Sermon Audio
February 14, 2016 First Sunday in Lent
Not in Vain
Isaiah 58, Psalm 50, 2 Corinthians 6:1-10, St. Matthew 4:1-11
It’s politics again. On Friday, Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill, who heads the Russian Orthodox Church, met in Havana. They spoke for two hours on sundry subjects, including persecution of Christians in Syria and Iraq.
Then they exchanged gifts and signed a declaration deploring the plight of those fellow believers.
What will come of it all? I wish I were a prophet. I do know this: Kirill is altogether too chummy with Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator. Since she walked back out into the open in the post-Soviet era, the Russian church has occupied a bedroom in the Kremlin.
Putin has put Kirill’s patriarchate in the service of his political agenda. Kirill sees in Putin an ally in expanding the influence of the Moscow church. The Orthodox comprise the second-largest church in the world. Unlike Rome, they have no pope.
Their patriarchates, or regional groupings of churches, operate independently. For centuries, Constantinople, the ancient capital of the eastern Roman Empire, stood as first among equals in the Orthodox world.
With that city in Muslim hands since Ottoman times Moscow has long coveted the role of de factor leader of Eastern Orthodoxy. About two-thirds of the 300 million members of these Eastern churches are in Russia.
Kirill sees an opportunity to assert his influence. Putin may be able to help . . . but Putin is propping up the Syrian president, Bashar Assad, and Russian warplanes are killing civilians in Putin’s campaign to decimate the Islamic State rebels who are trying to overthrow Assad.
Can Kirill do anything at all to save those his friend Putin is killing?
The churches of Rome and Moscow have their historical differences as well, not least among them longstanding bitterness over the Eastern Catholic Church in the Ukraine. These parishes use the Eastern liturgy but stand in full communion with Rome. The Russians contend the Catholics have been poaching on their turf.
Does any of this matter to us? These events are unfolding at a far remove from our shores, whether in terms of geography or ecclesiology. They churn in a cauldron of centuries-old grievances of which we know little and which, frankly, hold not much interest for most of us.
Why, then, do I raise the subject? Because Christians – our brothers and sisters – are dying in Syria and Iraq. They’re dying by bombs and mortar shells and starvation.
And I raise the subject because at long last Christians may band together in defense of Christians . . . in support of the gospel of peace . . . in the cause of Jesus Christ.
I don’t know what will come of this first step in mending relations between two churches that trace their origins back to the apostles. Political intrigue bubbles thick as potato soup.
Moscow said in its statement announcing the meeting that the issue of the Catholic Church's presence in Ukraine still remains a "bleeding wound" that has not been resolved.
Preparations for the meeting consumed two years. Kirill wants contact with the pope to boost his stature in the East. Francis will tread carefully to avoid being sucked into Putin’s vortex.
But I know they have taken the first step. The official rift between East and West known as the Great Schism occurred in the year 1054. The heads of the churches of Rome and Moscow had not met since . . . not until last Friday in Havana.
In advance of the meeting, a spokesman for Kirill, Metropolitan Hilarion, said, "We need to put aside internal disagreements at this tragic time and join efforts to save Christians in the regions where they are subject to the most atrocious persecution."
A Vatican spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, issued a statement remarking the event’s “extraordinary importance in the path of ecumenical relations and dialogue among Christian confessions."
Now I want to quote someone you know. Bp. Ray Sutton serves as the chief ecumenical offer for both the Reformed Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in North America. He has traveled to both Rome and Moscow to meet with church leaders. I recall vividly his words from four years ago at a meeting in Houston: “The reason the world pays no attention to us (the universal church) is that we’re so divided.”
As you consider the implications of that statement, I almost want to apologize for speaking of such grand events as these. I’m a green preacher in a small church of a small denomination holding forth in a small town tucked into a valley somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.
I doubt that either Francis or Kirill knows Durango, Colorado, exists. I am utterly certain neither of them has heard of All Saints Anglican Church.
But we are part of something much bigger and we’re as much a part of it as Christians in major cities and in high places. It must matter to us that our brothers and sisters are dying. It must matter to us that the world God created refuses to listen to His church – and gets away with it.
Can you even begin to conceive how the world would come to heel if Christians spoke for our Lord with one voice? And, yes, despite our insignificant numbers and our remote location, we in Durango have a role to play.
Look at what’s happening across the globe. Relations among the 14 loosely linked patriarchates that make up Eastern Orthodoxy have been as strained as those between Moscow and Rome, but the heads of most of those churches are scheduled to meet in June in Crete.
Once again, politics plays a role. This conference was originally set for Istanbul. After Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet, Moscow’s Kremlin-friendly leader Kirill balked at attending and the meeting was briefly in peril.
The move to Crete put it back on track, however, and the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church will convene for the first time in more than 1,200 years.
In our own Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest body of churches, primates of most of the 38 provinces convened in Canterbury last month to address the matter of The Episcopal Church’s deviation from the biblical and historical definition of marriage. Canada and some other national churches are following in TEC’s heretical footsteps.
At first blush this event seems to send up a signal directly opposed to the unifying messages coming from other camps. That thought, I believe, is entirely wrong.
The American heresy has driven the national churches of Africa, which represent the vast majority of the world’s 80-plus million Anglicans, and those of like mind such as our own Anglican Church in North America, into a tighter bonding.
We are proclaiming our resolve to stand together in defense of the faith once delivered to the saints, to shout with one voice that we will not succumb to an attack on the authority of Scripture from within.
Over time, this determination will give us a greater say rather than a weakened one on both the reliability of the Bible as God’s inerrant word and on the norms of morality.
We live in a momentous age. Massive movements in both religion and international affairs are poised on the razor’s edge, soon to topple in one direction or the other. Islamic terrorism rips gaping holes in cultures in both the ancient seedbed of Christianity in the Near East and in the hothouse in which it grew in Europe.
How will the divided church respond? Can we put her together again?
Wherever we turn, when the issue is not politics, it’s purity. Ever since the church has existed there have been those who wanted to cleanse her.
In the third century the Novatians denied communion to those who had participated in pagan rituals. In the next two centuries the Donatists declared invalid baptisms performed by men who had renounced their faith under persecution and then returned to holy orders when it ended.
The Puritans emigrated to America to gather in churches that applied a litmus test of faith to prospective new members. In Central Europe the Moravians and in England the Keswick community walled themselves off to prevent sinners from polluting their sainthood.
Now we Anglicans are living in impaired communion with significant numbers of those we once called “brother” and “sister” and quite possibly walking toward a day of broken communion. Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and others are confronting some of the issues that vex us, and some others of their own.
Can we safeguard our doctrine and make common cause with believers of other traditions at the same time? We must. Christians are dying today in Syria and Iraq.
It does no good to pretend doctrinal differences don’t matter. They’re real and they’re sincerely held and they have lived in the DNA of the various churches for centuries. But three things must be said about them:
First, when we’re not talking to one another we’re not addressing those differences. A millennium in the case of Rome and Moscow, 1,200 years in the case of the Orthodox patriarchates, ought to be long enough to bury the hatchet. Maybe more than long enough.
Doctrine matters; so does dialogue. When we close ourselves up in our cocoons we are failing in our Christian duty to strive for unity in the body. The apostle John reports our Lord’s words:
"I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me” (John 17:20-21).
Second, we must have and hold a godly hierarchy of values. It sounds terribly pious to say all sin is a stench in God’s nostrils. It is. But the law God gave Israel did not prescribe the same penalties for all violations.
And the brains God gave us should tell us that lusting after another man’s wife is one sin and having sex with her is a sin of a higher order. That hating our brother is one thing and murdering him a rather more serious thing. We are not justified in proceeding to the second because we have already done the first.
We must major in the majors, not the minors. When all other measures have been exhausted, perverting marriage to apply it to same-sex relationships is cause for breach of communion. A squabble over who gets to strut as archbishop of the Ukraine is not.
A denomination’s endorsement of abortion on demand is reason to sever ties with it. A disagreement over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or the Father and the Son is not.
Third, we should find the agility to pull together to save our persecuted brethren in the Middle East and to thrash through our theological differences at the same time. There once was a time in Britain when believers in the indigenous Celtic churches and those in parishes planted by missionaries from Rome celebrated Easter on different dates.
One group was rejoicing at the resurrection while the other was still grieving over their sins in Lent. At the Synod of Whitby in the year 664 King Oswiu of Northumbria ruled that his subjects would observe the Roman date. The matter hasn’t come up since.
Today, about 1,400 years later, the churches of the East calculate the date differently from those in the West. This disagreement should not impede combined efforts to rescue those who are watching their crumpled children fall before the Muslim onslaught. The enemies outside our camp are real enough; we need not create others within it.
We turn now to a second reason the carnage on the other side of the world should not be remote from us. In a very real sense, in spiritual terms, it is up to us to end it.
We must have our leaders. They must assemble and debate and attempt, at least, to resolve theological issues of great weight. May God bless them in that important work. But may He also bless us in ours -- because in His order we may not dump this labor on men wearing fancy titles and fancier hats and trundle off on our merry way.
And so we arrive at last at our text for today, from chapter six of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. Because Christ died to make us righteous, the apostle declares, we must shoulder certain responsibilities: “We then, as workers together with Him (Christ) also plead with you not to receive the grace of God in vain.”
This grace is given to us for a purpose. Paul brings out a citation from the prophet Isaiah to explain it: “For (God) says (to Christ): ‘In an acceptable time I have heard you, and in the day of salvation I have helped you.’ Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”
In Isaiah, the Father is telling the Son He is giving Him “as a covenant to the people, to restore the earth” (49:8). And we are fellow heirs of the Son – not only of the promises made to Him but of the burden He was made to bear as well.
Paul bore it. He goes on to catalogue his trials, as we heard him do in another passage just the other week: “. . . in much patience, in tribulations, in needs, in distresses, in stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in labors, in sleeplessness, in fastings . . .”
Beloved, we may pause to note on this first Sunday in Lent that our Lord has dealt rather more kindly with us. I do my best not to think of how I would have borne up under the afflictions the apostle endured for the sake of the gospel . . . but persecuted Christians today do not share in our luxury of escapism.
We have had it so easy I fear we forget that “now is the day of salvation” and that we do have a role to play in it. During Lent, of all seasons, we should consider that the institutional purity we claim to yearn for must follow in the wake of personal purity.
Whether we be pope, patriarch, presiding bishop, priest or pew-sitter, we are called upon “not to receive the grace of God in vain.” God dispenses that grace on His body the church for the good of that body.
The apostle Peter wrote, “But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; who once were not a people but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy” (1Peter 2:9-10).
In God’s eyes, we are one, His own special people. Our duty before Him is to live out our witness of Him by walking in righteousness and loving our brother. If we would be unified we must first be purified . . . and we have a part to play in that, in terms of what happens in our homes and of what happens in Syria and Iraq.
Are we walking uprightly? Are we praying for the persecuted? Are we giving? Are we sending?
As to the last, an excellent, even biblical, approach to curtailing terror perpetrated on Christians would be to convert to Christianity the cultures producing terrorists.
The numerical decline in the American church, of course, has generated a predictable decline in missionaries . . . but numbers don’t tell the whole story. During the Great Depression, churches would forego buying coal to heat their buildings to avoid cutting support for missionaries.
That level of passion for the gospel enterprise is not much in evidence today. Our own Reformed Episcopal Church can point to a grand total of two missionary families on the foreign field. Now that one of them is transitioning from the Philippines to Indonesia, we have one in a majority Muslim country.
Now what? Well, we have a start. The pope and the patriarch have met. Far away from us, leaders of hundreds of millions of Christians are talking to each other for the first time in a millennium. Here at home, we have our work to do as well . . . lest we have received the grace of God in vain. Amen.
Not in Vain
Isaiah 58, Psalm 50, 2 Corinthians 6:1-10, St. Matthew 4:1-11
It’s politics again. On Friday, Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill, who heads the Russian Orthodox Church, met in Havana. They spoke for two hours on sundry subjects, including persecution of Christians in Syria and Iraq.
Then they exchanged gifts and signed a declaration deploring the plight of those fellow believers.
What will come of it all? I wish I were a prophet. I do know this: Kirill is altogether too chummy with Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator. Since she walked back out into the open in the post-Soviet era, the Russian church has occupied a bedroom in the Kremlin.
Putin has put Kirill’s patriarchate in the service of his political agenda. Kirill sees in Putin an ally in expanding the influence of the Moscow church. The Orthodox comprise the second-largest church in the world. Unlike Rome, they have no pope.
Their patriarchates, or regional groupings of churches, operate independently. For centuries, Constantinople, the ancient capital of the eastern Roman Empire, stood as first among equals in the Orthodox world.
With that city in Muslim hands since Ottoman times Moscow has long coveted the role of de factor leader of Eastern Orthodoxy. About two-thirds of the 300 million members of these Eastern churches are in Russia.
Kirill sees an opportunity to assert his influence. Putin may be able to help . . . but Putin is propping up the Syrian president, Bashar Assad, and Russian warplanes are killing civilians in Putin’s campaign to decimate the Islamic State rebels who are trying to overthrow Assad.
Can Kirill do anything at all to save those his friend Putin is killing?
The churches of Rome and Moscow have their historical differences as well, not least among them longstanding bitterness over the Eastern Catholic Church in the Ukraine. These parishes use the Eastern liturgy but stand in full communion with Rome. The Russians contend the Catholics have been poaching on their turf.
Does any of this matter to us? These events are unfolding at a far remove from our shores, whether in terms of geography or ecclesiology. They churn in a cauldron of centuries-old grievances of which we know little and which, frankly, hold not much interest for most of us.
Why, then, do I raise the subject? Because Christians – our brothers and sisters – are dying in Syria and Iraq. They’re dying by bombs and mortar shells and starvation.
And I raise the subject because at long last Christians may band together in defense of Christians . . . in support of the gospel of peace . . . in the cause of Jesus Christ.
I don’t know what will come of this first step in mending relations between two churches that trace their origins back to the apostles. Political intrigue bubbles thick as potato soup.
Moscow said in its statement announcing the meeting that the issue of the Catholic Church's presence in Ukraine still remains a "bleeding wound" that has not been resolved.
Preparations for the meeting consumed two years. Kirill wants contact with the pope to boost his stature in the East. Francis will tread carefully to avoid being sucked into Putin’s vortex.
But I know they have taken the first step. The official rift between East and West known as the Great Schism occurred in the year 1054. The heads of the churches of Rome and Moscow had not met since . . . not until last Friday in Havana.
In advance of the meeting, a spokesman for Kirill, Metropolitan Hilarion, said, "We need to put aside internal disagreements at this tragic time and join efforts to save Christians in the regions where they are subject to the most atrocious persecution."
A Vatican spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, issued a statement remarking the event’s “extraordinary importance in the path of ecumenical relations and dialogue among Christian confessions."
Now I want to quote someone you know. Bp. Ray Sutton serves as the chief ecumenical offer for both the Reformed Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in North America. He has traveled to both Rome and Moscow to meet with church leaders. I recall vividly his words from four years ago at a meeting in Houston: “The reason the world pays no attention to us (the universal church) is that we’re so divided.”
As you consider the implications of that statement, I almost want to apologize for speaking of such grand events as these. I’m a green preacher in a small church of a small denomination holding forth in a small town tucked into a valley somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.
I doubt that either Francis or Kirill knows Durango, Colorado, exists. I am utterly certain neither of them has heard of All Saints Anglican Church.
But we are part of something much bigger and we’re as much a part of it as Christians in major cities and in high places. It must matter to us that our brothers and sisters are dying. It must matter to us that the world God created refuses to listen to His church – and gets away with it.
Can you even begin to conceive how the world would come to heel if Christians spoke for our Lord with one voice? And, yes, despite our insignificant numbers and our remote location, we in Durango have a role to play.
Look at what’s happening across the globe. Relations among the 14 loosely linked patriarchates that make up Eastern Orthodoxy have been as strained as those between Moscow and Rome, but the heads of most of those churches are scheduled to meet in June in Crete.
Once again, politics plays a role. This conference was originally set for Istanbul. After Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet, Moscow’s Kremlin-friendly leader Kirill balked at attending and the meeting was briefly in peril.
The move to Crete put it back on track, however, and the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church will convene for the first time in more than 1,200 years.
In our own Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest body of churches, primates of most of the 38 provinces convened in Canterbury last month to address the matter of The Episcopal Church’s deviation from the biblical and historical definition of marriage. Canada and some other national churches are following in TEC’s heretical footsteps.
At first blush this event seems to send up a signal directly opposed to the unifying messages coming from other camps. That thought, I believe, is entirely wrong.
The American heresy has driven the national churches of Africa, which represent the vast majority of the world’s 80-plus million Anglicans, and those of like mind such as our own Anglican Church in North America, into a tighter bonding.
We are proclaiming our resolve to stand together in defense of the faith once delivered to the saints, to shout with one voice that we will not succumb to an attack on the authority of Scripture from within.
Over time, this determination will give us a greater say rather than a weakened one on both the reliability of the Bible as God’s inerrant word and on the norms of morality.
We live in a momentous age. Massive movements in both religion and international affairs are poised on the razor’s edge, soon to topple in one direction or the other. Islamic terrorism rips gaping holes in cultures in both the ancient seedbed of Christianity in the Near East and in the hothouse in which it grew in Europe.
How will the divided church respond? Can we put her together again?
Wherever we turn, when the issue is not politics, it’s purity. Ever since the church has existed there have been those who wanted to cleanse her.
In the third century the Novatians denied communion to those who had participated in pagan rituals. In the next two centuries the Donatists declared invalid baptisms performed by men who had renounced their faith under persecution and then returned to holy orders when it ended.
The Puritans emigrated to America to gather in churches that applied a litmus test of faith to prospective new members. In Central Europe the Moravians and in England the Keswick community walled themselves off to prevent sinners from polluting their sainthood.
Now we Anglicans are living in impaired communion with significant numbers of those we once called “brother” and “sister” and quite possibly walking toward a day of broken communion. Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and others are confronting some of the issues that vex us, and some others of their own.
Can we safeguard our doctrine and make common cause with believers of other traditions at the same time? We must. Christians are dying today in Syria and Iraq.
It does no good to pretend doctrinal differences don’t matter. They’re real and they’re sincerely held and they have lived in the DNA of the various churches for centuries. But three things must be said about them:
First, when we’re not talking to one another we’re not addressing those differences. A millennium in the case of Rome and Moscow, 1,200 years in the case of the Orthodox patriarchates, ought to be long enough to bury the hatchet. Maybe more than long enough.
Doctrine matters; so does dialogue. When we close ourselves up in our cocoons we are failing in our Christian duty to strive for unity in the body. The apostle John reports our Lord’s words:
"I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me” (John 17:20-21).
Second, we must have and hold a godly hierarchy of values. It sounds terribly pious to say all sin is a stench in God’s nostrils. It is. But the law God gave Israel did not prescribe the same penalties for all violations.
And the brains God gave us should tell us that lusting after another man’s wife is one sin and having sex with her is a sin of a higher order. That hating our brother is one thing and murdering him a rather more serious thing. We are not justified in proceeding to the second because we have already done the first.
We must major in the majors, not the minors. When all other measures have been exhausted, perverting marriage to apply it to same-sex relationships is cause for breach of communion. A squabble over who gets to strut as archbishop of the Ukraine is not.
A denomination’s endorsement of abortion on demand is reason to sever ties with it. A disagreement over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or the Father and the Son is not.
Third, we should find the agility to pull together to save our persecuted brethren in the Middle East and to thrash through our theological differences at the same time. There once was a time in Britain when believers in the indigenous Celtic churches and those in parishes planted by missionaries from Rome celebrated Easter on different dates.
One group was rejoicing at the resurrection while the other was still grieving over their sins in Lent. At the Synod of Whitby in the year 664 King Oswiu of Northumbria ruled that his subjects would observe the Roman date. The matter hasn’t come up since.
Today, about 1,400 years later, the churches of the East calculate the date differently from those in the West. This disagreement should not impede combined efforts to rescue those who are watching their crumpled children fall before the Muslim onslaught. The enemies outside our camp are real enough; we need not create others within it.
We turn now to a second reason the carnage on the other side of the world should not be remote from us. In a very real sense, in spiritual terms, it is up to us to end it.
We must have our leaders. They must assemble and debate and attempt, at least, to resolve theological issues of great weight. May God bless them in that important work. But may He also bless us in ours -- because in His order we may not dump this labor on men wearing fancy titles and fancier hats and trundle off on our merry way.
And so we arrive at last at our text for today, from chapter six of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. Because Christ died to make us righteous, the apostle declares, we must shoulder certain responsibilities: “We then, as workers together with Him (Christ) also plead with you not to receive the grace of God in vain.”
This grace is given to us for a purpose. Paul brings out a citation from the prophet Isaiah to explain it: “For (God) says (to Christ): ‘In an acceptable time I have heard you, and in the day of salvation I have helped you.’ Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”
In Isaiah, the Father is telling the Son He is giving Him “as a covenant to the people, to restore the earth” (49:8). And we are fellow heirs of the Son – not only of the promises made to Him but of the burden He was made to bear as well.
Paul bore it. He goes on to catalogue his trials, as we heard him do in another passage just the other week: “. . . in much patience, in tribulations, in needs, in distresses, in stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in labors, in sleeplessness, in fastings . . .”
Beloved, we may pause to note on this first Sunday in Lent that our Lord has dealt rather more kindly with us. I do my best not to think of how I would have borne up under the afflictions the apostle endured for the sake of the gospel . . . but persecuted Christians today do not share in our luxury of escapism.
We have had it so easy I fear we forget that “now is the day of salvation” and that we do have a role to play in it. During Lent, of all seasons, we should consider that the institutional purity we claim to yearn for must follow in the wake of personal purity.
Whether we be pope, patriarch, presiding bishop, priest or pew-sitter, we are called upon “not to receive the grace of God in vain.” God dispenses that grace on His body the church for the good of that body.
The apostle Peter wrote, “But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; who once were not a people but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy” (1Peter 2:9-10).
In God’s eyes, we are one, His own special people. Our duty before Him is to live out our witness of Him by walking in righteousness and loving our brother. If we would be unified we must first be purified . . . and we have a part to play in that, in terms of what happens in our homes and of what happens in Syria and Iraq.
Are we walking uprightly? Are we praying for the persecuted? Are we giving? Are we sending?
As to the last, an excellent, even biblical, approach to curtailing terror perpetrated on Christians would be to convert to Christianity the cultures producing terrorists.
The numerical decline in the American church, of course, has generated a predictable decline in missionaries . . . but numbers don’t tell the whole story. During the Great Depression, churches would forego buying coal to heat their buildings to avoid cutting support for missionaries.
That level of passion for the gospel enterprise is not much in evidence today. Our own Reformed Episcopal Church can point to a grand total of two missionary families on the foreign field. Now that one of them is transitioning from the Philippines to Indonesia, we have one in a majority Muslim country.
Now what? Well, we have a start. The pope and the patriarch have met. Far away from us, leaders of hundreds of millions of Christians are talking to each other for the first time in a millennium. Here at home, we have our work to do as well . . . lest we have received the grace of God in vain. Amen.