Sermon: Begging forgiveness

After a long hiatus, the reason for which is explained in the sermon below, I've written my first sermon in well over two years. Hope you gain something from it.

Sermon for the First Sunday after Epiphany (Baptism of Jesus), Year C

Isaiah 43:1-7, Psalm 29, Acts 8:14-17, Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Today we’re celebrating the Baptism of Jesus, part of the Christmas season leading up to Candlemas on Feb. 2nd. The events described in the Gospel today have an obvious personal reminder for me.

Back in 2010, here in this church something extraordinary happened right over there behind you – I had the great honor and pleasure of sponsoring Jon for his baptism. It was a moving and powerful experience, and I was deeply honored to be a part of it, welcoming Jon into the Church. I’m very glad and proud to see how he’s become such a pillar in our parish in the time since then.

In the process of that Easter Vigil 2010, not only was he baptized, but also in a sense this church we’re standing in now was itself baptized. It was the first service we celebrated in this church that we are truly blessed to have, the first baptism to be held in it, and the waters in the baptismal pool were in turn used to renew our own baptismal vows and to hallow the church long before it was formally consecrated by our bishop almost 18 months later.

It was also, however, in a way the beginning of the end for me, though of course I had no idea about it at the time. As you may remember, Jon was not the only person who was baptized that night. The other person, Michelle, and I developed a powerful attraction to each other, and my horrible guilt over what I felt was the final straw that led directly to the breakdown of my marriage. My life of apparent normality and seeming stability came crashing to an end not long after, seemingly without warning. My marriage fell apart, my family torn to pieces, and my own personal unhappiness, which until then had largely been hidden from the rest of the parish and the outside world for literally years, exploded into view for all to see. It was without a doubt the worst time of my life, and I’m still sorting through the emotional debris left over.

For a time I seriously considered leaving the parish and never coming back. But I didn’t want to abandon the place where I had invested so much of myself. So to try and reboot, to get out of the spotlight and let things calm down, I withdrew from my parish duties while still attending services. Those duties included doing something I really enjoyed, which was writing sermons for the English services. This is the first time I’ve preached since then, and I have to say, I feel very strange doing it precisely because of all those events that began around the time of that Easter Vigil. When writing this, I often wondered if I even belong up here.

So do I have any business talking to you about right and wrong, about moral issues? My moral example is damaged goods. Without putting too fine a point on it, I’m an adulterer, a sinner. I caused immense pain to my wife and kids and disappointed and shocked a lot of people. To top it off, Michelle and I later broke up, compounding the pain and uproar. I’ve had a hard enough time asking the forgiveness of the Church, but the hardest part of all has been to forgive myself. So I hardly feel like I should be up here now. And I also can’t help but wonder what would be going through the minds of my ex-wife or ex-girlfriend or my friends if they were here listening now, let alone what God thinks about all of it.

But maybe today’s Gospel has a ray of hope for me. In the Gospel, Jesus, the one human being without sin, the one person who ever lived who didn’t need baptism in any sense, that Jesus goes to John the Baptist and asks him for baptism. In the parallel reading in the Gospel of Matthew, John exclaims to Jesus that Jesus should be baptizing him, not the other way around.

Maybe it’s because of the name, but I can easily place myself in John’s shoes right now. I’m supposed to stand here and act all holy and wise and pretend I can teach you something in a sermon, when I feel like I’m the one who needs teaching and guidance most. To carry the metaphor further: The Church, like the local parish, is referred to as the Body of Christ, and at the Eucharist, we often say we receive the Sacrament so that we “may become what we have received, the Body of Christ”. In effect I’m John the Baptist standing here in front of Christ’s body – that would be you – and wondering what the Body of Christ wants with someone like me, because I certainly don’t feel worthy to do much of anything church-related. Like John, I’m here exclaiming, “who, me?!”

I have a wonderful book I love to read to the kids at bedtime, called Mungo and the Picture-Book Pirates. It’s about a little kid named Mungo who loves having a pirate story read to him multiple times every night. But the hero of the book, dashing Captain Horatio Fleet, gets tired of having to go through the motions of being the hero so many times in one evening. As he is leaving the book to go on a holiday, he tells Mungo that maybe Mungo should just go do it himself if he likes the book so much. Mungo exclaims, “Me?! I can’t do anything!” but is left with little choice but to save his favorite book from the evil pirates. So he jumps into the book and becomes the hero himself.

After much buckling of swashes, Mungo does indeed save the day from the dastardly pirates, and Captain Fleet returns from his holiday to give Mungo a medal. 

There is a parallel here. It’s not a perfect one, but it will do. Mungo is like John the Baptist – or me – and the hero, Jesus, or Captain Fleet, wants us to not just like him and admire him, but to follow in his footsteps, to save the day like he would. That’s what we’re here for in the Church. If we sit back and say, “I can’t do it” or “I’m not worthy” and let our guilt destroy us, then the paradox is that we only hurt ourselves while not solving anything or doing anybody any good. We have to forgive ourselves before seeking forgiveness from others, and we can do that by accepting God’s grace and peace within us. We can’t wish others peace and spread peace until we make peace inside and with ourselves and with God. God is there to help us by sending out His Holy Spirit, but that Spirit can’t do anything to guide us if we’re so bound up with our own problems that we fail to notice the dove coming down and filling us with grace. It’s a free gift, the gift of salvation, there for the taking if we just stop navel-gazing and beating up on ourselves.

Even the unworthiest person, the gravest sinner, can accept God’s grace and turn things for the better, doing God’s work. So I ask – beg – God and His Church to forgive me, but I especially ask God to help me forgive myself – and then I will have His grace within me, which I need to buckle swashes and swing to the rescue in His name. 

So what I can give you, even as unworthy as I am, is this: I ask you to forgive yourselves in the same way, and to forgive one another, so that we, like Mungo, can all set sail into the setting sun and see the waters off the coast of tomorrow – for as Jesus promised on the Cross as He died for our sins, tomorrow we sinners shall be with Him in Paradise. Amen.

On All Saints’, we are all saints

Note
This sermon was originally written for All Saints' Day in 2008, but since the liturgical year A is back, this is as good a time as any to repost it.

Sermon for All Saints’ Day, Year A

Revelation 7:9-17, Psalm 34, 1 John 3:1-3, Matthew 5:1-12

This being All Saints’ Day, the obvious question is, “what is a saint?” Most people probably think of saints being guys running around with halos around their heads. After all, that’s what you see in icons and paintings like the ones of Jesus and Mary hanging on the wall behind me.

So I brought my own halo tonight. Just some tinfoil, doesn’t look like much, but it’ll do. It looks much like the one in this picture:

Of course, I notice some of you giggling a little. A ring of tinfoil doesn’t make a saint, does it? The halo itself as a ring around someone’s head looks a little ridiculous. Did the saints of old really run around with rings around their heads?

So let’s do a little bit of art history here. The idea of the halo-as-ring is actually relatively new. A halo is more properly called a nimbus, and the original purpose of the halo in art was not to represent something like this ring of tinfoil, but this:

...a candle, or more particularly its radiant glow. Early artists, and indeed the authors of the Gospels or even Jesus Himself, tended to speak in symbols and metaphor, and the halo itself is a metaphor for the inner light.

Jesus is portrayed in the Transfiguration as being a figure of radiant light. In early hagiographies, saints are described as having faces shining, as if they themselves were lamps or lanterns. The artists of the Middle Ages weren’t interested in literal portrayals of people, so they made symbolic portrayals of an idealized, stylized world. Rather than try to paint a radiant glow, they resorted to painting gold disks or just circles, like this:

If you’ve ever seen the ring around the Moon on a wintry night, you’ll know exactly where they got that from. There’s the origin of the halo.

Fast-forward to the Renaissance, and artists like Giotto and da Vinci were slowly “rediscovering” perspective. Realism, rather than symbolism, was the order of the day. The problem is that in the course of time, artists – indeed everyone – had forgotten what the reasoning behind the icons was, and thought that the symbol was to be taken literally. So when they began to paint in perspective, they tried to paint the halo in perspective, as a disc attached to the back of the person’s head, like in this painting by Giotto:

...then later as a ring, like in this painting, where da Vinci is showing off his talent by painting softly glowing rings in perfect perspective.

The problem is only that they didn’t know what it was they were painting. In the passing of the centuries, the original purpose of the halo was forgotten, the whole mentality of the people had changed. The point had been lost with time.

The irony is that the quest for realism stunted our sense of reality as badly as those people of the Dark Ages ignorant of science. Today we are very literal in our way of thinking – a product of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, when we learned to use logic and science to achieve great things. The result is that our metaphors for people change as our environment changes. We are surrounded by machines and computers, and thus we compare ourselves to machines and computers. We don’t think in animalistic terms very well anymore. We don’t think in symbols well anymore, either. We have unwittingly degraded ourselves to machines. Modern medicine arguably treats people as a machine as well. A pain in your leg means your leg is broken and needs to be fixed. A pain in your heads means…well, we won’t go there.

So we need to not just be logical and rational, but to reconnect with more ancient ways of thinking, to rediscover how people thought in those days, as an additional tool to understand. That tool is symbolism.

The symbol we have here today in church is a powerful one. The symbol is the ultimate sacrifice by Jesus Christ for us. We celebrate that symbol in the form of the Eucharist, in the partaking in bread and wine that we believe become the Body and Blood of Christ – not in a literal mechanical sense, that is, you can’t take the consecrated bread and wine and put them under a microscope and see blood cells or skin cells. But in a symbolic sense. The reality behind those things is changed. Mere bread and wine become powerfully precious to us, representing God Himself and the sum of His Creation in our midst.

It is a serious mistake to say “well, it’s not literally true”. Symbols have power, because they explain things that other methods of communication can’t achieve. In the same way our bodies are more than mere machines, so too is this Universe of ours something more than mere molecules. It’s more than the sum of its parts. Symbols give us a glimpse of something else, of the inner light that infuses every particle of our world. The Universe itself lives and breathes, and we with it.

The letter of John that we read today says it in a very straightforward way. “We should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. […] When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” Holiness, or seeing God, is thus about seeing the totality of reality. Each of us alone is blind to the vast majority of reality. Each of us casts only a tiny bit of light into the darkness, because we only see just that tiny bit of truth. We don’t see the whole truth. And light is the essence of enlightenment.

God is revealed to us when we open our eyes wide, as wide as we can, fearless of the consequences of the truth. Each of us can share our little bit of light. Each of us carries with us a halo, our own nimbus – some brighter than others, but still, each one of us has it within us. Even though each of us may be little more than a small candle, our light put together – our shared Truth – makes the world ever brighter. We see more as we not only open our own eyes, but we learn to see with the eyes of others. Reality itself is transformed. All of that is communicated by the symbols of the Eucharist. Communion is God revealed.

In the Beatitudes we heard in the Gospel, Jesus reels off a list of all the people who are blessed. It is not an exclusive list. What Jesus is doing is reminding us that even the most downtrodden, pain-ridden, suffering, poor leper of a person carries blessings and truth within them. Every human being has value, no matter how low their station. We need to see through the eyes of everyone, not just through our own. No exceptions.

In the end, each and every one of us is a saint, or has saintliness within us. We celebrate All Saints’ to celebrate the limitless potential of our own sainthood, by remembering those who went before us.

So rather than look at things merely in literal terms, I’d like you to look at the world in symbolic terms. That’s when the poetry of Creation takes shape and begins to sing, with each of us a voice in the chorus. Then the vision expressed in Revelation will come true: For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Amen.

Vesper blessings and “Phos hilaron”

A couple of years ago, I wrote a small prayer of blessing in German for a vesper service, used for the closing blessing, and later translated it into English. I'd like to share it with you as the daylight fades here in Hannover and the night approaches.

First, the English version:

Lord of all Creation,
bless the night in which we sleep.
Let your blessings come upon us
in the moonlight which flows through our windowpanes,
in the stars which shine in the night sky,
in the evening winds which whisper through the trees,
in the glowing embers of our hearts
which ward off all chills.
Stay with us and remain with us
and grant us the blessings of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

And then the German original:

Herr, segne die Nacht, in der wir schlafen.
Lass deinen Segen auf uns kommen,
im Mondschein, der durch unsere Fenster fließt,
in den Sternen, die im Himmelszelt funken,
im Nachtwind, der durch die Bäume flüstert,
in der Feuersglut unserer Herzen, die uns vor jeder Kälte schützt.
Bleibe bei uns
und schenke uns den Frieden des Vaters,
und des Sohnes und des Heiligen Geistes. Amen.

Then I also wrote an English version of the German text used by the Old Catholics for Phos hilaron, hymn number 735 in the German Old Catholic hymnal Eingestimmt, which can be ordered from the diocesan website. While the content more or less parallels the German text in meaning, it is written in rhyming meter, whereas the German version is simply prose.

Refrain
O wonderful glorious Light of Lights,
you light up the face of God's great might.
In love and in grace does your fire flame bright
to light up our hearts with Christ this night.

O gladdening light of God us bless,
a sign of the faith that we profess
in Heaven and on Earth. His faithfulness
will be our Light and Guide on the path we progress.

Refrain

We reach the end of day, the night awaits.
By your fire we all sit as it shines from your face.
With songs on our lips, we contemplate
the Father and the Son and the Spirit of Grace.

Refrain

At all times, and all places, as we walk along
the Path of our Christ, a lifetime long,
all Creation sings your praises, of your light so strong.
With angels and with saints we join in song.

Refrain

Feel free to use them in your services – as with the sermons and other texts, they are offered under the Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. A short note letting me know you used it in some fashion would be appreciated and reward enough.

Essay contest entitled "Why are you an Anglican?" – and the trap of schism

Over on the blog of +David Hamid, who is suffragan bishop for the Church of England's Diocese in Europe, he mentions a new contest for writing a 5,000-word essay on why you are an Anglican, and will remain an Anglican. The grand prize is £1000. More information is available on the website of the Anglican Communion.

Given all the strife and division that has been rocking the Anglican Communion over the last few decades, hopefully this will encourage people to think about why we should stay together, rather than heading for the exits and essentially excommunicating each other.

The seed of my essay will be this: Surely we have more to gain by sticking together than by dividing ourselves into ever-smaller splinter churches, as the history of the "Anglican Continuum" of Continuing Anglican churches has sadly demonstrated.

Those of you who know the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian will no doubt remember the farcical scene where the "Judaean People's Front" condemned the "People's Front of Judea", and vice versa. Well, I kid you not, but there is an Anglican Church in America competing with the Anglican Province of America, with nearly identical logos, as just one example. Of such things are schism made. As it happens, the ACA and APA now have full communion between them, but it remains to be seen how long it will last: Such churches are constantly merging, falling apart, reorganizing and such, so that it is extremely difficult to keep track of them all. Over time, they tend to get ever smaller as schism becomes ever more attractive for those intolerant of other views. Invariably some bishop with a big ego decides to go it alone and start his own church, and the cycle of schism starts anew. The list of "Continuing Anglican" churches is thus long and getting ever longer. So much for Catholic faith and order being a pillar of Anglicanism.

I certainly don't see how cutting each other off, fighting over church property, freezing out members with differing views, and all that has anything to do with being Christian, let alone Anglican. (And that goes for both sides of the argument, by the way.) Surely Anglicanism means to join together in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, which almost by definition means we have to accept a variety of views and try to stick to the ecumenical Creeds as the basis of our communion, and above all, to overcome our differences. Instead, far too many "Anglican" churches come up with laundry lists of beliefs suddenly deemed mandatory, as is all too common in Lutheranism (which is even more fragmented than the Anglican Continuum) or the various Congregational churches. Oh, by the way, there is even an "Anglo-Lutheran Catholic Church".

So...dear reader, if you are Anglican, please do participate in this contest and maybe even publish your essay online to inspire others. I certainly intend to, and will plant the seed in the hopes it will grow. Ut unum sint: That we may all be one.

Believing in doubt: Sermon for the First Sunday of Lent

Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13

Lent is normally a somber, reflective occasion, as we prepare for the joy of the Easter sacrifice and Resurrection. Not normally the time to be telling jokes. But I’m going to be a bit different and start off by telling one. It goes like this:

Jesus is subbing for Peter at the Pearly Gates.

A Roman Catholic dies. Jesus says, “I have one question to decide whether I should let you in: Who am I?” The Catholic says, “Well, the Pope says...” and Jesus says, “No, I wanted your answer. Sorry...”

A Protestant dies. Jesus says, “I have one question to decide whether I should let you in: Who am I?” The Protestant says, “Well, the Bible says...” and Jesus says, “No, I wanted your answer. Sorry...”

An Anglican dies. Jesus says, “I have one question to decide whether I should let you in: Who am I?” The Anglican says, “Well, you are Jesus, the Christ,” Jesus says “Very good!” And the Anglican continues, “...but on the other hand...”

The reason I tell this joke is because it highlights a central aspect of what it means to me to be a Christian: doubt. Gnawing, constant doubt, about everything. We Anglicans tend to question everything, we question authority and don’t take someone else’s word for it. We reject Biblical literalism, just as we reject slavishly following an overmighty Pope or other leader.

This brings with it an advantage, of course, of being liberated from these things. We aren’t burdened with slavishly following Biblical literalism or the latest utterances of Benedict XVI. But if we want to be honest with ourselves, it has a drawback: We are left spending our lives searching for answers, and our belief is constantly being tested and challenged, and thus evolves and changes over our lifetimes. Another old joke goes, ask three Anglicans what they think the Church is, and you’ll get at least five answers. Other Christians may accuse us of building our church on sand, because we as Anglicans or Old Catholics are so reluctant to accept outside authority beyond the barest necessities, and we keep asking questions.

Today’s Old Testament reading contrasts the experience of Israel with our own. Judging from the reading, the Israelites had no doubt that God was there, because He was constantly talking to their prophets and interacting with them directly. God today seems to be harder to spot. We today are plagued by this, constantly searching for evidence that God really loves us, or that God even exists. Bad things happen like the earthquake in Haiti, or the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, and our faith is sorely tested. We look for signs of God, and when God doesn’t quite turn out as we expect, we are frustrated and disappointed. Some of us give up entirely, rejecting the whole exercise as a waste of time.

But here, in this doubt, is the seed of our true foundation. It is in this doubt that the rock-solid foundation of our faith lies. Like the singer of the Psalm, we say to God, “You are my refuge and my stronghold, my God in whom I put my trust.” We trust in God and places our hopes in Him because our faith is constantly tested by the fire of doubt. We trust Saint Paul when he tells us, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”, and further, that “no one who believes in him will be put to shame”.

The thing is, if one relies on outside authority, that person is be making it too easy for themselves. They are taking a shortcut. That person has to constantly line up daily events or personal experience and see what their authority has to say to them about it. In a sense doing this is not a test of ourselves, but a test of God, to see if God really lives up to what that authority tells us God said. When God fails that test, as He inevitably will, it somehow becomes God’s fault.

But we don’t serve any authority but God Himself, and we certainly have no authority to question or test God, though it is of course tempting to believe that we can. As Jesus told the devil in the Gospel, “worship the Lord your God, and serve only him”. And in particular, Jesus admonished the Devil by saying, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” To think that we mere human beings can dare to test God or limit God or make God do what we want Him to do in any way is impossible. It is sheer hubris; it is folly. It is temptation of the Devil himself, who promises us the same false rewards that he promised Jesus. The “reward” of allowing our arrogance to get the better of us and to place ourselves above God is to be enslaved by our worst instincts. The temptation of certainty is what leads people astray to fundamentalism in any form, whether it is Biblical fundamentalism, ultramontane Catholicism, militant atheism or any of the other isms out there. That temptation is as evil as they come, and leads directly to war, conflict and despair.

We must be humble enough to admit that our own worldly authority might get it wrong, or that we ourselves get it wrong. Just as we must not test God by laying claim to infallibility, whether it is of a Pope or of the Bible itself, we must also be very careful not to lay claim to infallibility for our individual selves. It is through the deepest humility and self-denial that we come to experience the real divine presence that is God. Only when we are ready to renounce all preconceptions and preconditions are we ready to experience God directly. We have to play by God’s rules, not our own. Thy will be done.

On a lighter note, Casey Stengel, baseball player and legendary manager of the New York Yankees and the New York Mets, put it in his unique way: “Never make predictions, especially about the future.” We can certainly take that to heart by rephrasing it a little, “Never make assumptions, especially about God.” We have to let God define us and not the other way around, and that is the most important thing about learning how to let our faith grow on its own, rather than succumbing to the temptation of forcing the issue or of taking shortcuts. Thy will be done.

Lent is a time of testing our faith. We prepare ourselves for the triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ at Easter by spending these forty days reflecting on what we believe, and how we came to believe it. This is particularly true for our catechumens, Michelle and Jon, who are working their way towards baptism. Ideally, when we prepare for this, we fast. When we fast, we should do it not just to give up something because someone told us to. Once again that’s just following authority for the sake of following authority. Instead, we should fast because it is a way to strip down our selves to the barest essentials. To remind ourselves that we need nothing but God Himself. To reject the temptation of short-term rewards. To understand that we must be ready to give up anything and everything, just as Jesus gave everything He had when He stretched out His arms on the Cross. Above all, to understand, to see ourselves as part of the greater whole, and our place in it.

When we test our faith in this way, it is tempered, hardened, polished. It becomes something more solid than rock, harder than steel. When we are ready to test our faith to the utmost, to wear our self-doubt willingly, we come to dwell in the shelter of the Most High, and abide under the shadow of the Almighty. When we deny our own pride and hubris, and all pride and hubris around us, the door to God is opened in our hearts and the fire of the Spirit storms in. God can then work through us to save this world of ours. Each of us can become the hand of God working in our world, as an integral part of the body of Christ. It is when we seek rewards least that we gain the greatest reward of all.

When we confess our faults, our fallibility, we come to the point where Paul says in today’s Epistle: “For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.” This is why Confession is part of each Anglican service: as a reminder to deny ourselves, to accept we are flawed, to accept that only together can we overcome those flaws. We confess our faith together that God is there for us. We come together as a Church to reinforce one another in our faith, to give one another strength on the journey, to leave no one behind. We come together as the Holy Church to make the world new, with God’s help. And that nagging bit of doubt and restlessness, the thirst for knowledge, the will to know God, is the seed in our hearts to help get us to the Kingdom of Heaven itself. And best of all, we know that at the end of Lent, we are ready to personally experience the triumph over death by Jesus Christ in the Easter Vigil, gaining strength from it year after year.

Remember the joke I told at the beginning? It’s true: All you have to do to get into the Kingdom of Heaven is to recognize Jesus for what He is, and do so out of your own heart. Lent is here, so that we can learn to see Jesus all around us, including in ourselves; at the end of Lent, like the disciples at Emmaus, we recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread at Easter, when we come together as one to share – and then the door to the Kingdom of Heaven is wide open, so that we can come into the land that the LORD our God is giving us as an inheritance to possess. Amen.

God the builder: Sermon for Proper 18 (14th Sunday after Pentecost), Year B

Isaiah 35:4-7a, Psalm 146, James 2:1-10,14-17, Mark 7:24-37

The doctrine of »justification« is one that has divided Christians at least since the Reformation and the Roman Catholic Council of Trent. »Justification« is a theological term that basically defines at what point are we »just« in the eyes of God – that is, when are we fulfilling the Law as God foresaw, when are we being truly faithful in the fullest sense of the term, and when are we free from sin.

Martin Luther and the Protestant reformers, of course, changed the emphasis by insisting on the doctrine of sola fide, justification by faith alone. The principle of sola fide essentially says that without faith, no amount of good works will save you: Faith in God and Jesus Christ are absolutely necessary for being pardoned of our sinful nature. According to them, works are therefore irrelevant.

The thing is, neither of the two extremes – neither Catholic doctrine of faith and works, nor the Protestant doctrine of sola fide – really manages to tell the whole story as succinctly as today’s readings from the Epistle of St. James and from the Gospel of St. Mark.

In the Epistle, James says point-blank, »What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ›Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,‹ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.«

In the Gospel, we see an example of Jesus living this to the letter. Jesus is of course the Son of God. He is free of sin, and by definition filled with grace – by definition as »justified« as it gets. Yet Jesus spends much of his time healing people and comforting them. Indeed that is the central aspect of His ministry as shown in the New Testament – in a time where there was no such thing as doctors or nurses or clinics or hospitals, where sickness and disease were rampant, Jesus went around making a difference. Jesus didn’t need good works, because Jesus Himself was free of sin – but it was because of His totality of grace that He performed those good works in the first place. The two ideas are absolutely inseparable.

Our good works are the necessary consequence of our faith. When we accept Christ as our Savior, we explicitly recognize our place in the Holy Church of God – that we are part of a communion of believers, but just as importantly members of the human race, itself a gift of God’s creation. God’s power and love permeate all aspects of Creation, and it is by that power that life itself exists and flourishes. It is also that power, that grace, that moves us to be there for our fellow man. A faith that is »strictly personal« is a faith that is totally hollow and without meaning. On the other hand, a faith that moves us to care for the needy and sick, the unemployed and the outcasts, indeed also for those having a crisis of faith themselves – that kind of faith is the sort that truly justifies our existence.

There is another aspect to this that is important, however, and that is the power of prayer. I think many people get confused about what prayer is for and what it’s all about, and what our place is in Creation. When our prayers don’t appear to be answered the way we imagined it, we blame God for not doing as we asked. When things don’t happen as we would like, we get angry with God. Some even turn away from faith entirely – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the statement »I can’t believe in a God that…«

That attitude, however, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what prayer is, and what we are, and why we are here. God did not just create the world for us: God created the world with us and by us. God created us to with the ability to help ourselves. God created us as part of His Creation, as His tools as part of His great plan.

When some people pray, they do so in expectation of some supernatural result. Maybe it’s to ask God’s hand in making sure the right lottery numbers are picked. One imagines the hand of God reaching down and changing the numbers on the balls as they’re drawn out of the bin. But God clearly doesn’t work that way. In the Lord’s Prayer, we don’t say »my will be done«, but »Thy will be done«: we learn to surrender our will to the greater purpose, learning to see that even when things don’t go the way we want, it still all works out in the end. Prayer is the means by which we receive grace. From prayer comes the grace and the inner peace that we need to stop worrying and start doing.

God made us so that we can complete the great plan. Our own fallen nature, our own sinfulness, is the powerful motor that drives us on. We want to do better, we want to change, we want to transform: It’s all part of the human condition.

So when we pray, we do so not to ask God’s invisible hand to do something, but to gain grace and strength from experiencing God to do what we have to do. It is from our faith that we gain entry into that experience of God so that we are motivated to do good works in the first place. We acknowledge our sinfulness, and analyze our mistakes so that we can do better. We open up the gates of our hearts to let God in, and the power of the Holy Spirit fires us on to do more in God’s name. By experiencing God, by tapping into the love of God that permeates our Universe, we experience the totality of humanity. And when we see humanity’s suffering and troubles, we want to make it all better.

The amazing thing is that thanks to God’s grace, we are able to make it all better, even if it takes generations and thousands of years. Not only that, God’s grace is free for the taking – we only have to ask for it in prayer. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, »ask, and you shall receive«. To see the results, one only has to look and see the progress of the last five thousand years of human history. When we do work to change the world for the better, we call that »social justice« – we build a just society. Like James says, »If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.« It is through working for »justice«, by caring for the naked and hungry, that we find »justification«. If faith doesn’t motivate someone to do work for justice, it’s not really faith at all, but rather a kind of idolatry, a distraction from the true path. When we walk that path, we build that world of justice because of our faith. Meanwhile, we can hardly blame God for the state of the world, because it’s our job to change it in the first place.

In the end, what today’s lessons reveal is that each and every one of us plays a part in that great pageant of history, as part of God’s plan. God is like Bob the Builder: God asks us, »can we fix it?« and we reply in faith, »yes we can!«

The revelation is that we are the custodians of Creation. We are the tools of God. By God’s grace, experienced through prayer, we become the hand of God itself. And that is the faith that moves mountains. Amen.