Proper 15, Year C

Sunday 14 August 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Jeremiah 23:23-29

Luke 12:49-56

 

If you haven’t already, you’ll probably soon realize that in addition to the appointed Scripture readings, I occasionally like to reflect on the Collect of the Day. Most of these Collects go back to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s first Book of Common Prayer of 1549, and before that to the Latin liturgy of the medieval Western Church. They offer a useful compendium of Anglican theology, wonderfully encapsulated in short, pithy prayers.

 

Today’s Collect makes a dual statement about Jesus Christ, describing him both as a “sacrifice for sin,” and as an “example of holy life.” Here, in that first phrase alone, we have a magnificent combination of two sweeping theological affirmations. Some versions of the Christian faith focus narrowly on the Atonement, emphasizing our Lord’s sacrifice on the cross to the exclusion of all else; others emphasize Christ’s example and teachings while downplaying his sacrifice for sin. But this Collect makes it clear that the right approach isn’t “either/or” but “both/and.” Christ is both a sacrifice for sin and an example of holy life.

 

And who we understand Christ to be has enormous implications for how we live the Christian life. So, the Collect proceeds to ask God that we may have grace both to “receive thankfully that his inestimable benefit”—that is, the forgiveness of our sins through his sacrifice of himself on the Cross—and also “to endeavor ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life.” In other words, the fully Christian life combines both faith and works. God has given his only Son as a sacrifice for sin, to be received by faith, and also as an example of holy life, which we’re called to follow daily in the conduct of our own lives.

 

The difficulty is that before we can place our faith in our Lord’s sacrifice for our sins, we need first to recognize and acknowledge the sins of which we need to be forgiven. That’s the hard part. Two weeks I ago, I spoke of the importance of preachers proclaiming the Good News. And I meant it. But the inconvenient truth is that sometimes before we can even be capable of hearing the Good News, we need first to take on board the bad news. We’re sinners who’ve fallen short of the glory of God. Unless we recognize our need for forgiveness, the Good News is apt to breeze past us as the answer to a question we haven’t asked. So, sometimes the preacher’s task, as the old saying goes, is not only to comfort the afflicted, but also to afflict the comfortable.

 

This imperative is a driving force in today’s Scripture readings. The Prophet Jeremiah castigates the false prophets of his day, who relate their dreams to one another, prophesying the lies and deceits of their own hearts. The reading doesn’t tell us what kinds of dreams these false prophets were reporting, but we can be sure that they were what the listeners wanted to hear. The true prophet, by contrast, speaks the Lord’s Word faithfully: “Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer which breaks the rock in pieces?”

 

Our Lord says something similar in today’s Gospel: “I came to cast fire upon the earth, and would that it were already kindled! … Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.” There follow some hard sayings about divided households: “They will be divided, father against son and son against father; mother against daughter and daughter against her mother; mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” So much for Christian family values!

 

Most New Testament scholars agree that here Jesus is making it uncompromisingly clear that the requirements of discipleship surpass even the claims of family loyalty. And in the ancient world such a claim was radically new and subversive. For the ancients, no moral obligation could be higher than honoring and obeying one’s parents, and fulfilling one’s familial obligations as husband, wife, father, or mother. But here Jesus is telling us that he’s come to create a new community, a new family, within which loyalty to God and to our brothers and sisters in the faith takes precedence even over obligations to biological family should the two ever come into conflict.

 

And down through the centuries we see this conflict playing itself out in the lives of the countless faithful Christians. Consider Perpetua of Carthage in the third century. Twenty-two years old, a Roman noblewoman and the mother of an infant child, Perpetua was arrested and sentenced to death for being a Christian. Visiting her in prison, her father pleaded with her to respect his old age and save her life by recanting her faith so she could fulfill her duties as both a daughter and a mother. But Perpetua steadfastly refused: “I cannot be called anything other than what I am, a Christian.” And with those words, she willingly went to a gruesome death facing the wild beasts before the cheering crowds in the local arena.

 

Another example from about 900 years later is that of Saint Francis of Assisi, who at a young age experienced a call from Christ to take up a life of itinerant poverty over the objections of his father, a wealthy cloth merchant who wanted Francis to follow his footsteps in the family business. When his father had Francis hauled before the bishop to try to put a stop to his nonsense, Francis dramatically stripped off his fine clothes and formally renounced his inheritance—thus beginning his lifelong career as a wandering preacher and eventual founder of the Order of Friars Minor. 

 

Such examples could be multiplied by the hundreds of thousands down to the present day. Beginning with the call to repent of our sins, the path of Christian discipleship can indeed be difficult and costly. Hence Jeremiah’s dictum that God’s word is like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces; or our Lord’s declaration that he’s come to bring not peace on earth but rather division.

 

Over the years, however, I must admit that I’ve grown impatient with scolding sermons in which preachers try to shame their congregations into doing more or giving more by accusing them of neglecting to make sufficient sacrifices for the faith or for the Church. For that really is to miss the point on a grand scale. Jesus doesn’t ask us to be willing to give up everything for the sake of self-denial as an end-in-itself. That on its own would be nothing more than masochism. No, the fire that he comes to cast upon the earth is the fire of divine love. And the life he offers us is one of such joy as makes any sacrifice completely worthwhile. So, the real invitation and challenge of the Christian life is—like Perpetua, Francis, or any of the countless others who’ve followed in the blessed steps of Christ’s most holy life—to find in him that inner joy and peace that renders any outward loss or strife totally trivial by comparison.