St. Matthew's Church

Address: 2300 Ford Rd,Newport Beach, CA 92660
Phone: (949) 219-0911
office@stmatthewsnewport.com

Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity 10/6/19

Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity 10/6/19

A Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, October 5, 2019

The Rt. Rev’d Stephen C. Scarlett

The Epistle, Ephesians 3:13-21 – The Gospel, St. Luke 7:11-17

  1. The gospel and the two processions

Today’s gospel from St. Luke describes two processions that take place near the city of Nain. The first procession consists of Jesus and his followers. St. Luke writes, “[Jesus] went into a city called Nain; and many of His disciples went with Him, and a large crowd” (Lk. 7:11).

The other procession is a funeral. St. Luke says that as Jesus his followers “came near the gate of the city, behold, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother; and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the city was with her” (Lk. 7:12). There would have more than the usual amount of grief because the departed was a young man, and likely his mother’s main source of support.

The funeral procession was a procession of death. It symbolizes the natural path of human life apart from God. We are all marching toward the grave—despite the fervent efforts of the world to avoid or deny it. The procession following Jesus is a procession of life. Jesus is “the Bread of Life” (John 6:48-50), “The Resurrection and the Life” (John 11:25), and “The Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6). As Jesus said in John 5:24, “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.” At the gate of the city of Nain, the procession of death met the procession of life, and death was conquered by Life.

  1. Jesus authority over death as a sign of our Resurrection hope

This miracle or sign shows that Jesus has power over the greatest human enemy, which is death. It provides a visual image of our resurrection hope. The authority over death that Jesus exercised by his command in the gospel points to the authority Jesus will exercise over death by his command on the Day of Resurrection. As Jesus says in John 5:28-29, “The hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation.” It also provides an image of our baptism, in which Jesus gave us the gift of eternal life.

III. Our baptismal resurrection is a greater than the raising of the widow’s son

It is easy to miss the point of this resurrection story. We might be tempted to ask why Jesus doesn’t do this for all people who have died—especially young children. The answer is that the biblical healings, exorcisms, and resurrections are limited miracles. They restored people to health at a point in time, but they did not solve the problem of the human condition. Everyone Jesus raised from the dead got sick again and died again.

This calls to mind a story we were told in Scotland. A woman known as “half-hanged Maggie Dickson” was sentenced to death by hanging for some crime. Because she was so small, the rope did not succeed in killing her. It merely made her pass out. However, everyone thought she died and she was carted off to the grave. When the wagon stopped for a break, Maggie opened the coffin cover and sat up. She lived for another forty years or so. Though Maggie’s “resurrection” was not a miracle in the same sense as the raising of the widow’s son, its net effect was the same, for the widow’s son also died again.

The Son of God did not become man just to make our temporal lives longer or even happier. He came to conquer, evil, sin and death. Thus the biblical miracles that give a temporary benefit pale in comparison with the two main New Testament miracles. These are, first, the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus, which conquered sin and death; and, second, his gift to us of eternal life through baptism and faith—his sharing with us of the fruits of his Cross and Resurrection. If Jesus answers a prayer and solves a problem, we have a seasonal benefit—one for which we may indeed be very grateful. But through baptism and faith we have eternal life—life that will never end—and we should give thanks for this above all things.

It is, in fact, a temptation to focus so much on the desire for God to give us things in this world that we lose sight of the greater miracle, the gift of eternal life. The gift of eternal life is within us through the Holy Spirit. It is growing and producing in us things that we will never lose. Most often, it is our sharing in  the cross of Jesus, our struggling in faith through temporal things we wish were different, that most contributes to the growth of eternal things in us. As 2 Corinthians says,

Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2 Cor. 4:17-18).

  1. How we experience a greater miracle than the gospel miracle

Thus, the raising of the widow’s son is a sign of the greater miracle that we have already experienced and continue to experience in Christ. We were in the world’s procession of death, separated from God and headed to the grave without hope like everyone else. But Jesus intervened in our lives. He touched us through the water of baptism and the gift of faith. He said to us, “Arise.” And we began to live new lives in him. Ephesians describes the miracle of baptismal resurrection in this way:

And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ . . . and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:1-6).

We experience this miracle of resurrection every time we come to the altar of God. We need to experience this miracle of resurrection again because life in the world distracts us from the eternal things and drags us back into the world’s procession of sin and death. We take on the world’s guilt, anxiety, fear, and despair and lose sight of the grace of forgiveness and the faith, hope, and love that Christ has planted in our hearts. Thus, at the altar of God, the procession of life once again stops the funeral procession. Jesus touches us again and commands us, again, to “rise and live.”

It will help us to sustain our prayer if we realize that the main purpose of prayer is not to ask God’s help for our needs or to fulfill a religious duty. The main purpose of our prayer is to raise us from the dead—again. Life in Christ, Resurrection life, is a different kind of life. Life in Christ does not begin at birth and end at death. Rather, life in Christ begins with baptism and faith, it is sustained through the prayer and the Bread of Life, and it will come to its completion in the Resurrection and the life of the world to come.

There are three great miracles we celebrate when we gather around the altar. First, the cross and resurrection of Jesus; second, our dying and rising with Christ through baptism and faith; and third, our sure and certain hope, our eager anticipation, that Jesus will come again to finish his work in us and complete his New Creation. As Philippians says,

Our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself (Phil. 3:20-21).

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Feast of St. Matthew 9/22/1

A Sermon for the Feast of St. Matthew, given on September 22, 2019
The Rt. Rev’d Stephen C. Scarlett
The Epistle, 2 Corinthians 4:1-6 – The Gospel, St. Matthew 9:9-13

  1. The Feast of St. Matthew

The gospel tells us that Matthew was a tax collector when Jesus called him to “follow me.” The tradition is that he wrote the gospel that bears his name, that he first preached the gospel among the Jewish people, and then became a missionary abroad, though there is conflicting evidence about where he went. There is a tradition that he preached and was martyred in Persia.

The themes of the lessons for St. Matthew’s Day revolve around money and covetousness. Tax collectors had authority to charge a fee for their services and were notorious for collecting more than their fair share. Tax collectors who came to John the Baptist for baptism were told to “Collect no more than what is appointed for you” as a sign of their repentance (Lk. 3:13). Thus, St. Matthew’s conversion is portrayed as a movement away from covetousness and toward the service of God. Our statue of St. Matthew picks up this theme. The coins representing his tax collecting business are at St. Matthew’s feet, and Matthew has taken up a pen to write his gospel.

The collect for St.  Matthew’s Day applies this theme to us. We pray:

O Almighty God, who by thy blessed Son didst call Matthew from the receipt of custom to be an Apostle and Evangelist; Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires, and inordinate love of riches, and to follow the same thy Son Jesus Christ.

Most of us won’t be called to leave our current profession to follow Jesus like Mathew was. Our challenge is to follow Jesus and “forsake all covetousness and inordinate love of money” while living in the world and working at jobs whose ostensible purpose is to “make money.”

  1. Covetousness: Acts and patterns of behavior

The danger of covetousness will be misunderstood if we focus too much on individual acts rather than on the habits and patterns of behavior that characterize a life lived in service to mammon or money. For example, from time to time we may find ourselves desiring something that belongs to someone else, or just wanting more than we have. This sort of temptation to covetousness is a normal part of  the spiritual battle. It is typically resolved by a return to our prayer, which reconnects us to God, the source of our contentment, and exposes the temptation as a lie—for the thing we covet promises us a happiness that it will not give us.

The more insidious forms of covetousness stem from the cultural tendency to evaluate everything in terms of money; to view making or saving money as the chief goal of any enterprise. This “economic mindset” leads to covetousness because it skips important questions, such as: Does the thing I am doing glorify God and benefit others? Is it intrinsically good? When we do  something that is not intrinsically good in order to make or save money, we practice a form of covetousness.

We practice this form of covetousness when we do our work for the sole purpose of making money. The degree to which we care mostly about how much money we make rather than about the quality of the thing we do is the degree to which we live in service to Mammon or money. When we live life in service to God, the main concern is to do good work that honors God and benefits others. Thus, the Epistle to the Ephesians exhorted first century slave workers to do their work:

Not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. (Eph. 6:6-8).

Now, to worldly ears, this can sound like accommodation to injustice because it seems to tell oppressed workers to do good for oppressive bosses. This misses the point entirely. The point is that when we do our work for God, in the expectation that God will reward us in his good time, we experience a new kind of freedom. When my behavior is determined by what someone thinks of me or by what someone can give me, I am a slave to that person. But when my behavior is determined by what God thinks of me and will give me, I am free in the service of God—no matter whom I appear to work for.

The passage I quoted above was written to slave workers who had very little autonomy. In our culture workers typically have much greater freedom to leave one job and pursue another. This freedom can become another form of temptation because it can lead us to believe that if we only had a better job, then we would be happy. However, when we get the new job, we discover that the new work place also has greedy, ambitious people, and bosses who don’t really care.

My point is not to discourage anyone in their job search. My point is that we can never escape the need to cultivate the virtue of contentment in the middle of our trials. For something will always be wrong with our circumstances, and we will always be tempted to believe we would be happy if we just had the one thing we don’t have. But God calls us to serve him, to do good work for his glory and for the good of others, wherever we are. God may put us in a difficult place precisely to be witness for him in that place—to show others what it means to do our work for Christ and not merely for money.

III. Faithfulness in prayer and disciplines

This orientation towards work is hard to develop and maintain without a foundation of prayer and spiritual disciplines. When we begin our time in prayer, we remember who we are and we remember who we serve. This enables us to begin our work with a conscious intention to serve God and others. But when we neglect our prayer, we tend to forget who we are, and we tend to get caught up in the anxious service to money that characterizes the world.

We also combat covetousness by the disciplines of tithing and generosity. We may not leave all of our money at the tax table like Matthew, but, through the tithe, we symbolically give it all to him; the first part represents the whole. The discipline of tithing orients our money towards the kingdom of God and helps to free us from the love of money. When live life generously, thinking about how we can give rather than what we want to accumulate, things come to have less of a hold on us.

  1. “Follow me”

The key words in today’s gospel are, “Follow me.” Jesus did not call Matthew merely to believe in a set of doctrines, or just to accept him as Lord and Savior at a moment in time. He called Matthew to follow him into a new way of living. Jesus calls each of us to follow him into a new way of living also, which includes a new way to approach work and money. Thus, we pray on the feast of St. Matthew,

O Almighty God, who by thy blessed Son didst call Matthew from the receipt of custom to be an Apostle and Evangelist; Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires, and inordinate love of riches, and to follow the same thy Son Jesus Christ.

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