The theme of the third week of Advent centers on the messengers of God.  The Day of the Lord is at hand; God is coming soon to his people and he seldom shows up on the earth entirely unannounced.  Before the first Advent of Christ, God the Father called a messenger which he would send before his Son to prepare Israel to receive their Messiah.  This man’s name is John the Baptist.  “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.  The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light that all men through him might believe.  He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.”[1]  John was sent to preach “the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.”[2]  God himself was about to draw near to his people, to literally show up in the midst of his nation, and his people were not yet ready to receive him.  John was sent to prepare Israel to meet their God.  This has always been the essential role of the biblical prophet: to announce the coming of God and to prepare the human race to receive him when he arrives.  John was, in St. Luke’s words, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth; And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”[3]

The prophet of God is always a herald of the Day of the Lord; a messenger sent by God to declare publicly that the king himself is about to draw near.  Experience has taught the church that the message of the biblical prophet therefore always contains certain themes, chief among which is a constant tension between judgment and salvation.  God is drawing near both to judge and to save; the outcome of his advent depends largely upon the response of his people to the prophet who he has sent before him to prepare for his visit.  John’s message was simple and straightforward, if not entirely pleasant.  When the multitudes came to the desert to be baptized by him he declared, colorfully, “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance…the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: every tree therefore which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.”[4]  The prophets have literally been preaching some version of this message for millennia.  In hindsight the reason is somewhat obvious.  God made mankind to live in communion with him and with our fellow man.  He gave the entire physical creation to us as a gift and dominion over which we were to rule.  When we made it clear to him in Eden that we preferred to manage the affairs of the earth without reference to his plans or wishes he decided to allow the human race to carry on apart from him for a time as we have seen fit.  God has allowed us such a degree of autonomy on the earth that much of the human race has altogether forgotten him and in the process made a substantial mess of the world which we have attempted to govern without him. Every so often, as we go about our usual business a prophet shows up and declares to us that the long distant king of this world is about to return to reclaim what is rightfully his.  He is coming soon, and he wants to know what we have been doing with his creation while he was away.  The announcement that the kingdom of heaven is at hand implies that the current kingdom mankind has established on the earth is about to be judged.  God sends his prophets to the earth beforehand to give those who are willing to listen the opportunity to repent.

Nobody likes to be a prophet; it is not a job one often finds folks volunteering for.  It is frequently unpleasant to speak on behalf of God to our fellow man because oftentimes the messages we are required to bring contain uncomfortable truths which must be faced.  But if we ourselves had not been warned of the coming of Christ, would any of us have been ready to meet him?  If God had not sent his prophets, would any of us have been saved from the wrath to come?  If no one speaks plainly regarding the judgment of God, how will mankind know that it must repent and believe in order to experience the salvation of God?  As St. Paul says in Romans, “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.  How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent?”[5]  St. Paul finishes this thought by quoting Isaiah, “As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!’”  At first glance it would seem that the biblical prophet is anything but a messenger of “glad tidings,” “peace,” or “good things.”  Few in our age would find the herald of the judgment of God “beautiful.”  But this is largely because we live in a culture that no longer believes in the reality of human sin or the corresponding necessity of God’s judgment.  The biblical prophet presents each individual with an opportunity to deal with the reality of their sin; to call it by name, to confess it and to genuinely repent and be reconciled to God.  If sin is in fact real, and if our disobedience as a race does in fact cut us off from God, then the opportunity to actually face the consequences of our sin and to at long last be set free from them is in truth a beautiful gift.  Pretending that we have no sin merely allows us to remain enslaved to our depravity.

The “Good News” is this: God knows our sin and has sent his Son to redeem us from it.  John the Baptist was the prophet of this first Advent of Christ.  We as the church are the prophetic community which remains on the earth to prepare the world for his Second Coming.  We are the body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit, the foretaste and outpost of the Kingdom of Heaven already present in this fallen world.  In Christ we exercise and reveal God’s authority on the earth and the sacraments which define our prayer and liturgy are real and potent manifestations of the perfection of the creation which is to come when God makes all things new.  This morning’s collect calls us as the church “the ministers and stewards of God’s mysteries,” and charges us to fulfill the prophetic role to which we have been called.  In it we pray that, as John the Baptist prepared Israel for the first coming of Christ, that we would “likewise so prepare and make ready [God’s] way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at [his] second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in [his] sight.”  We as the church are the community of the Advent of God; the forerunners and prophets of his Second Coming in glory to judge both the quick and the dead.  May we be faithful in our charge to prepare the way of the Lord, to make straight the pathways of our God, that our brothers and sisters on the earth might be prepared to meet their maker on the great and final day of the Lord.

Sermon preached Sunday, December 11^th 2011 at St. Matthew’s Church in Newport Beach, California.

“Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?  Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death.”  In the epistle today St. Paul gives us what at first appears to be a very strange explanation of Christian baptism.  Most of the church’s teaching on the matter tends to center on the cleansing symbolism of the act and the reality of the new life shown forth when the person being baptized is drawn out of the depths of the water.  But St. Paul highlights a theme that we often overlook in the administration of the sacrament: before baptism shows forth the new life of the Christian, it first shows forth his death.  The first time I ever had this aspect of baptismal symbolism explained to me, I thought it to be a very strange rite of entry into the Christian Church.  The sacramental action, considered plainly, is a bit unsettling.  Christ through his church, in the person of the priest, takes hold of the initiate and holds them under water until the old, sinful man is dead; that is to say the minister of God begins by drowning the church’s new member.  Only then, after he has been “buried by baptism” into the death of Jesus, does God then bring him forth from the water into new life.  New life in the church has always been linked to this symbol of baptismal death.  One can be “born again” into new life only once one has “been crucified with Christ.”  Death and cleansing are linked in the sacramental waters of baptism.

The world is shocked by death; Christianity is not.  The world attempts to ignore or avoid the reality of death; Christianity proclaims it.  To some this appears to be an unduly morbid fixation of the traditional church.  Many wonder why it is that the chief symbol of the Christian church for two millennia has been that of the crucifix.  Why is it that for 2,000 years Christian worshipers have placed the image of Christ crucified directly above the altar?  Why hang before yourselves a constant, painful reminder of the moment when God, in the person of Jesus Christ, died?  And furthermore, don’t you know that that is not how the story ends?  Aren’t you aware that three days later this same Jesus rose from the grave?  Why has the church not instead maintained the image of the risen Christ as the visual focal point of Christian worship?  Because it is the vocation of the Church to prophetically proclaim that the cross is the mark of this world.  All of creation presently labors under the sentence of death.  This condemnation began with mankind’s rejection of God in the Garden of Eden, but it was consummated in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.  He who is the life of this world entered into this world and was rejected by it.  In crucifying Jesus, mankind condemned the entire creation to death, for there can be no life for this world apart from Christ.  The crucifix therefore is the prophetic showing forth, the sign, symbol and mark of the current state of all creation.

But this same cross is also the hope of all creation.  For “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.”  The world sentenced Jesus to death unjustly and in the resurrection, the Father has overturned our verdict.  He has raised his son from the dead and in this resurrection has opened the possibility for all of creation to be redeemed.  This redemption however must occur in Christ, according to the pattern established in his life on this earth.  All who hope to rise with Christ must first be made to die with him.  Death, which up until this time had been considered the endpoint of human life, has now in Christ been transformed into the possibility of a new beginning.  Death has become the gateway to resurrection.  As the proper preface for the Easter season states “by his death he hath destroyed death, and by his rising to life again, he hath restored to us everlasting life.”  The crucifix therefore stands before the eyes of worshipping Christians as a reminder of the passage which all life must take in order that it might be redeemed.

The image of Christian baptism sacramentally shows forth the nature of this passage.  The Church’s divinely ordained rite of initiation prophetically declares from the very beginning of each Christian’s journey that their long pathway to redemption will eventually lead them through the gateway of death.  The Christian hope has never been that Jesus will save us from death; each human soul, Christian or otherwise, will be forced to endure that last full penalty of sin.  The Christian hope is instead the hope of resurrection.  It is the hope that we will die in Christ and that Father will call us forth from the grave on the last day even as he raised Jesus from the dead some two thousand years ago.  And that, having died unto sin once, death will lose its dominion over us and we will rise again into the life immortal in the midst of a newly perfected creation.  Christians therefore have no cause to be shocked or surprised by the reality of death.  We have been taught by God to expect it from the very beginning of our life in him.

This is not to say that the Christian Church denies the pain of death, or that it downplays the grief which naturally results from the loss of our loved ones.  Death is an enemy which is to be destroyed; it has no place in the fullness of the new creation.  But, paradoxically, death is to be destroyed by death; it is to be done away with through the resurrection of the dead.  As Christians therefore God does not ask us to enjoy the idea of death, but neither does he desire us to fear it.  In Christ, death is no longer a meaningless endpoint.  It has instead become the means of our perfection.  The same baptismal waters which sacramentally drown the sinful man also purify him.  When we are plunged beneath the surface the old man dies, but when we are drawn forth from the depths a new man is brought to life.  The old creation is done away with, and a new creation is formed.  We are born again.  This single, simple action outlines the course of our entire Christian life.  We strive in this world to be sanctified by Christ through his church; we endeavor daily to put off the old man with all his sinful deeds and put on the new man which is daily being renewed in the image of Christ.  This process will continue until the day of our death when we shall return to the earth from which we were made and the waters of baptism shall for a time cover us over.  Then the trumpet shall sound on the last day and the dead in Christ shall rise first.  We will be drawn forth from the depths and find that at long last the process of our purification has been completed by the grace of God.  We shall find that the waters which for a while covered us in death will also have served to cleanse us.  Our souls shall return to our bodies and they will have purified.  And in the end, the only part of us which we shall leave behind in the grave will be our sin.  “Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him: knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.”

Sermon preached on Sunday, July 31 st at St. Matthew’s Church in Newport Beach, California.

“Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net.”  Peter and his partners, James and John, had spent the evening as they usually did, working through the night fishing on the Sea of Galilee.  It had been a long frustrating evening for the three business partners as their many hours of labor had netted them literally nothing.  And yet, catch or no catch the boats had to be washed and the nets had to be cleaned and mended.  In the midst of their concluding labors Jesus walks up to the boat and asks Peter to row it out a bit from the shore so he can use it as a sort of impromptu pulpit from which to preach to the crowd which had followed down to the lakeshore.  This is certainly an inconvenient request for Peter.  It’s been a long night, he’s just about to finish up his work and go home, and now he’s stuck in a boat just offshore listening to the preaching of a strange wandering rabbi.  To top it all off however, upon concluding his sermon this rabbi then tells Peter to row out to the middle of the lake again and let down the nets he had just finished cleaning.  Peter nicely attempts to explain to Jesus that he and his partners had been fishing all night, the proper time to fish mind you, and yet had caught nothing; it made no sense to set out again in the middle of the day when they would surely return empty handed.  But this time something was different; they responded in the faith to the word of God and were rewarded accordingly with the catch of a lifetime.  They hauled in so many fish that two boats were overloaded to the point that they began to sink.  One cast of the net had hauled in several years worth of wages for these poor fishermen.

Many people draw a simple conclusion from a story like this: if you follow the will of God even when it makes no sense to you, he will bless you accordingly.  This is both true and untrue depending on how one understands the notion of God’s blessing.  It is true that Jesus had blessed Peter, James and John with a small fortune of fish on this occasion, one that would feed their dependents for quite some time.  But Jesus’ aim was not to make these men wealthy fishermen; it was instead to call them to become Apostles.  After the miraculous catch these three men did not set out on their boats the following evening praying to God for further success in their business endeavors, instead they left everything they had and followed Jesus as he ministered in Israel for next three years.  They were granted success in their efforts as fishermen in order that they might become fishers of men.  Peter, James and John discerned this new vocation to be the will of God in their lives and left everything to follow it.  Were they blessed for this obedience?  Yes, but that blessing came to look nothing like wealth or prosperity.  Peter and James were martyred for their faithfulness while St. John was boiled alive and then banished to the isle of Patmos.  And yet these simple fishermen became an integral part of the foundation upon which the Christian church was established.

So what then can we say about the will of God?  First, it was bigger than Peter could presently have imagined.  Surely God intended to bless Peter with the miraculous catch of fish.  But in establishing Peter as a chief Apostle he intended to bless him far beyond mere earthly prosperity.  Peter in responding to the will of God would become a great member of the kingdom of heaven.  He would also become an incredible blessing to the people around him to whom he would minister.  Peter did not expect to wake up that morning and become an Apostle; God had plans for Peter which he could not even begin to fathom.  Second, in calling Peter to be an Apostle, God did not destroy the natural vocation Peter had been given; he elevated it.  Peter’s boat became a pulpit for the Son of God, and Peter himself became a fisher of men.  Peter knew how to catch fish, this empty-handed night of fishing notwithstanding, but he had at present no idea how to convert the hearts of men.  This leads to a third point that Jesus called Peter to a vocation which would constantly stretch him to the limits of his human capabilities.  It would bring him repeatedly to a place where, but for the grace of God, he would not know how to move forward.  In this, Peter would learn a practical dependence on God deeper than he could ever have imagined.  Lastly, Peter was to play an active role in the development of his vocation, right from the moment of his calling.  Peter, can I use your boat?  Yes rabbi.  Peter, set out again into the sea and fish.  Yes master.  And the entire affair of the miraculous catch implicitly asks, Peter do you know who I am?  Yes Lord, depart from me for I am a sinful man.  Jesus’ response: no Peter, come with me and learn your new trade.  You don’t know it yet but you are the rock upon which I will establish my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
What then can we learn from all this about the will of God in our lives?  First, it is only incidentally related to our earthly comfort and happiness.  God is more concerned with developing the fullness of our capabilities and gifts and our willing and active use of them to bless the lives of those around us than he is with our material well being.  He may or may not bless us with comfortable lives on this earth and frankly we should not be all that concerned with the particulars of these circumstances.  Oftentimes suffering can perfect the human soul while comfort chokes it; and rich men frequently have a hard time entering into the kingdom of heaven.  If God blesses us with prosperity we ought to thank him for it, but we ought to be able to echo with St. Paul the sentiment that “Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.  I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”  The will of God is for our perfection not necessarily for our comfort and for the blessing of those around us, not merely for prosperity in our own lives.

Lastly, the will of God is active and dynamic.  God is a person and not an idea; he is an living and knowable being, not a set of abstract theological principles.  The will of God was known to Peter because Peter had an encounter with Jesus Christ.  By extension, Peter was able to continue living in the will of God as an Apostle of God because he cultivated a continually active relationship with Jesus through the life of prayer.  If we faithfully enter into the vocation God has set before us, the very limits of our spiritual gifts will constantly be reached.  This is because we no longer merely cast nets in order to pluck fish from the depths of the sea but now we seek with the aid of God to draw human souls away from the pathway to their perdition.  We fish for the salvation of men, and men are complicated creatures.  The bonds of sin which must be unraveled, the depths of suffering which must be undone are decidedly beyond our power to overcome as human beings.  Each of us has received a portion of the same apostolic and priestly vocation given to St. Peter.   And each of us can succeed in our calling only by learning to discern the will of God in our life of prayer.  We must learn to plainly hear his voice.  Theology will not suffice; we must come to know Jesus himself who alone is the perfect manifestation of the will of God in the midst of Creation.  But for knowledge of Jesus all of our toil is in vain.  Alone, we will succeed only in pulling up empty nets from the sea.  “Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net.”

Sermon preached on Sunday, July 24 th at St. Matthew’s Church in Newport Beach, California.

“A certain man made a great supper, and bade many: and sent his servant at supper time to say to them that were bidden, Come; for all things are now ready.  And they all with one consent began to make excuse.”  It is worth noting at the outset of any discussion regarding the parables of Jesus that the application of all of his parables begins first and foremost with the nation of Israel.  Only after considering them in the light of their application to the first century Jews to which he was speaking can we begin to draw conclusions which apply to our current circumstances in the church today.  With this in mind, what are we to make of this Sunday’s parable of the Great Supper?  A certain man, wealthy in the region, invited all of his neighbors to a great feast at his home.  Functioning in a culture which predates the invention of clocks or watches, he sent out his invitation in two tiers: first, he informed them that he was to have a party on a given day, bidding them to arrange their schedules in such a fashion that they would be able to partake in his generous festivities.  Second, on the day of the feast once all the necessary preparations for the gathering had been accomplished he sent his servant out to bid all to leave of their work and gather at his house.  He was angered to discover that all those who had pledged their attendance at the gathering, now that the moment had arrived, began to make a series of excuses as to why their ordinary business would make them unable to attend.  Having prepared a fine, costly feast, the man decides that he cannot allow his magnificent provisions to go to waste.  He therefore sends his servant out to gather less respectable members of the surrounding society who had not received the initial invitation.  When even these men are too small in number to fill the seats at his table, he sends his servant out yet again, this time further from home, into the highways and byways of the countryside to compel even strangers and aliens to join him at his feast.  Marvelous preparations have been made and the master of the house will make sure that they are properly enjoyed.

How then are we to interpret this parable in the light of the situation of the Jews in first century Israel?  The master of the house who has arranged the feast is God the Father.  Through the prophets he informed Israel that, after their long exile from the land and their partial restoration to nationhood, he would send the Messiah to them to establish the kingdom of God in its fullness.  As his people, they pledged their loyalty to this Messiah and waited in great expectation for the day of his coming to restore Israel.  Then the day of the feast arrived; Jesus was born into their nation, baptized by John in the Jordan River, filled with the Holy Spirit and sent out into the nation to call all men to the long promised feast of God.  Immediately those called began to make excuses.  Rather than come to God’s table to see what wonderful gifts he had prepared for them they desired only to continue with business as usual in the land of Israel.  God himself had prepared the marriage feast of the Lamb for his chosen people; he had at long last begun to bring about the fulfillment of the hopes, dreams and destiny of the people of God, and they showed themselves entirely uninterested in his meal.  Israel forgot that they were not brought out of the nations by God merely so that they might have their own land in which to go about buying fields, purchasing oxen, and giving and receiving one another’s hands in marriage.  They were not set apart from all the peoples on the earth merely to go on living ordinary human life; they had been chosen as representatives of the race of men to learn to dine with God.  They were destined by God to be the people through whom he re-established the fullness of his fellowship with the human race.

When the upstanding religious men of Jesus’ day refused to respond to his Messianic invitation the Father then sent him to the lowly and overlooked within the nation of Israel.  As the Pharisees rejected Jesus, the fishermen and the tax collectors, the lepers, the Samaritans and the adulterers were pierced by his words and began to approach the table of God.  When even the numbers of these people were too small to fill the impending feast of God, Jesus then sent his disciples out to bid the gentiles to come and eat.  The kingdom of God will be filled, for God wills it to be so; and if those of us who were originally invited refuse to take our place at the table of God, our seats will be filled with others who respond to his call.

Israel’s chief mistake was to misunderstand or forget why they had been placed by God in the Promised Land to begin with.  They were called out from the pagan nations of earth to receive true knowledge of and fellowship with the God of all creation.  The sacrifices carried out at the temple in Jerusalem were not perfunctory religious duties which had to be performed before they could return to the actual business of living their life.  Temple worship was in fact the culmination and fulfillment of Eucharistic life in the Promised Land.  It was Israel’s opportunity to take the produce of their labor in the land they had been given and offer it back to God with thanksgiving.  The very food they had produced by the work of their hands was not only to provide for the physical needs of their immediate family, it was also to become the physical means of their communion with God.  A portion of most temple sacrifices offered to God was reserved for the family who had offered it in order that they might eat a meal together with God within the temple courts.  God established Israel in the Promised Land in order that the human race might again learn to dine with their Creator.

In Christ God the Father prepared for Israel an even more excellent meal and called the nation to the Great Feast of the New Covenant.  Through the work of the church, this invitation continues to be extended to all the people of the earth.  In Christ all mankind is again offered the opportunity to dine with God; to experience the entirety of creation as a means of communion with him.  We must be reminded that this Eucharistic meal and fellowship with our Creator is in fact the culmination of human life and not a religious sideshow.  It is the only source of true human fulfillment and happiness.  In it all of our talents and labor receive their crowing purpose and achievement.  Human action and physical matter are elevated into fellowship with God.  Let us take heed therefore not to despise the invitation of God’s Son to dine at the table of his Father.  If we reject this Divine invitation in order to return to business as usual in our earthly labor, our labor will succeed in becoming merely earthly.  We will till the dust of the earth of which we are made until we return to it in death.  Non-Eucharistic labor will turn out in the end to have been nothing more than communion with this death all along.  Even now in the Eucharistic feast set before us at this altar the master of the house calls out to us, “Come; for all things are now ready.”

Sermon preached Sunday, July 3rd at St. Matthew’s Church in Newport Beach, California.

The feast of the Holy Trinity last Sunday celebrated the church’s reception of the heavenly vision of the Divine Trinity.  Like St. John in the book of Revelation, each of us has been called up into the reality of heaven and have been permitted to stand before the very throne of God there to witness the perfect unity and life of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  The existence of God for us ought no longer the subject of philosophic inquiry or theological discussion for we have seen the beatific vision; we have met God himself.  The Gospel lesson for this morning adds a more practical side to this heavenly vision of God.  The parable of the rich man and Lazarus implicitly asks its hearers if they can perceive the presence of the Holy Trinity not just when looking at God’s throne of glory in heaven, but when confronted with a disease riddled, homeless beggar lying on the street in front of your house.  It is relatively easy in some respects to perceive the presence of God in the midst of the church’s beautiful liturgy, in the birth of a child, the touch of a loved one, or in the awe inspired by the grandeur of the created world.  Jesus asks us as well if we can perceive the presence of God on skid row in LA, in the Tijuana slums, in war torn Africa, or amidst the dead and dying on the streets of Calcutta.  When we are honest with ourselves, we often wonder how a holy and benevolent God can be present in these circumstances at all.  If he were there, would he not do something about the plight of these downtrodden individuals?  If he loved them would he not save them from the apparent hopelessness of their circumstances?

Jesus has a very strange response to such questions in today’s parable, one which catches us quite off guard because it is certainly not the approach we would have expected God to take in dealing with suffering in the world he has created.  He does not explain the suffering, nor does he simply cure it, instead he identifies himself with it; he enters into the experience of human suffering.  The rich man of the parable, who tellingly is not named while we are given the name of the poor man dying at his gates, represents the average prosperous, comfortable, and religious Jew at the time of Christ’s coming.  He has surely spent most of his life attending synagogue, listening constantly to the chanting of the psalms and the many lessons and exhortations of the Old Testament scriptures.  He has very likely made dozens of pilgrimages to the Holy city of Jerusalem to take part in the high feasts of the nation of Israel diligently offering the required sacrifices of divine worship under the old covenant.  The question asked by the parable is: his religious practices notwithstanding, had this man ever learned to see God?  It is well and fitting to worship the God of Israel before the throne of his Holy Temple in Jerusalem, his presence must surely have been felt upon entering the temple courts.  But why then did the rich man fail to serve that same God when he was revealed to him in the need of the poor man dying outside the gates of his home?

Lazarus, the destitute beggar of our parable, is a type of Christ.  Both were rejected by the upstanding religious Jews of their day; both were condemned to suffer unjustly and alone just outside of the gates.  As the rich man failed to recognize the image of God in the person of Lazarus and therefore took no notice of his plight, Israel by and large failed to recognize Jesus as the manifestation of the formerly invisible God and he was thus rejected and disowned by his own people.  Again, this does not explain the suffering of Lazarus, or Christ for that matter; it offers no reasons or rationalizations.  It does not say to the sufferer “This is why you are suffering.”  Or, “This is what God will accomplish in your suffering.”  It says instead the only thing which can actually comfort those in pain, “God himself is with you in your suffering.”  Not metaphorically, not by some convoluted extension of reason or argumentation, but really.  God himself came to the earth and suffered as you have suffered; he has felt the sting of human rejection, betrayal, destitution and hopelessness.  With Lazarus, Jesus too could cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  So it is when Jesus explains to his followers “What you do unto the least of these my brethren, you do unto me” he means for his statement to be taken at face value.  When we reject or overlook the suffering of our fellow man, we reject and overlook the presence of God himself.  Thus the church must learn to see the presence of God not just in the transcendent beauty of the Divine Trinity shown forth in the beatific vision from the throne of glory in heaven; we must learn also to see Christ himself in the lowly of the earth, the weak, the downtrodden and the disenfranchised.  For God identifies himself not with the rich man in our parable, but with Lazarus.

This does not mean however that the rich of the earth cannot themselves enter into the kingdom of God.  If it were so, we Christians in the modern American Church would find ourselves in a hopeless predicament; for we are certainly among the most wealthy and comfortable souls upon the earth.  But we too are capable of showing forth another aspect of the glory of God in the midst of our prosperity.  We can show forth the kingly rule of God over his creation through humanity as his vice regents.  With the accumulation of our resources and leisure in the American church we have accumulated also a great responsibility to put our time and assets to work for the advancement of the kingdom of God.  Little action was required of Lazarus because with his poverty and ailments his potential for activity was severely limited.  It was his vocation to lay at the rich man’s gate and show forth the image of God in suffering rather than in glory; an unenviable vocation, but not an illegitimate one.  Lazarus shows forth to his community the image of God’s Son hanging in agony of the cross; the potential for redemptive suffering on the earth; the promise that, in Christ, the death pangs of the world can be transformed in the pains of birth; into new life.  The rich man has the opportunity to show forth the fatherly care, concern and provision of God for his creation.  His wealth and leisure have not been given to him merely for his own sake that he might build a gate around his property and enjoy his blessings in isolation from the suffering of his fellow man.  In failing to care for Lazarus, the rich man failed in this divine vocation and no amount of formal worship or religious dedication can compensate for this shortcoming.  Theological knowledge of God matters little when Christ himself suffers outside our gates and we do not lift so much as a finger to alleviate his pain.  “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?  And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.”  The man who would seek to see the full glory of the Divine Trinity in heaven must also learn to perceive the presence of God in the least of men on the earth.

Sermon preached on Sunday, June 26^th at St. Matthew’s Church in Newport Beach, California.

Trinity Sunday is the last major feast day of the Christian year which walks us annually through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Last week God poured out his Holy Spirit on the church and at last revealed himself to mankind as Trinity.  The feast of Trinity celebrates the fullness of this divine revelation.  We now know that the one true God has existed for all eternity as the perfect union of three divine persons; three persons who have played clearly distinguishable roles in the redemption of mankind.  The Father is the source and origin of all things.  As the creed states, he is the “the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and earth.”  All things come from the Father, including the other two persons of the Trinity.  The Son is begotten of the Father and the Spirit proceeds from the Father.  They have existed for all eternity with the Father, but the manner of their existence somehow has its source in Him.  When the Creation fell from grace, it lost its former access to God the Father, the only source of life.  And so while mankind lives in this fallen world we live only with the semblance of life and not its fullness.  Though we move and breathe, apart from God we are as St. Paul says “dead in our sins.”  There can be no fullness of life, human or otherwise, apart from the Father.

If the Father is the source and origin of all things the Son is the visible revelation of the invisible Father.  The Son is the Word of God; the perfect manifestation of divine thought and action in the midst of the Creation.  The Father created the world through his Son and continues to interact with his creation through him.  The Son has always been the immanent expression of the transcendent Father; the spokesperson or ambassador of the Trinity to the created world.  When the time came therefore for God to enter into his Creation to reconcile it to himself, it was the Son who became man in the Incarnation.  During his time on earth the Son is revealed to us as obedient to the will of the Father.  As Jesus explains in John’s Gospel, the Father is greater than the Son and the Son is characterized by his submission to the Father.  And yet the Son is the perfect expression of the will of the Father and is himself equally God.  In the midst of the divine unity there somehow exists not just distinction of persons, but also hierarchy.

Having accomplished his work of the earth, Jesus prepares his disciples for his impending departure by promising that he will not leave them comfortless in this world, but will send them his Holy Spirit to guide them in all truth.  The third person of the Trinity is by far the most difficult for us as humans to understand.  We can conceive of a heavenly Father and an Incarnate Son, but what are we to make of the “Holy Ghost?”  The creed states that he is “the Lord and Giver of life.”  The life of a man was given to him by his breath as stated in Genesis 2 where God formed man from the dust of the earth and then breathed into his nostrils “the breath of life” and man became a living soul.  He was no longer merely a physical thing; God breathed his Spirit into man and gave him conscious life.  The spirit of a man is that force or energy of the inner life which unites all of his various faculties and abilities in the seat of human consciousness and makes him capable of thought, choice and creative action.  By analogy, the Spirit of God is the life of God, the breath of God, the creative energy, force or consciousness of God.  Insomuch as the creation possesses life, energy, motion, or activity, these things all flow forth from the life of God that is his Holy Spirit.  It is through the action of the Holy Spirit that the Father imparts the life of the Trinity to the world.

Thus we see that the three persons of the Trinity are in fact distinguishable in their unity.  They are not merely three shifting personas of a single person.  God does not manifest himself in one way when he wishes accomplish a certain set of tasks and again in another form when he changes focus to a different undertaking.  These three distinct persons have dwelt together in perfect unity for all eternity; each continuously playing his part in the creation, preservation and redemption of the created universe.  Thus it is that even today as the church we offer our prayers to God the Father, through his Son Jesus Christ, in the unity and life of the Holy Spirit.  The doctrine of the Trinity is not a mere theological principle, but rather a formative reality experienced continually by the Church in her interaction with God.

And yet surely it is not for the sake of needless complexity that God exists in this tri-une nature.  If at the center of all existence is one God in three eternal persons surely this reveals something to us about the nature of reality.  At the core of the mystery surrounding the nature of the Trinity lies the possibility that distinct persons can dwell together in perfect unity.  In fact, the chief Christian hope, the crowning virtue of the church is just this: unity.  We as Christians long for true union with God first and foremost, but we long as well for genuine union with our fellow men.  The easiest example of this in human life is marriage.  It is believed that in Christian marriage two formerly distinct individuals “become one flesh.”  Two previously separate lives unite to create new life both literally and figuratively.  A new family is formed and the new life of children is brought into the freshly created household.  The longer the Christian family dwells together in charity the more difficult it becomes to distinguish where the life, needs and happiness of one individual ends and that of the other begins.

By extension, the Christian church works according to this same pattern.  Many members are brought through baptism into the one body of Christ.  One and the same Holy Spirit is poured out into these individuals and gives unto each of them a portion of the spiritual gifts necessary for the life of the Church.  In the perfection of the Christian community therefore, one Spirit animates one body with Christ as its head and all of us as its unified members.  We become more than a collection of individuals as the life, joy and happiness of one member of the church, or for that matter the pain, suffering, and disappointment of any individual comes to be experienced by them as a member of the corporate body of Christ and not simply as a distinct unit within the church.  Neither pain nor joy is felt by the Christian in isolation but rather all of life comes to be processed in and with the Christian community.

Thus at the heart of Christian marriage and at the center the Church’s life we find the same principle at work which is exemplified to us by the very life of Trinity: unity.  Diverse persons are brought into perfect union with one another without in any way losing their own particular qualities and character.  Instead the distinct traits of each individual add to the beauty and fullness of the completed whole.  This is as true of our interactions with our fellow men as it is of our relationship with God our Creator.  The destiny of mankind is to be brought into the very life of the Trinity without losing our distinct place in creation as human beings made in the image of God.  Our union with the Father will be brought about through the work his Son Jesus Christ, in the unity and life of the Holy Spirit.  Trinity Sunday reveals to us that at the very center of the nature of God is the perfect unity of three distinct persons.  It reveals to us as well that the ultimate destiny of mankind is to one day enter into and experience the life of this perfect unity.

Sermon preached on Sunday, June 19th at St. Matthew’s Church in Newport Beach, California.

Shepherd based, or pastoral imagery has been used throughout the scriptures as a metaphor for leadership within the kingdom of God.  The most obvious example of this in the Old Testament is found in Israel’s exodus from the land of Egypt.  In the exodus God delivered his people from the oppression and slavery found in Egypt and brought them out into the wilderness in order that he might lead the nation into the Promised Land.  The church has always understood this journey to stand as a sort of allegory for the process of salvation in human life.  Egypt represents the slavery of sin as expressed in the oppressive political and social systems we have created on this earth.  The Promised Land represents the eternal kingdom of God where the human race will dwell in peace, safety and harmony in the presence of God.  The wilderness which lies between Egypt and the Promised Land represents the life of the people of God on this earth.  We have been delivered from our slavery to sin and brought into intimate relationship with God our Creator, but we have yet to set foot in the Promised Land.  And this wilderness is full of many dangers and temptations.  Some days we lack food, water or other basic necessities of life and it is anything but apparent where our next meal will come from.  On other days the nations of the land around us gather on the edges of our camp to harass or attack us with force of arms and we are unsure how a group of former slaves wandering through the desert will ever manage to defend itself.  The first overwhelming sense we get upon leaving the relative safety of the fallen structures of worldly Egypt is that of vulnerability.  We have now entered upon a journey through the wilderness in which we are incapable of providing for ourselves along the way and this is a profoundly uncomfortable feeling.  Sure, we are promised that on the other side of this desert is a land flowing with milk and honey, but from where we are currently standing that land often seems to be nowhere in sight.

It is in the midst of our vulnerability that God reveals himself to us as the Good Shepherd.  When Israel is oppressed in Egypt God unleashes ten plagues upon the land and frees his sheep from slavery.  When the nation steps out into the wilderness and finds the pathway before them blocked by the Red Sea on one side and Pharaoh’s army on the other He parts the sea before them and leads them through the midst of it on dry ground.  When Israel journeys further into the heart of the wilderness and provisions begin to run low in the camp God rains down heavenly food upon them each morning; feeding his sheep as it were with daily bread from his own hand.  When the nations of the land gather around Israel to attack them in their vulnerable state God himself fights for them, defending his sheep from the wolves which lurk about their camp seeking to scatter his flock and devour it.  When no water is found on the journey, God commands his visible representative Moses to strike a desert rock with his staff and a stream of life giving water gushes forth.  Throughout their wanderings in the wilderness God sought to establish himself in the minds of the Hebrews as the true shepherd of his people.  He sought as well to teach his people that leadership within his Kingdom would follow the same model.  Moses was known to Israel as the true representative of God in heaven precisely because he spent his life shepherding God’s flock through their journey in the earthly wilderness.

This imagery was explicitly continued by Jesus in his earthly ministry.  Christ led thousands of Israelites into a desert place on multiple occasions there to instruct them in the ways of his Father in heaven.  As the day wore on the people who had come to Jesus seeking spiritual food grew hungry and the disciples recommended sending them away to find provisions for themselves to eat.  Jesus would do no such thing, for he knew himself to be the Good Shepherd of this flock standing before him.  Accordingly he took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to his people; feeding Israel yet again with miraculous food from the hand of God in the wilderness.  And this time again he chose to do so through his visible representatives on this earth: the disciples.  Christ took the life giving bread which he had created and gave it to his disciples in order that they might in turn administer it to his flock gathered around them.  In this he was making a very explicit point to those who would bear his leadership after he returned to the Father: “Peter, do you love me?  Feed my sheep.”  And it is exactly this that the church has been doing for 2,000 years since the ascension of Christ.  Consider what we are all gathered here to do this very morning on the Lord’s Day.  As the church we have all been delivered from our bondage to sin in Egypt and are making our way through the wilderness of this life with the sure hope that the Promised Land of the Kingdom of God awaits us at the end of our journey.  And yet along the path we grow hungry and thirsty and stand in great need of refreshment in the midst of the desert.  And so even now we gather together in the wilderness around the table of God where the successors of the Apostles will feed us with the true bread come down from heaven which is Christ himself.  This is most truly the center of the Church’s ministry: to feed God’s sheep with heavenly food in the midst of their earthly journey.

Furthermore, as members of the Body of Christ each of us are called to be extensions of his shepherding ministry in the lives of those around us.  Surely the church is the flock of God gathering around the apostles to partake of the sacramental ministry of Christ.  But what about those sheep which have wandered away from the fold?  Surely they cannot survive in the midst of this earthly wilderness without also being fed from the hand of God.  It seems that just as the life of the Church is centered upon the sacrament of the Eucharist, so is its evangelism.  Our role as representatives of the Good Shepherd is both to gather around his table and ourselves be fed from his hand and then to go forth from this heavenly banquet and search out God’s lost sheep in the world.  We ought to go about this work with quiet confidence.  The leadership of the shepherd is both gentle and self sacrificial.  It is capable of speaking hard truth to the world without being unduly harsh.  When we speak on behalf of God himself his sheep will hear his voice in us and will respond.  They cannot be forced or coaxed into returning to the fold; we cannot win them over to the church by our power, will or wit.  They must recognize in our ministry the words and actions of Christ himself.  As shepherds we must call them back to the fold with love and as they continue their own journey in the wilderness we must be willing to lay down our lives on their behalf.  They will know us by our love.

Our message is simple: alone in the wilderness of this life, without food water and protection from the evils surrounding us on every side no human can hope to survive.  Happily the Good Shepherd has been sent into the midst of this desert to lead his people through its trials and tribulations into the Promised Land.  We ourselves have been called to join Christ’s flock on this journey to the heavenly kingdom and our chief work as the church is to lead other straying sheep into the life of this flock.  For as the epistle says we ourselves “were as sheep going astray; but now are returned to the shepherd and bishop of our souls.”  In this return we have found the fullness of life in the midst of the wilderness of this earth.  It is now our bounden duty to share in the work of Christ as the Good Shepherd and to give our lives for the redemption of his lost sheep.

Sermon preached on Sunday, May8th, 2011 at St. Matthew’s Church in Newport Beach California.

Good Friday represents in many respects the culmination of human sin.  Our rejection of God as a race is most fully manifested in our actions this day.  Surely sin entered the world through the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and humanity has been subjected to the pain and futility of life in a fallen world ever since that fateful beginning.  But Good Friday and the crucifixion of Jesus are the final fulfillment of our parent’s sin.  After the Fall of Eden the human race was cursed to experience life in this world mixed with suffering and ultimately that life was fated to end in death.  God gave this curse to the human race in the hope that it would cause us to realize that our life can only be found in Him.  We rejected the divine command given to us in Eden and chose to attempt to order our existence according to our own standards and desires.  We rejected the Divine headship of God in favor of being our own masters; in favor of not having to submit our will to any authority beside ourselves.  We wanted to run the earth on our terms; to rule creation according to standards of our own making.  And ultimately God let us do exactly this.  He gave us precisely what we asked for and we then set about making the tangled mess of an existence that we now live in.

Then, part way through this experiment in human sovereignty the Messiah set foot in our world.  Jesus came down to us as an example of what humanity always should have been.  He lived a perfect human life of worship to God; exercised all of his faculties as gifts from God, used in every circumstance of life with the purpose of blessing others and bringing glory his Father.  The Word became flesh and dwelt among us; revealed our full potential as creatures made in the image of God and we hated him for it.  We responded to Jesus by attacking Him, literally.  Mankind was not chastened by experiencing the consequences of our sin in death and suffering.  We were not chastened when the Messiah himself came to us and showed us that even now it was possible to return to the fullness of life if only we would repent and submit ourselves again to the loving rule of our Father in heaven.  All the fury of a disobedient and resentful creation lashed out at the person of Jesus this very day in the form of a centurion’s fist.  There is no more grotesque moment which could have occurred in the course of human history than the crucifixion of Jesus.  God himself set foot in the midst of creation in order to offer mankind the possibility of redemption and we chose instead to kill him who was and is the very life of this world.

And yet, Jesus knew that the events of this day would come to pass long before he was born an infant in a stable in Bethlehem.  He knew exactly how his long estranged creation would respond when he came to them in the Incarnation.  And, knowing this, he came down to us anyway.  He knew full well that we did not like living in this fallen world and at the same time that we would not at first be willing to accept his proposed remedy for our sinful state.  He knew that ultimately if he came and stood before us we would lash out against him in anger, wound him, and crucify him.  And he gave us this opportunity willingly.  He gave it to us in the hope that after we had done our worst to him, after we had vented upon him the worst of our dissatisfaction and rage, we would then pause and look upon him whom we had pierced and realize what we had done.  That the sun would turn dark at midday and the earth would shake and we would stand there at the cross with the centurion and at last recognize, “Truly this was the Son of God.”

In the midst of our realization today at the foot of the cross therefore let us call to mind that this is not how the story ends.  God is in the business of redemption.  He can redeem even the events of this day.  Just as surely as we have put the Messiah in his grave today, God will raise him from it not three days hence.  And not only this, he will make the great sin of the crucifixion into the very means of our salvation.  Today, creation struck its definitive blow against its Creator.   But in three days this Creator will offer his response in the Resurrection.  “For by his death Jesus has destroyed death, and by his rising to life again he will restore to us everlasting life.”

A sermon preached on Friday, the 22nd of April 2011 at St. Matthews Church in Newport Beach, California.

In this morning’s gospel we find a curious thing: the Jewish leaders are arguing about the fine points of the Old Covenant with Jesus, the very man who was sent by God as the fulfillment of the covenant.  The chief purpose of the Old Testament Law was to prepare Israel, and through them the entire human race, for the coming of the Messiah.  Now the Messiah has come and he is literally standing right in front of the Pharisees and they cannot see Him; or perhaps more accurately, they do not want to see him.  The truth of the matter is that they are much more comfortable with their conception of religion than they are with this strange man Jesus standing right before them.  The Pharisees would rather continue practicing the religion they have received from their fathers than deal with the startling implications of its fulfillment in the person of Jesus as the physical Incarnation of God.  In short, they are attempting to use their religion as a way to avoid an actual encounter with Christ.

And yet we ourselves are today presented with the very same mystery manifested to the Pharisees nearly 2,000 years ago.  At the center of all Christian revelation is Jesus himself.  And the fundamental question remains for each of us, how will we respond to the Messiah?  We have come to a place where the entirety of the moral law, all forms of religious sacrifice and worship, the sum total of the revelation of God expressed to the human race throughout all of history now runs through this one man Jesus.  He is the Incarnate Word of God; the perfect expression of the mind and will of the Father in human flesh.  He is the physical manifestation of the invisible God standing before our very eyes.  He is the Son of God sent by his Father to reconcile all of creation to its Creator.  All true knowledge of the Father and all genuine hope for reconciliation to Him now centers upon the person of Jesus.  The mystery of the New Covenant is this: to know Jesus is to know the Father by whom He was sent. The Pharisees rejection of Jesus therefore was in fact a rejection of the very God whom they claimed still to worship through the Old Covenant.  They failed to see that all true worship of the Father would from this day forward be expressed through mankind’s relationship with his Son.

It is of great importance therefore that we take care not to repeat the mistake of the Pharisees in this morning’s Gospel.  For it would be just as easy for us as Christians living under the New Covenant to use the religious structure we have received from God to avoid an actual encounter with God himself.  Let us consider some potential examples of this tendency in the context of the Christian faith.  First, it is possible to develop and cling to a system of theology rather than to deal with the reality of God himself.  We can read the scriptures daily, regularly attend bible studies and listen attentively to all manner of sermons and other forms of religious instruction, and still somehow miss the God behind all of the theology.  It must be remembered that God is not a series of abstract theological propositions; He is not an idea.  God is a person and one comes to know Him in the same way one comes to know any person: through consistent interaction with Him. Reading books about God and making an effort to receive proper religious education is a healthy discipline of the Christian life; but the true purpose of all theological knowledge is to guide us in the course of our relationship with God himself.  We will eventually realize that Jesus very seldom fits into our neatly arranged theological boxes anyway and it is infinitely better to know the man himself rather than a mediocre theological caricature of him.

Second, it is possible for us in the church to approach our prayer in such a way that it becomes an obstruction to true intimacy with God.  This danger is especially relevant to us in the traditional church where the entire liturgical cycle of prayer has been provided for us both in the form of the weekly liturgy and that of the daily offices.  When the foundation of our life of prayer is quite literally already written out for us, it can be tempting to slide into the habit of merely going through the motions of our daily prayers and settling for a lukewarm participation in the Eucharistic Liturgy.  The power and objectivity of the church’s liturgy are indeed great blessings in the Christian life but because so little of the liturgy depends upon our subjective response to it, it is easy to set a sort of spiritual cruise control and coast our way through the Christian year.  The aim of liturgical worship and prayer is to provide us a corporate, objective framework within which our personal experience of God can flourish; it supplies us a sure foundation of prayer and sacrament upon which we can then begin to build the fullness of the Christian life.  We cannot allow ourselves to be satisfied with a mechanical participation in the life of the church.  We must always strive to encounter the liturgy of the church as a gift of God to us through which we have objective active to Christ himself.  The liturgy is the means, but Christ himself is the end.

Third, it is possible for us to mistake pious feelings or emotional experiences for lasting intimacy with God.  Any healthy relationship is bound to result in moments of intense and moving emotional experience.  The nature of all relationships is that these feelings come and go as they please over the course of time and therefore they cannot serve as a sure foundation for human love and intimacy.  Interaction with God is no different.  There are some moments where the beauty of the liturgy overpowers us or the Holy Spirit descends upon us in our private prayers and we find ourselves filled with excitement and peace in the presence of God.  During these times we feel particularly close to God; intimately connected to him.  Yet these feelings inevitably fade and we are left with normal Christian life.  It is in these long stretches of “normal” time that true intimacy with God is formed and strengthened.  We must avoid therefore using our emotional experience of God as the standard by which we judge our closeness with him.  We must long for lasting intimacy with Christ himself in the normal course of life rather than seeking disjointed moments of powerful emotional and religious experiences.

Lastly, it is possible to busy ourselves in the use our spiritual gifts in such a way that we keep ourselves distant from God.  Our gifts were given to us by God in order that we might serve others.  Christian service is never primarily about the tasks themselves which we accomplish by the use of our gifts; rather it is chiefly concerned with loving those who it has been given to us to serve.  In serving others we actually serve God himself and through our relationships with others we are brought into continual contact with the God who has created us all.  To lose sight of meeting the needs of others therefore is to lose sight of the true purpose of our spiritual gifts and ultimately to lose sight of God himself.  As Christ taught us, what we do to the least of these our brethren we actually do unto him.  We must not allow ourselves to become distracted by the tasks which we undertake in the church and forget that it is through loving those around us that we express our love to God himself.

We have spent four weeks now seeking to remove external distractions from our lives in order to focus our efforts and energies on growth in our relationship with God.  This morning’s gospel lesson reminds us as well that it is not just external distractions which can impair our spiritual growth; we can also use the very means of grace which we have received from God in his church to avoid an actual encounter with Jesus.  We must not forget in the course of our lives in the church that the chief aim of all sacraments, the primary purpose of all prayer and the ultimate objective of all theology is union with Christ himself.

Sermon Preached on Sunday, April 10th 2011 at St. Matthew’s Church in Newport Beach, California.

Today is known in the church as “stir up Sunday,” a name derived from the opening words of this morning’s collect: “Stir up we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people.”  It has been a long season of Trinity and the spiritual disciplines begun in the excitement of Lent and Easter should have now been bearing their intended fruit in our lives for nearly half a year.  And yet over the long leisurely months of the summer many of us will have likely found that the routines of daily life have slowly reasserted themselves and that we have grown lethargic in carrying out our Christian duties.  On the brink of the Advent season therefore it is particularly fitting for us to undertake an examination of the state of our spiritual progress over the past year.  We are about to experience again the birth of the Messiah into our world, but we are also to be reminded that one day soon he will come again in glory.  In this second coming of Christ he returns to “judge the living and the dead.”  Advent reminds us each year that the Creator of the world is returning soon and he wants to know what it is that we have been doing while he was away.

One valuable feature of the Anglican Tradition is that it provides us a very practical framework within which to examine the spiritual progress of our lives.  The prayer book tells us plainly that it is our bounden duty as Christians to “follow Christ, to worship God in his church every Sunday, and to work, pray and give for the spread of his kingdom.”  We can therefore plainly ask ourselves, have we been morally obedient to the commandments of God?  Have we been faithful participants in the weekly liturgy of his church?  And have we fully offered our lives to the essential work of the church, which is to spread the kingdom of God on the earth?

This last Christian duty can seem overwhelming at first.  What can each of us practically do in the course of our daily lives to work towards such a lofty goal as the spread of God’s kingdom?  The prayer book again makes our duty quite plain to us.  We are to work and pray and give.  The church speaks regularly concerning the first two of these requirements.  We have been told many times that we are to identify and use those particular gifts and abilities which we have been given by God in concrete ways to bless our neighbors, coworkers and fellow parishioners.  We are also fully aware of the fact that it is a baseline expectation of the Christian life that we set aside time in the morning and evening of each day to unite ourselves to God in prayer and to intercede before him on behalf of those in need.  The third Christian duty however we often hesitate to address directly; and that is our duty to tithe.  And yet the discipline of tithing is every bit as important to our spiritual health and happiness and the daily ministry of the church as are our prayers or the practical use of our spiritual gifts.

Christ states the operative principle of tithing plainly: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”  It is a practical impossibility to orient our lives around the kingdom of God without practicing the discipline of habitual tithing.  As creatures we instinctually and automatically become attached to the things we spend our money on.  It has rightly been said that, in reality, everybody offers a tithe to some thing in their lives; one just has to take a glance at the checkbook to see what it is that we worship.  If our deepest hope is truly set upon the spread of God’s kingdom then we cannot help but pray for its increase, contribute our talents and abilities to its growth and invest our hard earned income in its development.  The discipline of offering the first tenth of our income to God has two obvious effects.  First, it is the primary way in which we as Christians are prevented from forming an undue attachment to the things of this world.  Offering the first tenth of our income back to God both inclines and enables us to make use of our remaining wealth in a manner which will please him.  It is a concrete way in which we are taught to concern ourselves with the affairs of eternity rather than temporary matters of this world.  Tithing helps protects us from the sins of greed and covetousness by disciplining our souls in the habits of charity and generosity.

Second, the sum of the tithes offered by the faithful members of the Body of Christ make it possible for the church to carry out its work.  The building in which we sit, the musical setting in which we worship and the pastoral and educational staff whose gifts we are served by would not be possible but for the tithes offered by many faithful members of St. Matthew’s Church.  Many people with whom I interact in the community are surprised upon visiting us to find out that our church has only somewhere around 300 regularly attending members.  Both the quantity and quality of the work they see carried out by the people of this parish leads them to suspect a congregation of nearly double our size.  It is an amazing thing to see what a relatively small core of faithful Christians can accomplish in their community. Furthermore, it is becoming more clearly evident in our parish that we have been called to undertake a further expansion of our current ministry.  Many of us are encouraged by the progress we see at St. Matthew’s towards the building of a new sanctuary, the addition of pastoral staff, the continuing increase of men called to the ministry, and the steady growth of new services, bible studies, home groups and charitable projects in the community.  In many respects we stand on the brink of a new era in the ministry of our parish and the way forward is in some senses quite simple.  The next stages in the life of St. Matthew’s Church will be built on the same sure foundation upon which the parish has been established for the past quarter century: a deep and abiding faith in Christ which manifests itself in the earnest prayer of its parishioners, the selfless contribution of their time and talents, and every bit as importantly upon the faithful tithing of its committed members.

As Father Scarlett suggested in his sermon last Sunday, St. Matthew’s Church has become what it is today because of the faithfulness of a committed core of parishioners to carry out the work of God in the midst of their community.  We sit here today as a result of the grace of God and the dedication of a generation of Anglicans to work, pray and give diligently for the spread of his kingdom.  It is now our great opportunity to continue to build upon the work which they have begun.  This Advent season it is fitting that we commit ourselves again to the generous use of our spiritual gifts, to persistent faithfulness in the life of prayer and, not least important of the three, to the discipline of offering back to God the first tenth of the income with which he has blessed us.  “For where our treasure is, there will our hearts be also.”

Sermon preached on Sunday, November 21st, 2010 at St. Matthew’s Church in Newport Beach, California.