For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me! (Job 19:25-27a)
Most of us will know these words as the second sentence in the Prayer Book’s Burial service: I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. Many of us have heard these words sung by the soprano soloist in Handel’s Messiah. They are, in any case, unforgettable, and it is not incidental that they are known often as words of comfort.
An old professor of mine argues that in our very modern quest to know the Jesus of history, the Jesus who really walked, really taught, really preached, we must admit that the Resurrected Christ is part of the historical Jesus. The Resurrection is reported by the gospels not as vision, nor as dream, but as an event, just the same as Jesus’ teaching, consorting with tax collectors, and breaking bread.
When in John 11 Jesus arrives in Bethany, where his friend Lazarus has been dead for four days, his sister Martha accuses Jesus: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” At which point Jesus announces the first sentence in the Burial service: “I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” (John 11:25-26) He then puts the question to Martha: do you believe this?
He is putting the question to us as well. Do you believe this?
When the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, the minds of Pharaoh and his officials were changed towards the people, and they said, ‘What have we done, letting Israel leave our service?’ So he had his chariot made ready, and took his army with him; he took six hundred picked chariots and all the other chariots of Egypt with officers over all of them. The Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh king of Egypt and he pursued the Israelites, who were going out boldly. The Egyptians pursued them, all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots, his chariot drivers and his army; they overtook them camped by the sea, by Pi-hahiroth, in front of Baal-zephon. (Exodus 14:5-9)
It sometimes seems that the only time people really want to share something with us is when it’s something intolerable.
Everything is fine for the Israelites, so long as they remain bound to Pharaoh’s service. As soon as they flee into the desert, the minds of Pharoah and his officials are “changed towards the people.” Nevermind that he had told Moses and Aaron, “Rise up, go away from my people, both you and the Israelites! Go, worship the Lord, as you said” (Exod 12:31). The Israelites are following the Lord. They are doing something different. They are getting above their station. And Pharaoh is determined that they will not go.
If this story seems a long way away from our own time and experience, it shouldn’t. Each of us lives in some way bound to a status quo. Don’t ask too many questions. Don’t make a fuss. Keep things from getting awkward. The pressures that keep us apart from the Lord are every bit as powerful as Pharaoh. They are usually harder to identify, but our overlords are determined that we too will remain in line, will drop any “unacceptable” behavior.
When we make a move to follow the Lord, whether it be an act of charity, defense of the little guy, or vocal opposition to unethical practices, we should be prepared for Pharaoh to say, “What have we done, letting Israel leave our service?”
Sermon preached at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
October 30, 2016 / 24th Sunday after Pentecost
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12 Luke 19:1-10
Being “worthy” is something we don’t talk about very much in our daily lives. How much time do you spend considering your own “worthiness?” I don’t think, apart from this sermon, that I’ve used the word “worthy” in the past week. When I meet someone, I don’t think: Oh, he’s worthy… she’s worthy. Even in this heated election season, how much do we hear the word worthy? The only results of a google search on both candidates’ names last night with the word “worthy” yielded no results newer than August. Considering how much ink has been spilled on this election, these results are somewhat telling.
But if we don’t speak about worthiness much, we think about it constantly.
If you’ve ever applied for a job, or been considered for a promotion, or submitted a résumé, you’re hoping to God to be found worthy. If you’ve ever been on a date, and you think it went well, you’re hoping to God to be found worthy of a second date.
In any scenario, the worst is hearing nothing. No interview. No email. Not even a text. Am I not worthy of a reply? What’s the matter with me?
We all want to be worthy of esteem, of respect and admiration. How many of us would prefer to be forgotten, to be passed over, to be demoted from the starting team to the bench? If you’ve ever been to a cocktail party, then you’ve witnessed people comparing resumes. What they do. Where they live. Where they went to school. Where their children go to school. Where they went on vacation. How do you compare? How do I?
Frankly, it’s all enough to drive a person to distraction. Is this enough? Have I distinguished myself yet? Have I done enough to get my résumé to the top of the pile, do I have enough friends to be worthy of the membership committee? Am I dressing right? Groomed well enough? Accomplished enough? Polite enough? Smart enough? Am I good enough? What can I do to make myself worthy?
What an exhausting question. What an exhausting quest.
Last week (at least at the 8 and 11 o’clock services), we heard Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, and this week we get Zacchaeus, a “chief tax collector.”
Liberal mainline Protestants like to talk about Jesus’ affection for the marginalized and the poor, but Zacchaeus was exactly the opposite. He was the marginalized and the rich! He admits in today’s gospel lesson to having “defrauded anyone of anything,” and even if he hadn’t done, he was the still local representative of an occupying regime that Jesus’ followers hated. Zacchaeus was probably a Jew of some means who bought the local taxation rights from the Roman government. He was a traitor!
Now, I sincerely doubt inhabitants of ancient Palestine liked paying taxes more than anybody else, but where we in 2016 have a faceless government bureaucracy in Washington, they had Zacchaeus, a collaborator and the embodiment of everything they hated about Rome, living among them. For Jesus’ followers, his sitting down with Zacchaeus was like his sitting down with a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
And yet last week, Jesus taught his followers that it was the tax collector, not the Pharisee, who went away from the Temple justified. And the same thing happens this week! Zacchaeus comes to Jesus and is “happy to welcome him,” and what does Jesus say? “Today, salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.” He too is a son of Abraham.
In showing faith in Jesus, Zacchaeus, like Abraham, trusted in God. Paul writes that, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” (Rom 4:3) This is the language of accounting. Abraham’s faith in God was credited to his spiritual account as righteousness. He was quite literally made right with God. His debt was erased. He was made whole. So too was Zacchaeus. As Paul puts it: “The promise to Abraham and his descendants… [came through] the righteousness of faith.” (Rom 4:13)
Think of the risk Zacchaeus took in wading into a crowd to see Jesus. Going into such a crowd would have invited ridicule at best, and mob violence at worst. This was no idle curiosity, his desire to see who Jesus was. And who knows why he was so curious? Perhaps he wanted a reprieve from his self-imposed social exile, and he had heard that Jesus had a soft spot for outsiders. Perhaps he was tired of trusting in his own abilities, his own choices, his own worldly success, which had brought him both wealth and sorrow. However it happened, hearing of Jesus had begun a good work Zacchaeus’ soul.
His desire to see Jesus echoes the sentiment of last week’s tax collector. “Standing far off, [the tax collector] would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’” Both men – both tax collectors – recognized the utter inadequacy of trying to make themselves worthy, the futility of putting their faith in themselves, rather than in God. We should not forget the who the audience was for last week’s parable: Luke tells us it was “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous.”
And look at what happens to him… a radical re-organization of his priorities, beginning with his moral priorities. “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” One hears joy in this, and great relief. Zacchaeus’ new life of faith is one in which he no longer has to carry the weight himself. He doesn’t need to line his pockets anymore. He doesn’t need half his stuff. It is not his righteousness, his own efforts, that bring salvation to his house: it is his faith in Jesus Christ.
One of the great losses of the current Prayer Book is the removal from the Rite II Communion office – and the practical omission from many a Rite I Eucharist – of the Prayer of Humble Access. Some of you will know this prayer by heart.
“We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table”
What comes next is the most important word of the whole New Testament, and the operative word of all theology in the English language:
BUT
We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table, but thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy.
Our own righteousness – and our own efforts – are insufficient to heal our own hearts, our own souls, and they do not make us worthy. But he is the same God whose property is always to have mercy. See how this works? We come up short, all the time. We’re only human. Those lines on our spiritual résumés, we might as well (like Paul) “count them but dung” (Phil 3:8), but in Christ it is God who makes us worthy.
In her sermon last week, Jenny pointed out that the Temple was the place where both Pharisee and tax collector could be justified. For Christians, the temple is not this church, nor any cathedral of old, but it is Jesus’ own body, which hung on the hard wood of the Cross. In his “one oblation of himself once offered” Christ has justified those who are baptized into his death and resurrection, for “if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him” (Rom 6:8). And what else is this life with Christ but freedom from having to rely on our “own righteousness?” We do not have to go it alone!
Do you believe this? Do you want to believe it? Your faith in Jesus, whether small or great, whether easy, hard won, or a daily struggle, is proof positive that the grace of God is already working in you. Christ is calling you, and you have only to answer him.
Back in the days when Morning Prayer was the principal service on a Sunday, loyal Episcopalians would have heard weekly that God’s service “is perfect freedom.” Well, the whole of the Christian life of prayer, service, and devotion is lived in this freedom, which was won for us on Good Friday. There is no amount of accomplishment, no accumulation of lines on your professional or your spiritual résumé, no quality of devotion that can make you worthy before God. Your worthiness is a free gift, given through faith, by grace. You can’t buy it, you can’t earn it, you can’t achieve it.
So does this help us with the job? Or that first date? Does it help us through a round of compare-your-summer-vacation? Yes, it does.
It is not incidental that Isaiah described the messiah as the “prince of peace.” His peace is not only a political promise, but a spiritual one as well. You are more than your résumé, more than your accomplishments, more than your friends, and “I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8:38-39) Imagine what it would be like to get up in the morning and believe that. We know what it looked like for Zacchaeus, how his response to Jesus was to unburden himself. What could it look like for you?
I began this sermon with a quotation of today’s epistle, and I propose to finish with it. So here goes.
In this, his second letter to his brothers and sisters in Thessaloniki, Paul shares his prayer that “our God will make you worthy of his call.” See who the active agent is here? It is not Paul, not the Thessalonians: it is God, God who is in fact the active agent in the whole of the Bible. Paul prays that our God may make them worthy of their call. And what was true for them is true for us as well. They are not empowering themselves, not making themselves worthy, and neither are we, and so we do not have to rely on our own efforts, our own resources, and on the fragility of the lives that we make for ourselves. Our trust is in the God who has raised Jesus from the dead, Jesus, in whom we too are made worthy to love and serve the God whose service is perfect freedom.
“To this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
That Holy Fellowship 