Sermon Audio
The 19th Sunday After Trinity
Repentance and Renewal
Psalm 34, Ephesians 4:21-24
By the Reverend Doctor Randolph Constantine
This morning, in addition to our Lord Jesus Christ, I have enlisted the aid of three men to help us understand the meaning and message of this day. Here we are on the 19th Sunday after Trinity, a day for which you might think that there is no particular distinction. Well, there was a priest of the Church of England who thought that all of the Sundays of the Church year were very interesting. He wrote a book about it that was picked up by a Lutheran theologian who expanded the idea to four volumes relative to Lutheran Service Book.
The Reverend Doctor Melville Scott, D.D. was the Vicar of Castle Church in Stafford, England, for some years around the beginning of the 20th century. He did not, as far as I know, ever do anything scandalous. Wiki and other internet references have very little to say about him. He was also the son of a minister of the Church of England. His father had left some notes on preaching on the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels for some of the Sundays of the Church Year. Melville built on what his father had begun and wrote a book that was published in England in 1903 titled, The Harmony of the Collects, Epistles and Gospels. At that time, he was about 42 years old. In a few years the book went out of print, but was reprinted 2011 by The Anglican Expositor.
Rev. Scott’s idea was that for every Sunday for which there is a Collect, Epistle, and Gospel in the Prayer book, there is a central theme common to each of those three things, and that it would be profitable for the congregations to hear sermons preached on that theme as an exposition of either the Epistle or the Gospel for that Sunday. He did not leave us just something from which someone might see possible outlines of sermons from the readings in the Prayer Book for each Sunday of the Christian year; no, he also gave us his analysis of the themes of each Sunday on the Christian calendar as expressed in those Collects, Epistles, and Gospels. This is an amazing and useful work of analysis and synthesis.
The second of the three men is the Rev. Dr. Fred H. Lindemann, who did an expansion of Scott’s work in regard to the Lutheran Service Book rather than the Book of Common Prayer. An interesting thing about this is that more than 40 of the Sundays of the Church year have exactly the same Collect, Epistle and Gospel in the Lutheran Service Book as in the BCP! I had never heard of Scott’s book until I read of it in Lindemann’s bibliography. In seminary it was recommended to me that I get a copy of Lindemann’s work if I could. It turned out that they were available on the Internet for not too awful much. And then Scott’s book was reprinted, and I got to see what inspired Lindemann.
If we look at the first part of the Church Year from its beginning on the First Sunday in Advent, through all the major events in the life of Jesus up through to the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came in tongues of fire, that period is almost exactly 26 Sundays long. What Scott saw in that was that from Trinity Sunday through to the Sunday Next Before Advent we also have 26 Sundays on the average, and that gives us, on average, 24 Sundays after Trinity. What’s more, he saw that those ministers of long ago who had written the Collects and had chosen the Epistles and Gospels as early as 1400 years ago had not done so randomly – that there were patterns in the themes of the Propers of those 24 or so Sundays.
In Scott’s view, the pattern of the themes of the Propers of the 24 Sundays after Trinity is this:
1) The Propers for the first five Sundays after Trinity show us the character of God, of God’s love on Sundays 1 and 2; and on grace; mercy; and peace on Sundays three, four and five.
2) The Propers for the next five Sundays look at man’s duties in response to God’s love.
3) The Propers for Sundays 11 and 12 look at man’s response to God’s Grace. That takes us halfway through the Trinity season.
4) The second half of the Trinity Season begins with the 13th Sunday after Trinity and consists of all 12 Sundays devoted to various aspects of the character of a Christian such as his service in love to God and the world, patience, humility, living a life of duty and others.
In his analysis, Rev. Scott saw that the Propers of the 19th Sunday after Trinity speak to a Christians need for living a life of renewal.
Our third helper gives us a terse introduction to one of our great problems as Christians. Many of you know who Calvin Coolidge was – the 30th President of the United States from 1923-29. Coolidge was renowned for being a man of few words, very few words. To call him taciturn borders on understatement. One story about Coolidge has it that a woman sitting next to him at a dinner tried to get him to talk to her by saying to him, “Mr. Coolidge, I made a bet with my husband that I could get more than two words out of you.” Coolidge’s reply was short and meaningful, “You lose.” Another story about Coolidge applies to this sermon. When Coolidge returned from church one Sunday, he was asked what was the topic of the minister’s sermon. Coolidge, never one to use two or more words when one would do, said after a moment’s thought, “Sin.” His inquirer then asked, “And what did he say about it?” Coolidge replied, “He was against it.” I’m against it too, and I hope you are as well; for sin is the one great thing that stands in our way to renewal and salvation.
President Coolidge condensed that morning’s sermon into four words; Rev. Scott tells us the theme of the 19th Sunday after Trinity is simply the Christians need for “Renewal of Life”. Let us see how the various parts of today’s service speak to that idea.
The Collect for today is one of the most concise statements of the doctrine of grace that exists: “O God, forasmuch as without Thee, we are not able to please Thee; Mercifully grant that Thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Sola Fide, soli gratia; only by faith, and only through grace.
We can see how this works in the OT lesson. The setting for the lesson we heard is that Jeremiah is writing during the reign of Zedekiah, King of Judah. Josiah, the last good king of Judah, had died at least 11 years before, and Judah had gone after false gods. Judah did not believe Jeremiah’s warning and would not repent. In our lesson, Jeremiah gave them the message of the promise of restoration to God’s grace before Nebuchadnezzar’s army came to Jerusalem for the last time to tear down the walls and take King Zedekiah and almost all who were there to Babylon; but the Judahites would not listen.
The Psalm for today, Psalm 34, is intertwined with the Epistle lesson in that the second half of the psalm contains much of the message of the Epistle lesson. It does not repeat the message of renewal and restoration, but does give us a clear message that we need to pursue righteousness, as does St. Paul.
The Epistle lesson is a classic of St. Paul’s exhortations: what not to do, what to do, and why to do it. The message of renewal is in verses 21 through 24: “if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: 22 that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, 23 and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, 24 and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.”
Now you may ask where is the renewal in the Gospel lesson. Let me assure you, it is not all that well hidden. Jesus went to His own city, which was Capernaum, for that was the center of his ministry.. Some men bring Him a man who is paralyzed lying on a bed, and His first words to the man on the bed, are, “Take heart, My son, your sins are forgiven.” Jesus had been on the west side of the Sea of Galilee and had come in a boat over to Capernaum. By this time in His ministry, crowds were following Him as were always some scribes and/or some Pharisees in the hope of catching Him in doing something illegal or saying something blasphemous or heretical. Concerning the men who carried the paralytic on the bed, we don’t know how many there were or what their relationship was to the paralyzed man. They could have been his brothers who had heard Jesus preach and thus had faith in Him; or the paralytic could have been a son or an heir of a rich man who had heard of Jesus’ healings and had hired the men to carry him to where Jesus was known to be. Whatever the case, it seems they all had faith, because the text says that, “When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, ‘Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you.’" (Matthew 9:2)
The ever present scribes grumble among themselves about blasphemy; but Jesus ,being God, and never forget that, knew what was in their hearts, asks them, "For which is easier, to say, 'Your sins are forgiven you,' or to say, 'Arise and walk'? 6 But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins" -- then He said to the paralytic, "Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house." (Matthew 9:5-6) And so the man who was paralyzed got up and went home.
Where is the renewal here? We tend to think of renewal as returning to a condition that was present before; but for the paralytic or the man born blind, renewal did not mean that at all. Renewal, meant re-NEW-al, coming to a new condition of health or righteousness, a next step in sanctification rather than returning from a state of sin to a former state of sanctification, Here, on this day of renewal, renewal means coming to new and greater state of righteousness.
How can we do this? Could we possibly do this on our own? Deep down we think we can, but the Doctrine of Grace and prayers such as today’s Collect make it clear to us that we can’t do anything right on our own – “forasmuch as without Thee, we are not able to please Thee”. For any one of us to want to do something that will please Him, God has to by grace give us a little stimulus to want to do it, and then we have to respond accordingly. Without that little nudge of Grace, we would not respond rightly because we are all by nature the evil children of Adam.
For the sort of renewal that St. Paul wants us to make, we just can’t manage to do it without repenting for an awful lot of sin. Here again, grace is required, … an ample dose of grace; for true repentance also goes against our human nature.
Suppose you say something nasty about someone, maybe to his face, or he somehow hears of it, and you are sorry you did it. Is that repentance? NO! Being sorry is being contrite, but contrition is not repentance. Repentance is a matter of change, of changing your mind and your heart about saying that nasty thing when you said it and then changing your way of life and speaking so that your won’t ever do that again; that is repentance. The Greek word that is translated in the bible as repent is metanoiō, which literally means to change your mind. The sort of renewal that St. Paul wants us all to have cannot be had without repentance and that requires God’s Grace.
Repentance is really required for God to forgive us of our sins because if we don’t repent, we don’t change, and we just keep on sinning. Just saying, “I’m sorry.” is not enough. Were you really sorry when you insulted that person? Do you still feel that it was a neat thing that you said? If you do, you aren’t really sorry; and you surely haven’t repented.
If you worry about whether you have been forgiven for some sin that you committed long, long ago, there is a verse near the back of the Bible that is one of the most comforting of all. It is1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The question here is what does it mean to confess, to really confess. First of all, it means that you recognize that some specific act that you did was a sin (BTW I am not letting myself off the hook here; I am preaching to myself as much as I am preaching to you); that the thing you did went against God’s Law; and then you tell God that you recognize that you did it, and when; and that you are sorry that you did it; and that you will truly try never to do it again, meaning that you repent of that behavior, whatever it was. That is what true confession is.
The General Confessions of Morning and Evening Prayer leave something to be desired here, because there is no time to pause and reflect about specific sins. The same is true about the confession we shall say shortly near the beginning of the second part of this service.
I have a Greek Orthodox Prayer book that has in it a Prayer of Confession that goes for three small pages. Part of that prayer says this: “all my sins which I have committed in all the days of my life and in every hour at the present time, and in the past, day and night, by deed, word, thought: gluttony, drunkenness, secret eating, idle talking, despondency, indolence, contradiction, disobedience, slandering, condemning, negligence, self-love, acquisitiveness” and so on for most of a page.
For a time I prayed that God would give me the grace to recognize as sins those things I had done that I did not think of as sins. Am I any better for it? I am not sure. What I do know is that in order to put on the new man that St. Paul tells us about and to be truly renewed will require a lot of repentance, which will require a great gift of grace, which comes from a generous God.
Remember the Collect from the 12th Sunday after Trinity, the one that says “Almighty and everlasting God, Who art always more ready to give than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve . . .”
Yes, God is generous, so generous that He gave his only Son to die for our sins on the cross, Him, Jesus, whose name means, “the Lord is Salvation”.
With God’s help, nothing is too hard. Repent and be Renewed!
AMEN!
Repentance and Renewal
Psalm 34, Ephesians 4:21-24
By the Reverend Doctor Randolph Constantine
This morning, in addition to our Lord Jesus Christ, I have enlisted the aid of three men to help us understand the meaning and message of this day. Here we are on the 19th Sunday after Trinity, a day for which you might think that there is no particular distinction. Well, there was a priest of the Church of England who thought that all of the Sundays of the Church year were very interesting. He wrote a book about it that was picked up by a Lutheran theologian who expanded the idea to four volumes relative to Lutheran Service Book.
The Reverend Doctor Melville Scott, D.D. was the Vicar of Castle Church in Stafford, England, for some years around the beginning of the 20th century. He did not, as far as I know, ever do anything scandalous. Wiki and other internet references have very little to say about him. He was also the son of a minister of the Church of England. His father had left some notes on preaching on the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels for some of the Sundays of the Church Year. Melville built on what his father had begun and wrote a book that was published in England in 1903 titled, The Harmony of the Collects, Epistles and Gospels. At that time, he was about 42 years old. In a few years the book went out of print, but was reprinted 2011 by The Anglican Expositor.
Rev. Scott’s idea was that for every Sunday for which there is a Collect, Epistle, and Gospel in the Prayer book, there is a central theme common to each of those three things, and that it would be profitable for the congregations to hear sermons preached on that theme as an exposition of either the Epistle or the Gospel for that Sunday. He did not leave us just something from which someone might see possible outlines of sermons from the readings in the Prayer Book for each Sunday of the Christian year; no, he also gave us his analysis of the themes of each Sunday on the Christian calendar as expressed in those Collects, Epistles, and Gospels. This is an amazing and useful work of analysis and synthesis.
The second of the three men is the Rev. Dr. Fred H. Lindemann, who did an expansion of Scott’s work in regard to the Lutheran Service Book rather than the Book of Common Prayer. An interesting thing about this is that more than 40 of the Sundays of the Church year have exactly the same Collect, Epistle and Gospel in the Lutheran Service Book as in the BCP! I had never heard of Scott’s book until I read of it in Lindemann’s bibliography. In seminary it was recommended to me that I get a copy of Lindemann’s work if I could. It turned out that they were available on the Internet for not too awful much. And then Scott’s book was reprinted, and I got to see what inspired Lindemann.
If we look at the first part of the Church Year from its beginning on the First Sunday in Advent, through all the major events in the life of Jesus up through to the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came in tongues of fire, that period is almost exactly 26 Sundays long. What Scott saw in that was that from Trinity Sunday through to the Sunday Next Before Advent we also have 26 Sundays on the average, and that gives us, on average, 24 Sundays after Trinity. What’s more, he saw that those ministers of long ago who had written the Collects and had chosen the Epistles and Gospels as early as 1400 years ago had not done so randomly – that there were patterns in the themes of the Propers of those 24 or so Sundays.
In Scott’s view, the pattern of the themes of the Propers of the 24 Sundays after Trinity is this:
1) The Propers for the first five Sundays after Trinity show us the character of God, of God’s love on Sundays 1 and 2; and on grace; mercy; and peace on Sundays three, four and five.
2) The Propers for the next five Sundays look at man’s duties in response to God’s love.
3) The Propers for Sundays 11 and 12 look at man’s response to God’s Grace. That takes us halfway through the Trinity season.
4) The second half of the Trinity Season begins with the 13th Sunday after Trinity and consists of all 12 Sundays devoted to various aspects of the character of a Christian such as his service in love to God and the world, patience, humility, living a life of duty and others.
In his analysis, Rev. Scott saw that the Propers of the 19th Sunday after Trinity speak to a Christians need for living a life of renewal.
Our third helper gives us a terse introduction to one of our great problems as Christians. Many of you know who Calvin Coolidge was – the 30th President of the United States from 1923-29. Coolidge was renowned for being a man of few words, very few words. To call him taciturn borders on understatement. One story about Coolidge has it that a woman sitting next to him at a dinner tried to get him to talk to her by saying to him, “Mr. Coolidge, I made a bet with my husband that I could get more than two words out of you.” Coolidge’s reply was short and meaningful, “You lose.” Another story about Coolidge applies to this sermon. When Coolidge returned from church one Sunday, he was asked what was the topic of the minister’s sermon. Coolidge, never one to use two or more words when one would do, said after a moment’s thought, “Sin.” His inquirer then asked, “And what did he say about it?” Coolidge replied, “He was against it.” I’m against it too, and I hope you are as well; for sin is the one great thing that stands in our way to renewal and salvation.
President Coolidge condensed that morning’s sermon into four words; Rev. Scott tells us the theme of the 19th Sunday after Trinity is simply the Christians need for “Renewal of Life”. Let us see how the various parts of today’s service speak to that idea.
The Collect for today is one of the most concise statements of the doctrine of grace that exists: “O God, forasmuch as without Thee, we are not able to please Thee; Mercifully grant that Thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Sola Fide, soli gratia; only by faith, and only through grace.
We can see how this works in the OT lesson. The setting for the lesson we heard is that Jeremiah is writing during the reign of Zedekiah, King of Judah. Josiah, the last good king of Judah, had died at least 11 years before, and Judah had gone after false gods. Judah did not believe Jeremiah’s warning and would not repent. In our lesson, Jeremiah gave them the message of the promise of restoration to God’s grace before Nebuchadnezzar’s army came to Jerusalem for the last time to tear down the walls and take King Zedekiah and almost all who were there to Babylon; but the Judahites would not listen.
The Psalm for today, Psalm 34, is intertwined with the Epistle lesson in that the second half of the psalm contains much of the message of the Epistle lesson. It does not repeat the message of renewal and restoration, but does give us a clear message that we need to pursue righteousness, as does St. Paul.
The Epistle lesson is a classic of St. Paul’s exhortations: what not to do, what to do, and why to do it. The message of renewal is in verses 21 through 24: “if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: 22 that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, 23 and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, 24 and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.”
Now you may ask where is the renewal in the Gospel lesson. Let me assure you, it is not all that well hidden. Jesus went to His own city, which was Capernaum, for that was the center of his ministry.. Some men bring Him a man who is paralyzed lying on a bed, and His first words to the man on the bed, are, “Take heart, My son, your sins are forgiven.” Jesus had been on the west side of the Sea of Galilee and had come in a boat over to Capernaum. By this time in His ministry, crowds were following Him as were always some scribes and/or some Pharisees in the hope of catching Him in doing something illegal or saying something blasphemous or heretical. Concerning the men who carried the paralytic on the bed, we don’t know how many there were or what their relationship was to the paralyzed man. They could have been his brothers who had heard Jesus preach and thus had faith in Him; or the paralytic could have been a son or an heir of a rich man who had heard of Jesus’ healings and had hired the men to carry him to where Jesus was known to be. Whatever the case, it seems they all had faith, because the text says that, “When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, ‘Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you.’" (Matthew 9:2)
The ever present scribes grumble among themselves about blasphemy; but Jesus ,being God, and never forget that, knew what was in their hearts, asks them, "For which is easier, to say, 'Your sins are forgiven you,' or to say, 'Arise and walk'? 6 But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins" -- then He said to the paralytic, "Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house." (Matthew 9:5-6) And so the man who was paralyzed got up and went home.
Where is the renewal here? We tend to think of renewal as returning to a condition that was present before; but for the paralytic or the man born blind, renewal did not mean that at all. Renewal, meant re-NEW-al, coming to a new condition of health or righteousness, a next step in sanctification rather than returning from a state of sin to a former state of sanctification, Here, on this day of renewal, renewal means coming to new and greater state of righteousness.
How can we do this? Could we possibly do this on our own? Deep down we think we can, but the Doctrine of Grace and prayers such as today’s Collect make it clear to us that we can’t do anything right on our own – “forasmuch as without Thee, we are not able to please Thee”. For any one of us to want to do something that will please Him, God has to by grace give us a little stimulus to want to do it, and then we have to respond accordingly. Without that little nudge of Grace, we would not respond rightly because we are all by nature the evil children of Adam.
For the sort of renewal that St. Paul wants us to make, we just can’t manage to do it without repenting for an awful lot of sin. Here again, grace is required, … an ample dose of grace; for true repentance also goes against our human nature.
Suppose you say something nasty about someone, maybe to his face, or he somehow hears of it, and you are sorry you did it. Is that repentance? NO! Being sorry is being contrite, but contrition is not repentance. Repentance is a matter of change, of changing your mind and your heart about saying that nasty thing when you said it and then changing your way of life and speaking so that your won’t ever do that again; that is repentance. The Greek word that is translated in the bible as repent is metanoiō, which literally means to change your mind. The sort of renewal that St. Paul wants us all to have cannot be had without repentance and that requires God’s Grace.
Repentance is really required for God to forgive us of our sins because if we don’t repent, we don’t change, and we just keep on sinning. Just saying, “I’m sorry.” is not enough. Were you really sorry when you insulted that person? Do you still feel that it was a neat thing that you said? If you do, you aren’t really sorry; and you surely haven’t repented.
If you worry about whether you have been forgiven for some sin that you committed long, long ago, there is a verse near the back of the Bible that is one of the most comforting of all. It is1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The question here is what does it mean to confess, to really confess. First of all, it means that you recognize that some specific act that you did was a sin (BTW I am not letting myself off the hook here; I am preaching to myself as much as I am preaching to you); that the thing you did went against God’s Law; and then you tell God that you recognize that you did it, and when; and that you are sorry that you did it; and that you will truly try never to do it again, meaning that you repent of that behavior, whatever it was. That is what true confession is.
The General Confessions of Morning and Evening Prayer leave something to be desired here, because there is no time to pause and reflect about specific sins. The same is true about the confession we shall say shortly near the beginning of the second part of this service.
I have a Greek Orthodox Prayer book that has in it a Prayer of Confession that goes for three small pages. Part of that prayer says this: “all my sins which I have committed in all the days of my life and in every hour at the present time, and in the past, day and night, by deed, word, thought: gluttony, drunkenness, secret eating, idle talking, despondency, indolence, contradiction, disobedience, slandering, condemning, negligence, self-love, acquisitiveness” and so on for most of a page.
For a time I prayed that God would give me the grace to recognize as sins those things I had done that I did not think of as sins. Am I any better for it? I am not sure. What I do know is that in order to put on the new man that St. Paul tells us about and to be truly renewed will require a lot of repentance, which will require a great gift of grace, which comes from a generous God.
Remember the Collect from the 12th Sunday after Trinity, the one that says “Almighty and everlasting God, Who art always more ready to give than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve . . .”
Yes, God is generous, so generous that He gave his only Son to die for our sins on the cross, Him, Jesus, whose name means, “the Lord is Salvation”.
With God’s help, nothing is too hard. Repent and be Renewed!
AMEN!