Sermon

Now about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the Church. And he killed James the brother of John wit the sword. And because he saw it pleased the Jews, he proceeded further to take Peter also.

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This past week was nearly one of unbounded joy and a liturgical spectacle fit for a prince — indeed a prince of the Church. Bishop Chad was enthroned as our Archbishop in a two & half hour liturgy that one rarely has the opportunity to participate in. And it was made all the more special to be there with our delegates, Priscilla King, Margaret and Garry Woody, two of our aspirants, John and Kyle, as well as Fr. Sean and Fr. Mark as well. We have a new Archbishop and a renewed vision of the our duty and opportunity to serve Jesus Christ our God and King in this present age. Bishop Chad is young and bright and effortlessly cheerful. A Duke Divinity graduate who dabbled with the lure of an academic career till he fell in love with the Bride of Christ and gave his heart to her service. Then he fell in love with Megan and ever the churchman, he proposed to her at the Altar of the Washington National Cathedral. “I got right down on me knees at the Altar — believe it or not,” he told me. She said yes and together they have made a family dedicated to Christ’s Church. They have four children — Aidan is 18, Owain (Owen) is 14, Millie (may-lee) is 11, and Caelin (cay-Lynn) is 6. Bishop Chad loves his wife and his children and he loves his clergy and his laity and he genuinely does so. Most of you have met Archbishop Chad and you have heard him preach wonderful sermons, he has confirmed many of you and your children, and has celebrated the Holy Communion here. And God willing you will see him many, many more times as the years roll on. I know this man very well and I know his spiritual life, his wisdom, and his confidence in God the Blessed Trinity and I know the hardships that he has endured. For all his very real sunny fellow-feeling, he shares the same sadnesses that are part and parcel of our common life — the betrayal of friends, his own failures, and the ups and downs of family life, finding the right place to live, figuring out how to educate our kids, raising children and keeping them safe and growing them up into happy Christian men and women. Megan’s mother died this year and her father lives alone now. Dick was a Presbyterian minister for 40 years, but they converted to Anglo Catholicism and after some study and examination he was ordained to the priesthood. So Archbishop Chad is his own father’s-in-law Father-in-God. Now this is starting to sound like an old country song. His parents are growing infirm and living with illness and disease. Though they live in Western North Carolina, he spends lots of time wth them. When he travels up this way he always stays with them a night or two and he and the family spends extended time with them in the summer and the same for M. He’s good man. A good family man. And he is a prince of the Church, consecrated an Archbishop, made an Apostle. In all of that he is an example of a Christian man that you can all be proud of and that we may all take encouragement from. He wants what we all want — to love and be love by our families, to be reasonably happy in this life, to serve our Lord Jesus Christ, and to be supremely happy in the life to come. We are a blessed Church in the APA to have him as our Father in God. And while thinking about all this and the Feast of St. James the Apostle, I remember that wonder hymn written by William Alexander Percy, They Cast Their Nets in Galilee and I thought it was a perfect way to bring up some thoughts on the Christian life and Apostleship. 

They cast their nets in Galilee

Just off the hills of brown;

Such happy, simple fisher-folk,

Before the Lord came down

There is no indication that Peter or John or James were going through a personal existential crisis when along came Jesus and solved all there problems. In fact the men all seem pretty much at peace with themselves, their families, and the Jewish ways. They were not gloomy or searching for meaning in life. They weren’t dissatisfied with their work or their station in life. If anything they were going about there work doing their jobs responsibly, raising families, building a business, worshipping, until Jesus came along and actually disturbed their’s and everyone else’s peace. This giddy notion of inward peace is a rather new concept. You cannot really find people searching for peace in the New Testament. Searching for forgiveness of our sins, yes. Healing our broken hearts and broken bodies, yes. Jesus promised rest and forgiveness and everlasting life and he did things that no man or angel could do. He did things that only God could do. And he split the atom of their social, spiritual, personal life and what they thought was peace vanished in the bright blaze of God’s glory. 

Contented, peaceful fishermen,

Before they ever knew 

The peace of God that filled their hearts

Brimful, and broke them too

What men thought was peace and contentment, what our world tells us is peace and contentment and important and oh so urgent is shattered by the peace of God that passes understanding. A peace that fills our hearts to the brimming sometimes so unexpected and then it breaks us. The peace of God breaks us, breaks the hold of this world’s oh so desperate trumpet, breaks the hold of old sins and shame, and breaks our self-centeredness and brings everything in life under the judgement of Christ’s Kingdom. And sometime, for some of us, it may break us to death for Christ’s sake.

Young John who trimmed the flapping sail,

Homeless, in Patmos died.

Peter, who hauled the teeming net,

Head down was crucified 

And St. James the Apostle we can add to that list of those who gave their life for Christ’s sake. But it is highly doubtful that any of us will die for Christ’s sake, die like Peter or James. But we are called to a greater and more difficult death than that. You all recall Flannery O’Connor who said, “I will  never be a saint, but I could probably be a martyr if they killed me quick.”

Well, there you have it. If its quick, its more likely we can stand it. But the fact is that we die daily, as Paul said. This is slow motion daily dying. Dying to self-centeredness, dying to unruly ambition, dying to the siren calls of this world to be busy and be important — dying to that is not the easiest thing in life either. But the Kingdom of God is the peace of God and we are citizens of heaven first and foremost and that makes the peace of God our right by citizenship. 

The Peace of God, it is no peace,

But strife closed in the sod.

Yet, brothers, pray for but one thing —

The marvelous peace of God.

And here it is, the Peace of God is no peace, but strife that will strive and strive on till death do us part. Now that is not exactly the phrase that wins converts to Christ. Imagine the bumper sticker: “Come to Jesus, add more strife to your life, and learn how to die daily.” Following Jesus is not about the very modern misguided notion of peace of mind. The Apostles would not know what you were talking about. Following Jesus is about believing that God is and that he is who Jesus says he is — that Faith. Following Jesus is desiring the will of God, his purposes for your life and the lives of those you love — that’s Hope. Following Jesus, is about loving God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind and your neighbor as yourself. Pray for our new Archbishop that God will protect him and enable him to continue seek first the Kingdom of God and lead us as a loving, faithful, and worthy Shepherd of the Church. 

            Shall we continue in sin, that grace may  abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Romans 6:1-4

Remember what it means to be in someone. Recollect how the Philistines were in Goliath as their champion against Israel. And recall how Israel was not in Saul, but rather Israel was in David when he slew Goliath. These are example of a weak participation. But there is also a strong participation. Every little girl that is born into the world is born with all the eggs she will ever have. Her eggs participate in her life, in fact they could not live without her life. They go where she goes. If she goes swimming, they go along. If she become ill, they live with it. Now think of how Jonathan and David made a blood covenant with one another and how the blood covenant bound them not only to one another but also to their unborn children who were within their bodies. And don’t forget how David honored his promise to Jonathan by loving and saving Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth, a child who wasn’t even born when the promise was made. Another way of saying this would be to say that Mephibosheth participated in the covenant because he participated in his father Jonathan. “Abraham believed God and it was counted unto him for righteousness,” which is to say he was in a covenant with God because of his faith. But it was not just reckoned to him as an individual person, it was reckoned to everyone who was participating in Abraham. Again, Abraham’s seed participated in the promise God made to Abraham because his unborn seed was in Abraham. And now it is in light of that narrative history that we are to understand the first question of chapter 6:  “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?”

At the end of Romans 5 Paul says that, “sin hath reigned unto death,” which is to say that death constitutes a kingdom, a regime that has invaded God’s creation. The goal of the insurgency is to the separate the creature man from the God who is God. The beginning of the rebellion is described in Genesis chapter 3 — the old familiar story of the Garden of Eden. Paul reviewed the wreckage that follows from Genesis 3, in chapters 1, 2 and 3 of Romans. This is the human condition according to Paul; humanity, indeed creation itself, participated in Adam and when he entered the insurrection against God he took us with him. We are born part of the insurrection. Our world and we are lost in Adam.

The Kingdom of Death continued to have dominion over mankind. Then at the right time, God called Abraham to fight back, not by giving him another commandment, but by making him a promise. God promised him that He, God, would somehow use Abraham’s family to redeem all of creation and to bring about such a beautiful, blissful blessing upon every creature and every man, woman and child in the world, that it beyond man’s imagination. And Abraham believed God and that established the promise that Paul is constantly referring to in his epistles.

But before the Seed of the Promise, Jesus Christ, was born, the Mosaic Law was introduced and it was obviously after that the Israel took the Law to be the gift of God for conquering sin. So Israel took the Mosaic Law as God’s path of salvation and rather than bringing God’s blessing upon her it lead them further and further away from the promise God had made to Abraham. As long as one attempts to please God through the Mosaic Law, and I believe we can frankly extend that to anything in the world other than believing God’s promise – any form of Law taken as a means of salvation as opposed to the faith of Jesus Christ and his life giving sacraments only leads back to participation in and greater bondage to the Kingdom of Death.

So think of the phrase “Shall we continue in sin…” not only to mean to continue doing sin, but also to continue to participate in Adam, continue to participate in the dominion of sin, to live as a child of Adam, an offspring of Death.

“Let us continue in sin that grace may abound,” was almost certainly a slogan hecklers used against Paul in order to discredit him before the Church. Paul addresses this sort of libel in his letters to the Galatians and the Corinthians and so the statement and its source was probably known by the Christians all over the world and that includes the Roman Christians.

                      Let us abide in the regime of Sin and glorify God.

It is of course a ridiculous statement and like all political sloganeering it is supposed to be ridiculous because it is meant to smear an opponent by reducing his statements to absurdity. But Paul had been down this street before and he quickly turns the tables on his enemies by taking the slogan as a serious theological statement to which he gives the answer:

How shall we, who are dead to sin, live any longer therein? 

Know ye not, that so many of us as were 

baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?

What Paul is saying is that we have been moved from one kingdom into another kingdom by the faith of Jesus Christ and our baptism into Christ.  How is that possible if we originally participated in Adam and the insurrection against the Creator? Paul believes that the promise God made to Abraham, the really critical one, is that all the nations will be blessed in Abraham; that is all nations will participate in Abraham’s blessing and thus benefit from Abraham’s faith. “Abraham believed God and it was counted unto him for righteousness,” but it was not just reckoned to him as an individual person, it was reckoned to everyone who was in Abraham. These words also apply to all of us; we who are baptized into Jesus, we too are reckoned righteous, we too are children of Abraham and feed upon his faith. We are not in Adam nor are we participating in the Kingdom of Sin and Death. We fight as Christ soldiers against that Kingdom. We have died to that kingdom because we have been baptized into Jesus Christ and made members of his Body. We are true children of Abraham, we participate in his Seed, Jesus Christ who by his faith founded the New Covenant. And like David who loved Mephibosheth as though he was Jonathan himself, so the Father loves us with the same love he has for Jesus. And all of the promises the Father made to Jesus apply to everyone who is in Jesus and just as the Father raised him from the dead, so that promise belongs to us as well. Paul goes on then to draw out the implication of our new position in Christ:

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. Romans 6:12-14

Christians, because we are in Christ, do not have to sin — we have died to sin and death. By our baptism we have been grafted mystically into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have been buried with Christ in baptism, we have died to the regime of sin and death and, we have been raised to his moral life. For that reason Paul says:

Yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness untoGod. For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.

Be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous…

Patriotism begins at home and the home I refer to is the Oikos, the House of God, the Family of Christ’s Church, whose citizenship is in Heaven. That is the greater patriotism whose object of affection and loyalty is Christ our God and King. There is a lesser patriotism that is appropriate. It is the affection and loyalty owed to our earthly commonwealth. The way we express our loyalty is through obedience to her laws, but especially by distinguishing between the greater and the lesser knowing that our duty to the lesser is most perfectly know through our love and loyalty to the greater, to Christ. By this action we may also present to our earthly commonwealth an example of true and permanent community. 

When Christ ascended to his Father, he made two promises that loom large: the Father would send the gift of the Holy Spirit and Christ will return for us. For us! Now count ten days from his ascension! His disciples were together in a rented room in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit fell upon them. They were regenerated, filled with the Holy Spirit and immediately began preaching the Gospel of the Resurrection.

Jerusalem was filled with Jews celebrating Pentecost and many of them were converted to Jesus, were baptized, and they carried the message of Christ back to their hometowns. Little communities of disciples sprang up all over the world. It is estimated that there were close to 40,000 Christians by the time Peter’s first epistle was delivered by Silvanus – which was probably about 30 years after the Resurrection. Some parishes grew while other fell apart. Stresses from within and from without gain momentum as the original leaders, the Apostles and their immediate successors, were hunted down and killed.

Hermas was a Christian businessman writing from Rome around 95. He was arrested for being a Christian. He wrote a book titled, The Shepherd. His business, which had something to do with oil and wine, was seized. But more than the external threat, he worried over the internal stresses. Many Roman Christians, and there were not that many, were so enamored with business and making money they didn’t go to Church on Sundays like they should. They didn’t care for the poor. They were ambitious and they envied the success of others. And, militating against the cohesion of the community, their emotions ran wild and they vented their anger toward fellow believers! He worried the community would go up in flames. 

Be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous… 

In the epistle for today Peter exhorts the disciples in these parishes scattered all over Asia Minor to conduct themselves honorably within and without the Christian community. He too is concerned that cohesion of the community would not hold.  

Finally, all of you…

Peter addresses the whole community listing five imperatives that describe honorable conduct within the Church of God. This behavior is absolutely necessary for the internal cohesion – the pulling together of the Christian community.

The first imperative is “like-mindedness.” Our text has it translated, “be of one mind.” This exact term occurs nowhere else in the Bible, but Paul frequently uses an equivalent expression. That “like-mindedness” is ultimately to be found in our loyalty to Jesus and our intentional appropriation of his way of life. Paul exhorted the Philippians to “have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” As we shall see “like-mindedness” is not empty-mindedness. This like-mindedness is to be marked by the remaining four imperatives. All virtues embodied in the life of our Lord.

So, Peter writes that we all should be like-minded in that we all have“compassion one of another.”The word here is “sympathies.”It means pretty much what our word “compassion” literally means – “to suffer with, to feel with” your brother or sister in Christ – “to feel with.” This is close to the language we saw John using a couple of weeks back when he referred to feeling something in the “inward parts of a man.” We might say, “I feel it in my gut.” John was referring to a situation where a Christian not only turns his back, but he also shuts off feelings of compassion for a needy brother or sister. What John stated negatively, Peter is stating positively. “Have deep feelings of compassion for one another. Passover to one-another’s points-of-view. Feel one another’s pain. Feel one another’s joy.” Nurture these feelings.

Peter next describes single-minded Christians as those who “love as brethren — as siblings.”The word used here is “philadelphoi.” We are probably at the very heart of Peter’s exhortation. “Love” is the greatest of all the gifts, according to St. Paul. 

Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 

It is true that Paul is speaking of love for God here, but as I have said before, the overflow of our love for God is love for our brothers and sisters in Christ. Love is the sum of it all. Again, surprising to me, this word actually denotes an emotional attachment and commitment to one another — not only behavior. It is all of this: emotional attachment, felt commitment to one another that issues in loving behavior toward one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. Our family is the Family of God. Our home is the Oikos, the Household of God. This brotherhood and sisterhood among us is by virtue of our Baptism into Christ. In this case, Christ and the Apostles would insist that “water is thicker than blood!” Our spiritual kinship is based upon the fact that we have the same Father as Jesus Christ – who is our elder brother. We should follow his example in love. The fact that Christians regarded one another as brothers and sisters did not go unnoticed by outsiders. Lucian of Samosata a satirist wrote a play around the 125 AD titled The Passing of Peregrinus in which the lead character takes advantage of the generosity and gullibility of Christians. The reputation of Christians for love was already common currency in Antiquity. Lucian could use Christianity as a foil and everyone got the joke. He lampoons Christians whose “first lawgiver persuaded them that they are all brothers to one another.” Christian love was a mark of distinction even for pagans. Centuries after Peter’s epistle, Christians were rounded up to die in the arena and the crowds would shout, “Look how these Christians love one another!” Christian love was public knowledge and it certainly drew outsiders to faith in Christ. 

Next, I want to handle the last two adjectives together. The first is similar to “compassion,” but the way it is used here is more of disposition than a response. “Compassion” is feeling with a brother or sister – a response. The translation we have here is “pity” while others translate it as being “tenderhearted” toward one other. The idea is that we are already pre-disposed with tenderheartedness to one another. It is a wonderful word and paired with the first reference to “compassion” we see just how important the “feeling life” of the parish church was to the Apostles. Feelings were not dismissed or belittled. Our emotional life is part of our humanity, just as it is part of our Lord’s incarnation. He felt deep sadness and grief over the death of his friend Lazarus. And he was tenderhearted toward Mary Magdalene and even the thief beside whom he was dying. Be tenderhearted to one another. 

Finally we get Peter’s last word describing “single-mindedness” within the community:

Be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous… 

“Courteous” is a very poor translation. The word is “humility.” “Be ye all humble minded toward one another,” is much better. Remember what I said about humility a few weeks back? The Greco-Roman world radically opposed Christian humility. In the highly aggressive and socially stratified world of Roman antiquity, only the degraded and dishonored person was “humble.” The weak and shameful were incapable of defending their honor. “Humility” was a character flaw revealing self-contempt and for that matter contempt for proper social order. From the point-of-view of their neighbors in the world, Christians were downright subversive.

But for Christians they were following in the footsteps of Jesus whom they love. All these imperatives were descriptive of how they conducted themselves within the Household of God. They deeply loved one another and they were committed to one another far beyond anything that made sense to their pagan neighbors. One could feel the solidarity and cohesion that bound their lives together as the Family of God. It is your duty as children of God to consciously and intentionally live these imperatives – individually and as a community. It is your duty to curb your feelings of envy and to control your tongue. No one is entitled to blast another Christian with anger.  There’s enough of that in the world. Rein in your feelings. Protect your brothers and sisters in Christ. Be tenderhearted toward one another. Learn to cherish our cohesion and solidarity with one another. By doing so we may be a living icon of true community and love to our lesser commonwealth and thus live as true patriots. Let us define true liberty in this parish, as we do in Morning Prayer, knowing that our worship of God is perfect freedom. Thus this little parish may be a shelter from the storm for you and your family, a haven of peace and blessedness. 

Be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, and be humble-minded toward one another…