SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT, YEAR B

December 9-10, 2023

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick, R.I.

 

Isaiah 40:1-11

Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13

2 Peter 3:8-15a

Mark 1:1-8

 

Last Sunday, we began a new liturgical year. Up until the Feast of Christ the King two weeks ago, we were in Year A of the three-year lectionary cycle, and the Gospel readings were taken mainly from Matthew. We’ve now begun Year B, when the Gospel readings are taken mainly from Mark and John.

 

And the first line of today’s Gospel reading is none other than the first line of Mark’s Gospel: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” In older translations, the words “the good news” are rendered as “the Gospel.” So far as I’m aware, this is the only place where one of the four Evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—describes the book he’s writing as a “Gospel.”

 

Let’s reflect on the meaning of this word, “Gospel.” Sometimes in the English language we use it to describe information that is absolutely accurate and reliable, as in “Gospel truth”. But that’s not really the word’s primary meaning in the biblical languages.

 

The Greek word here translated as “good news” or “Gospel” is evangelion, from which we get the words “evangelism,” “evangelist,” and “evangelical”. These words remind us of another way the word “Gospel” is often used, as in “Gospel preaching” or “Gospel music” – suggesting certain styles of enthusiastic worship and music emphasizing subjective experiences of conversion and a personal relationship with Jesus. But that’s not really the primary meaning of the word “Gospel” in the original Greek, either.

 

In the ordinary, everyday language of the ancient world, the word evangelion indeed meant something like “good news” or “glad tidings”. It typically described an official public pronouncement by a messenger or herald in the town square concerning a joyous event, such as a military victory, the coronation of a king, or perhaps a royal birth.

 

The word’s Hebrew equivalent is used in today’s Old Testament reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah: “Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings …” In this, one of the most beautiful and moving passages in the whole Bible, the prophet announces the Good News that the Exile in Babylon is almost over and that God will soon bring his people home to Zion.

 

And in the New Testament, the Greek verb that gets translated as “preach the Gospel” when talking about the John the Baptist, Jesus, or the apostles and evangelists, is exactly the same verb that gets translated in other contexts as “bring glad tidings” or “proclaim good news”—for example in the Nativity story when the angel appears to the shepherds and tells them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people …”

 

Think for a moment about what good news can be like. Over twenty years ago, the TV series Band of Brothers came out tracing the experiences of a group of American paratroopers in Europe during World War II. From D Day on, they fight their way through Normandy, Belgium, Holland, and finally Germany. At length, with Hitler dead and the Third Reich defeated, they start gearing up to ship out to the Pacific for the final assault on Japan. 

 

But then, one day, their commanding officer makes an unexpected announcement: the Japanese government has unconditionally surrendered. The camera scans each face as the men slowly absorb this information and realize that instead of further combat, injury, and death in the Far East, they’ll soon be going home to be reunited with those they love and resume their civilian lives. Now that information was “gospel” in the biblical sense of the word: a public announcement that is welcome, joyous, life changing, and life giving.

 

Looking back over our own lives, my guess is that most of us can remember similar moments of good news: the announcement of a birth or an engagement; the letter informing us of our admission to a school or college; the telephone call to say that we’ve got the job.

 

So, the phrase “preach the Gospel” really means “bear glad tidings,” or “announce good news.” And therein lies a challenge for all of us. In a world so full of so much bad news every day, do we come to church expecting to hear good news? And when we get here, is good news what we get? (That’s the challenge for me!)

 

Today’s readings are shot through with good news. From Isaiah: “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together.” From Psalm 85: “[God has] forgiven the iniquity of [his] people, and blotted out all their sins.” In the Epistle, Saint Peter writes of the Lord’s patience in delaying his return to give his people plenty of time to repent and get ready for him. And in the Gospel John the Baptist proclaims the One coming after him: “I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” So much good news here if we just pause to listen and take it all in!

 

In my beginning homiletics class in seminary, we were each assigned to write a sermon for a different Sunday of the church year, and then in class we’d give our sermons, and listen to and critique one another’s efforts. It was occasionally painful, but ultimately very good training for future preachers. One of the questions we learned to ask ourselves as we listened was: “How is what I’m hearing good news?” After all, we were supposed to be preaching the Gospel. So, sometimes the critique would be, “Interesting sermon, you made some good points – but where was the Good News?”

 

From time to time, we clergy can fall into the trap of presenting the Christian life solely as a series of demands and challenges. And to be realistic, for those who follow Jesus Christ, demands and challenges there certainly will be—indeed, hardships and sacrifices. But these really only make sense, they really only become bearable, ultimately even joyful, in the wider context of the Gospel—the Good News of what God has done for us in Christ, and of what he promises to do for us in the future. “The Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God” is the Good News that we need to hear above all!

 

This Season of Advent is a time of waiting, preparation, anticipation, and hope. We long for good news. And this Advent can be the time when we develop the habit of waking up every morning in the expectation that this very day, we might very well receive Good News from God. Perhaps this Advent, then, we can learn to be a people constantly listening out for the Gospel.

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT, YEAR B

December 3, 2023

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick, R. I.

 

Isaiah 64:1-9

Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18

I Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 13:24-37

 

Today, as we begin a new liturgical year, the season of Advent invites us to reflect upon the future and, more than that, upon our relationship with time itself. Is there a uniquely Christian understanding of time and history--a distinctively Christian attitude towards past, present, and future?

 

Before attempting to answer this question, it may be helpful to survey four basic options suggested by different philosophers and thinkers down through the centuries in the way of possible orientations towards the future. That way, we’ll be in a better position to appreciate what’s distinctive about the Christian viewpoint.

 

The first basic attitude is optimism: the belief that things are just getting better and better all the time. Every day in every way, things are getting better. This view came into prominence in the eighteenth-century, and it’s with us still. This worldview confidently asserts that despite periodic setbacks, the steady march of reason, science, technology, and education is gradually improving the human condition, eradicating disease, poverty, ignorance, and superstition, until finally we achieve a perfect society, or utopia, upon earth. 

 

The second basic option, diametrically opposed to the first, is pessimism. This viewpoint characteristically looks back to a past golden age, from which everything seems to have gone downhill ever since. This pessimistic view is sometimes associated in old age with nostalgia: wistful reminiscing about the “good old days,” combined with disapproval and dismay at the dreadful state things have fallen into now. The trouble is that it’s all too easy to view the past through rose-colored glasses. When we actually study history, we discover that the good old days weren’t always that good, and many aspects of the present aren’t really all that bad by comparison.

 

A third basic option might be described as resignation. In this view, the future is determined by blind impersonal forces beyond our control. So, there’s no guarantee that the future will be either better or worse than the present or the past. Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be.

 

One ancient variation of worldview is a cyclical view of time, which sees history as having neither direction nor purpose, but simply as a never-ending cycle of repetitions. Civilizations and worlds come to birth, grow, prosper, decay, and die, over and over again. To quote the Book of Ecclesiastes, there’s nothing new under the sun. Or the French proverb: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Our only option, in this view, is to make the best of whatever our circumstances happen to be. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

 

The fourth basic option is despair. From this viewpoint, history isn’t going anywhere at all; past, present, and future have no discernible direction, and hence no purpose or meaning whatever. In its more depressive moments, the Book of Ecclesiastes gets into this frame of mind: “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!” But my favorite expression of this outlook is expressed in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

 

So, to recapitulate, four possible orientations towards the future are optimism, pessimism, resignation, and despair. We might each find it useful in the coming days to reflect on where we stand in relation to each of those options. Perhaps we can strongly identify with one or another, or perhaps it changes according to our moods. 

 

Over and against those four, however, we’re now able to sketch out the biblical worldview. In the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, first, time has a beginning and an end. So, history has a definite direction and purpose. In the beginning, God creates the heavens and the earth. From that moment, the world moves forward, according to a God-given plan, towards its final goal and end in the kingsom of heaven.

 

Contrary to the optimistic viewpoint, however, progress is not inevitable. Things are not necessarily getting better all the time. Despite our very real advances in science, education, medicine, and technology, we still live in a world afflicted by war, poverty, disease, famine, pandemic, and disaster. Indeed, the very technology intended to better the human condition often has unintended consequences that threaten our very survival: for example, environmental pollution, global warming, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The Christian tradition expresses this predicament in theological shorthand by saying that we’re fallen creatures living in a fallen world.

 

Contrary to the pessimistic viewpoint, scripture nonetheless promises us that the best is indeed yet to come. The future is better than the past. God holds in store for us joys infinitely surpassing anything we’ve ever known. Still, this glorious future is in no way the result of human achievement or inevitable progress. Numerous passages in Scripture suggest that things will get worse before they get better, culminating in a final apocalyptic crisis before the end comes. And the end itself will take the form of God's own final intervention in human history – an intervention that the Bible calls “the coming of the Lord.”

That observation brings us to today’s lectionary readings. Our Old Testament reading from the Prophet Isaiah looks to the future with intense longing for the Lord’s coming: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence … to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!”

 

Psalm 80 similarly looks for the Lord’s coming with eager longing and expectation, repeating three times the lines: “Restore us, O God of hosts / Show the light of your countenance and we shall be saved.”

 

In the epistle reading, Saint Paul promises his readers in the Church at Corinth that God will strengthen them to the end, for they’re not lacking in any spiritual gifts as they wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

And in the reading from Saint Mark’s Gospel, our Lord warns his disciples to stay awake and keep alert, for they do not know when the time will come, when they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds and great glory,” sending out his angels “to gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.”

 

The Church’s traditional teaching is, in the words of today’s Collect, that just as Jesus has come among us once in great humility, he will come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead. Our response, then, must be to cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armor of light, so that in that day we also may rise to the life immortal.

 

For Christians, then, the proper orientation to the future is neither optimism, pessimism, resignation, nor despair, but hope. Every year, this season of Advent calls us to be a people who live in joyful hope for the coming of the Lord, whatever hardships and trials we may have to face in the meantime. So, another question worth reflecting on during the coming week is how we can best cultivate this virtue of hope in our own lives. 

 

Advent is an exciting time: of anticipation, expectation, and preparation, of watching and waiting. We pray, then, that through our observance of this holy season, God will grant us the joy of Christian hope.

PROPER 29, YEAR A

(Christ the King)

November 26, 2023

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick, R. I.

 

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24

Psalm 95:1-7a

Ephesians 1:15-23

Matthew 25:31-46

 

From time to time, the liturgical calendar asks us to take a second glance at events in the Gospel story that we’ve already considered earlier in the Church year. For example, on Good Friday, we commemorate the Lord’s Passion and death; then, on the Feast of the Holy Cross (on September 14th) we look again at this sacred mystery of our redemption.

 

Similarly, the Feast of Christ the King asks us to look again at what we celebrated on the Feast of the Ascension, kept on the sixth Thursday after Easter Day. As Saint Paul says in today’s reading from his Letter to the Ephesians, “God raised [Christ] from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.” 

 

Although a relatively new addition to the calendar, the Feast of Christ the King celebrates the Church’s ancient faith as set forth in the New Testament and proclaimed in the Nicene Creed: 

 

He ascended into heaven, 

  and is seated at the right hand of the Father. 

He will come again in glory to judge the living

   and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end

Notice how those lines of the Creed twin the images of Christ as Judge and Christ as King: He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. 

 

This image of Christ as judge doesn’t always sit comfortably today. Decades ago, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr satirized the faith of nineteenth century liberal Protestantism with these lines: “

A God without wrath

Brought [people] without sin 

Into a kingdom without judgment 

Ministered by a Christ without a cross. 

I fear that these lines also sum up the faith of all too many in today’s Episcopal Church. However, the readings won’t let us get away with that; they’re shot through with the images of both Christ as King and Christ as Judge.

 

They also bring in the image of the Shepherd. Again and again, the Bible depicts the relationship between a king and his people as that between a shepherd and his flock. After all, the kings of Israel are descended from David, the shepherd boy whom God took from watching the flock to shepherd his people Israel. 

 

Both the Old Testament reading from Ezekiel and the Gospel reading from Matthew describe God judging the world as a shepherd separating the animals in his flock. The prophet proclaims: “Thus says the Lord God … ‘Behold, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep … I will save my flock … and I will judge between sheep and sheep.’” And in the Gospel, Jesus describes the Son of man coming in glory, and all his angels with him: “then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.”

 

This reading depicts a scene from real life. To this day, shepherds in the Middle East often allow sheep and goats to intermingle as they graze in the fields or migrate from one pasture to another. But every evening, especially in cold weather, the shepherds separate them, because sheep with their thick wool coats can be left outside while goats need the warmth of a shelter for the night. 

 

In the ancient world, moreover, sheep were regarded as honorable and even noble animals, while goats were seen as degenerate and shameful. So, it’s not altogether surprising that Jesus uses a shepherd separating sheep from goats to symbolize the judgment of the nations at the end of time: distinguishing the good from the evil, dividing the saved from the damned. 

 

So, who are the sheep and who are the goats? For some Jews in our Lord’s time—not all, to be sure, but some—the answer would have been immediate and obvious. The sheep are the people of Israel. As Psalm 95 puts it, “For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.”

 

As Jesus starts telling the story that we know as the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, at least some of his listeners probably assume that the sheep are the Jews, and the goats the Gentiles, so that the judgment will bring about the vindication of Israel and the punishment of the nations. As the story unfolds, however, it becomes clear that such a distinction is not what our Lord has in mind at all.

 

The separation of sheep from goats proceeds not according to racial, ethnic, national, or even religious criteria, but instead according to the criteria of compassion and mercy. The shepherd-king recognizes as the sheep of his own flock those members of all nations, both Jew and Gentile, both Christian and non-Christian, who’ve fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and those in prison.

 

After all, Jesus came down to earth from heaven on a mission of divine mercy and compassion. Taking human flesh, he identified with the poorest of the poor, and suffered a shameful death. But just as Christ died and rose again to show a sinful world God’s compassion and mercy, so he’ll judge us according to the compassion and mercy that we’ve shown our fellow human beings. So, the parable’s surprise ending is that in ministering to the sick and dying, refugees and prisoners, the hungry and the homeless, we discover that all along we’ve been ministering to an incognito king: ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

 

Today we rejoice that Christ is our king; and we praise his majesty. We owe him all loyalty, obedience, and service. And we have his promise that as we minister in this world to the poor, downtrodden, and oppressed, we’re really ministering to him. Then, when he returns in glory to judge the living and the dead, he’ll bid us inherit the kingdom prepared for us from the foundation of the world. 

PROPER 28, YEAR A

November 19, 2017

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick, R. I.

 

Matthew 25:14-30

 

As we think about stewardship and pledging, it’s perhaps providential that today’s appointed Gospel should be one of Our Lord’s great stewardship parables. The biblical definition of a steward is a servant entrusted with the management of his master’s wealth and property. The servants or slaves in the Parable of the Talents fit this description perfectly. So, it seems opportune this morning to grapple a bit with what Jesus is teaching us in this story. 

 

Interpretations of this parable have tended to go in one of three directions. First is the economic interpretation, associated with what Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic. By this reading, the parable justifies the accumulation of earthly wealth and the enjoyment of material prosperity as signs of God’s favor. To those who have will more be given …

 

The problem with this type of interpretation is that it presupposes a thoroughly modern understanding of economics, and it fails to recognize how shocking and scandalous this parable would have been to our Lord’s original audience. In our day, we’re apt to admire the first two servants who invest their money and double their return for their good business sense. And we’re apt to scorn the servant who buries his money in the ground just as we scorn people who stuff their life savings away in mattresses. Money loses value over time, and we’ve got to keep it invested just to stay even.

 

But people in the ancient world saw matters very differently. They didn’t understand inflation as we do; and they saw nothing wrong with hiding treasure in the ground. In fact, the rabbis taught that when someone entrusted you with a large sum of money, burying it for safekeeping was the most morally responsible thing to do. Indeed, one who did so bore no liability if the money was lost.

 

Moreover, the ancient world’s operating assumption was that the supply of this world’s goods was finite, limited, and already distributed. So, if you weren’t born rich, the only way you could get rich was by robbing someone else and making them poor. People who became wealthy through business dealings were universally suspected of fraud, deceit, or theft. Financial success was not the badge of respectability that it is today: quite the opposite.

 

So, our Lord’s original audience likely regarded the first two servants, who double their money, as shady and dishonest characters. For the original hearers, the parable’s great scandal would have been that these disreputable servants end up being rewarded, while the honest servant, who’s done the right thing by burying his money safely in the ground, ends up being punished.

 

If the economic interpretation doesn’t work, then we have what we might call the moralizing interpretation. The word “talent” in Greek means both a measure of weight and a denomination of currency, like the British pound. But it totally lacks the English sense of the word “talent,” and so has absolutely nothing to do with the ability to paint, sing, write, play basketball, or do needlepoint. Still, innumerable sermons and devotional commentaries on this parable exhort us to use our God-given gifts, skills, and talents, to the best of our abilities. That may be good advice, but it fails to capture the full import of today’s Gospel.

 

Ultimately, this parable is about neither wealth-management nor personal self-improvement, but the Kingdom of God. We get a glimpse of this when the two servants who’ve doubled their money are invited to “enter into the joy” of their Master, while the servant who buried the money in the ground is cast “into the outer darkness; where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 

 

And so we come to a third type of interpretation, which might be called allegorical. The Church’s traditional reading of this parable is that the Master is a figure of Christ who entrusts us with everything we have in this life: all our gifts, in every sense of the word. The master’s departure on a long journey away symbolizes Christ’s Ascension into heaven. And the master’s delayed return and demand for an accounting from his servants symbolizes Christ’s Second Coming, when he shall call each of us to account for our stewardship of the gifts he’s given us.

 

More than that, the Parable of the Talents challenged its original hearers, as it challenges us, to imagine a different kind of universe, governed by different economic laws, with a different kind of wealth, denominated in a different kind of currency. In a world governed by finitude and scarcity, there are circumstances in which hoarding treasure makes perfect sense. We’d better guard what we have, or others might take it from us. 

 

But maybe the talents in the parable represent not commodities to be invested or hoarded, but rather gifts to be shared. Our Lord has entrusted great treasures into our care—the Gospel, the Sacraments, the means of grace. He intends us to share these treasures and to spread them abroad liberally. When we do share them—freely, generously, and abundantly—we find that, unlike material wealth and possessions, which diminish the more we give them away, these spiritual gifts keep on multiplying back to us until the day when the Master returns and bids us enter into his joy.

 

To go one step further, the original hearers of Saint Matthew’s Gospel would have understood, just as we understand today, that the two servants who doubled their money were risking everything, while the servant who hid his talent in the ground was playing it safe. Here the parable illustrates the principle that our Lord twice enunciates elsewhere in Saint Matthew’s Gospel: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” 

 

In other words, just as the two enterprising servants laid down everything they had in a game of double-or-nothing, even so, those who’re willing to lay down everything in the Lord’s service, including even their lives, are the ones who gain eternal life. But those who cling to their belongings, their fortunes, and their lives are the ones who end up losing them, like the servant who buried that one talent which is death to hide.

 

To understand this parable, then, we don’t really need to identify what, if anything, the talents represent. They’re not really the point. The parable calls us to a bold generosity of spirit, a self-sacrificial willingness to risk everything, in the assurance that if we do so, then in the end, we shall hear the Lord saying to us: “Well done, good and faithful servant … Enter into the joy of your Master.”

PROPER 27, YEAR A

Sunday, November 12, 2023

Saint Mark’s Church, Warwick, R.I.

 

Wisdom 6:12-16

I Thessalonians 4:13-18

Matthew 25:1-13

 

Today’s Gospel addresses themes of preparation and readiness. A wedding feast is about to take place. By custom, the bridegroom has gone to the home of his bride’s parents, to sign the marriage contract, and then bring his bride back in a festive procession to his house, where the celebrations will begin. But for some unexplained reason the bridegroom is delayed in his return. Perhaps the last-minute negotiations have bogged down in some difficulty.

 

The bridegroom’s return at midnight reveals who are wise and who are foolish among the young women who’ve been waiting outside his house to greet him. “Bridesmaids,” by the way, is a bad translation. If they were really bridesmaids, they’d be at the bride’s house rather than the groom’s. The word Matthew uses is more akin to “virgins” or “maidens.” In any case, having anticipated the possibility of just such a delay, the wise maidens have brought along extra flasks of oil for their lamps; but not so the foolish maidens who are caught with their lamps flickering out – and who at length find themselves locked out of the marriage feast.

 

The Church has traditionally interpreted this parable as a commentary on Christ’s Second Coming, and I see no good reason to depart from that line of interpretation. After our Lord’s Resurrection and Ascension, the earliest Christians expected him to return within their lifetime to judge the world and inaugurate the Kingdom of God.

 

Again and again, the Bible describes the Kingdom of God as a wedding feast, with Christ as the bridegroom. In the parable, then, the shout at midnight: “Look! Here is the Bridegroom! Come out to meet him” evokes the imagery in today’s reading from St. Paul to the Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven …”

 

But as we know, the years went by and Christ didn’t return as soon as expected. The bridegroom was delayed. Perhaps some Christians in the second and third generations were tempted to give up on the hope that he’d ever return, and grew slack and lax in their faith. They’d once been eagerly waiting; but as time went on some of them found their faith flickering and growing dim, just like the lamps of the foolish maidens. Perhaps for them Matthew remembered and wrote down in his Gospel this parable of the Lord.

 

The parable thus functions as both a warning and an exhortation. Even though the bridegroom seems delayed in coming, we need to remain alert, prepared, and ready. Regardless of whether we believe in a literal return of Christ to earth in human history, we’re all going to meet him sooner or later, one way or another. And when he does arrive, at an unexpected hour, there won’t be time to begin making the preparations that we should have been making all along. So, in today’s Collect, we pray that “we may purify ourselves as he pure; that when he comes again with power and great glory, we may be made like him in his eternal and glorious kingdom …”

 

Our Old Testament reading for today indicates our need for divine wisdom. After all, the presence or absence of wisdom was what made the difference between the wise and foolish maidens. And today’s reading from the book of Wisdom comes from a genre of biblical literature that treat's God’s wisdom, in Greek Sophia, as a manifestation of God’s Word, or Logos. The implication is that we grow in holy wisdom by attending to God’s Word.

 

That, after all, is why we’re here in Church today. We all need continuing formation. All the spiritual practices of our faith – Mass, Offices, daily prayer, spiritual reading, meditation, confession, retreats, and so forth – constitute a regimen of training to steep us in God’s Wisdom and so prepare us for whatever crises and joys lie ahead.

 

I once knew a woman whose teenage sons periodically rebelled and gave her a hard time about coming to Church on Sunday. Her response was to tell them this: Much as you might think you don’t need Church now, someday you’ll be grateful for a place to turn for comfort and hope when you lose your job, your girlfriend, or your spouse. Otherwise, without something solid to fall back on, you’ll be tempted to lose yourself in drinking, drugs, gambling, or some other addictive form of escape. But to gain any meaningful support from your faith at that moment, you’ll need to have been practicing it all along. Otherwise, it’ll be the worst possible time to start learning.

 

A youngster in the Sunday School class in one of my parishes once asked the teacher: “Isn’t it hypocritical of us to say the Lord’s Prayer by rote every Sunday when we don’t really mean it or don’t even think about what we’re saying?” “Not at all,” the teacher replied. “Think of each Sunday as a time of training to pray. We teach you to know the Lord’s Prayer by heart because one day, when you find that you really need to pray more than anything else, you’ll at least have the words to get started.”

 

But the practice of our faith isn’t just preparation for the bad times, the inevitable moments of crisis in our lives, but even more for the good times. How much more we’re able to enter into the joy of a baptism or a wedding, for example, when already we’re accustomed to being in Church, when we understand what’s going on, and when we know the responses, symbolism, and customs!

 

Most of all, however, the practice of our faith is preparation and training for the joy of heaven itself. There, we shall be caught up in the continual praise and adoration of the Blessed Trinity; and here, Sunday-by-Sunday, our worship affords us the opportunity to practice and get ready for that. Again, if we hope to spend eternity with God, it’s a good idea to spend some time every Sunday in Church, and every day in prayer, getting to know him now!

 

The Bridegroom is coming. We can be ready to meet him if by divine Wisdom we attend to God’s Word and practice the spiritual disciplines that constitute the oil by which we keep our lamps burning brightly. Then, when he comes, we shall enter into the never-ending joy of the wedding feast celebrating the marriage of heaven and earth.