October 4, 1998
The President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, coming out of church one Sunday morning was asked by a reporter, "Mr. President, what was the topic of the sermon today?" To which he replied in his usual way, "Sin." The reporter, trying to get a little more information than that from the President, said, "Mr. President, what did the preacher say about sin?" To which he replied, "He was against it."
Sermons are frequently about sin. The danger that we all face is that sin lurks around us waiting outside the door like a ravening and roaring lion looking for someone to devour. It's always there. We mostly associate the warm sins as the ones we like to point our finger at, and certainly, when we start talking about sins, we think of things other people are doing. The things that we do, of course, are just the way we are — no big deal.
The warm sins get all the press. These are sins that include violence and anger and murder, that require some passionate thought — thievery, addiction or sexual misbehavior of one kind or another. But, the ones that really threaten us, I think, are the cold ones — the sins of a hard of heart, turning a blind eye to human suffering, the cold sins of pride and prejudice, and insensitivity to another's need.
We are disciples of Jesus Christ, called to live in the world as Jesus Christ would live if he were walking on the face of our planet today. Because, in fact, he is walking on the face of the planet in you and in me by virtue of our baptism . If Christ's love for the world, Christ's redemption of the world, is to be alive and well on the planet earth today, it is going to be alive and well because of you and what you do and say and think and feel in the world around you. We are disciples of Jesus Christ responding to his call to follow. We, at one time or another in our lives, have placed ourselves willingly under his command.
The danger that faces us today is the same danger that faced the Hebrew people in the beginning of salvation history, and that is the cold sins. Having renounced all the warm sins in our baptismal promises, the cold ones lie in wait. Especially for us Episcopalians, I think more than anyone else, the cold sin of pride. This building is built on a hill where it can be seen from the interstate and be a sign of God's presence in this community for all to see and a place that you can get to if you simply look up from any point in the valley. The danger for us is that we will look at this building as a sign of what we have done — that this building was put up because of who we are and how magnificent we are, rather than because of the magnificence of the Lord we worship.
And so we know about the sin of pride. We know that it threatens us. In the second part of today's Gospel Jesus says when you have done everything you had to do and you have done it perfectly well, your proper posture before God is to say, "Lord, we are unworthy servants because we have only done what was required of us." We have only done our duty. And few of us have done our duty all that well, if we are really honest with ourselves.
Our duty as Christians is to show justice in the world. It is a rallying cry of the prophets at least from the time of Habakkuk, going on and on today about how justice has been perverted because those who mete out justice are corrupt. Isaiah talks about justice, Amos talks about justice, Micah talks about justice, and justice is just as rare in our world today as it was in their world.
In our world today, in our country, because the judicial system is so clogged justice is long delayed, and delayed justice, in our understanding and in our Constitution, is no justice at all. Year after year after year, we struggle with making justice swift and even-handed. We continue to struggle with it - what we have tried, hasn't worked to perfection. And so, when we have done everything we can, our proper response to God is we have only done our duty. We have not gone beyond it.
Christians are reminded by St. Paul to view the civil court as a court of last resort. When everything else has failed, we then turn to the bar of justice as the last resort, because true justice means first of all that we resolve our differences humanely and civilly. We come to terms with each other, with forgiveness and repentance. We come to terms with each other by penance and repayment. When those things do not work, then and only then do we resort to the bar of justice. Only when we have failed do we go and say to the judge, "We failed, will you help?" But justice — showing justice and doing justice is our duty as Christians.
Another duty that we have as illuminated by the Gospel today is the duty of mercy. To temper all of our justice with mercy, in part, because God created all of us and the image of God lives in each of us. To show no mercy is to ignore the presence of Christ, to ignore the image of God. We are called by Christ to give people what they need, not what they deserve. We can thank God on our knees or standing upright with our arms in the air for giving us what we need and not what we deserve.
Our duty as Christians is to be humble, to be humble before God. That's one reason why we kneel as Episcopalians, to show our humility, to put our bodies in the posture that we want our hearts to live in, and to understand ourselves as the servants of the Almighty - the stewards of his creation. We have created nothing in this world. We have taken what God has given us from the earth and we have created this place — a place where God's name is proclaimed, where God's hymns are sung, where God's praises are lifted on high. When we have done all that we have done our duty.
That four-letter word began to fall on deaf ears some time in my youth, and certainly by my twenties it was not a word we even talked about in seminary. In part, because we had just come out of the Vietnam war when I came to seminary, and so duty was something that we applied to soldiers, and we soldiers were held up not as examples of Godly life, unfortunately, but mistakenly as an example of how things go terribly wrong in our corporate life.
And so that four-letter word that has been important for building civilization and in offering God's salvation and in sending us out to do our duty as Christians — looks burdensome on the near side. It looks burdensome, like something we have to do that just is plain unpleasant. But if we get out there and do it, if we do Christ's work in the world because he bids us to we know that on the other side of the story we will be given abundance; we will be given joy; we will be given the blessing of God. So while in our temperament, we may not trust that, if we will read the story over and over again and read the ending, we know that if we follow through, when we kneel before God and say we have only done our duty, he does not send us out as some kind of cast-off. He lifts us up, he gives us what we need, and he give us an abundance beyond.
That is the promise of the Gospel - not that we should come out here beating our chests and saying we are not worthy. We are not worthy. That is true. But beyond that, we are the beloved of God. God loves us and God continues to give us everything we need and more. And so we discover as Christian people that if we do our Christian duty, we are blessed with Christian joy. We are blessed with a glad heart. When we are generous, we discover that we become generous people. Even though we give grudgingly on the front end, when we realize the blessings that come, that begrudgingness turns into joy for us. The doing of it, whether it is helping the homeless or teaching the illiterate or feeding the hungry, can seem like a burdensome duty on the front end, but as we get into the ministry we can discover that it is a joyful event in our lives. Teaching Sunday School, worshiping Sunday after Sunday, and giving generously in our offerings in tithes to God can seem burdensome, but after we do it over and over again we discover that we are blessed with great joy and great abundance.
The disciples today come to Jesus with this burdensome sense of duty. They are beginning to get the picture. They see what Jesus is asking them to do and they say to him, "Jesus increase our faith. We do not have enough to do our duty." And Jesus said, "Not so. You do not need more faith." He says to us today, you do not need any more faith than you already have - faith no bigger than a mustard seed, that's all it takes. You do not need the faith of a Mother Theresa. You do not need the faith of your local parish priest. You only need enough faith to turn and I'll do the rest. Jesus says, "Give me what you have and I will give the increase." All the feedings of the multitudes have already happened at this point in the story and they should have gotten it. It just doesn't take much offered to Christ to be the source that Jesus uses to multiply to fill the need.
Our faith is not too small. It simply is not. The only problem that we might have is that we do not trust the Lord enough - that he will give the increase to do his work. And if we believe the Lord wants the work to happen, if he wants salvation for the world and he has called us to be part of his great and magnificent journey, then he is going to make the increase come from us, and give us everything we need to do his work. The Lord shows us the need. Either as individuals or as a community of faith, he simply calls us to use the resources we have in our people — whatever those resources are, buildings or money, whatever they are, to show justice, to do mercy, and to walk humbly before God.
First, he will ask us to do it out of duty because we are reluctant disciples just like all the rest that have gone before us. He will ask us to feed the poor, clothe the naked, care for the widows and orphans, out of duty. But as we do the Lord's work, we will find joy. And when we have done all of that, when we come to the end of the road, and we have done everything, then Jesus says your posture before God is to say — God I have done my duty, that is all I have done, but I have done my duty and here it is. The end of that story is that he will give his blessing and his multiplication.
As we strive to do our duty as Christian people in this place, let us remember we know the rest of the story. We know that we are going to be blessed by joy as we place Jesus first, others second and yourself last. We will be blessed by the joy of God. We will be blessed by abundance that overflows and because the more the Lord makes us to overflow, the more it's going to spill out on those who have nothing because we will continue to care for them. We will find it, as we have in the past, so we will find it in the future — the source of great Christian blessing as we reach around us to embrace the world with the love of Christ.
In the economy of the kingdom of God we don't need a lot of faith. We need the Lord. In the economy of the kingdom of God what we have to offer is more than enough. Not just for ourselves but to do the work that God has given us to do. And so we rejoice this day when Jesus says say to the master, "We are unworthy servants. We have only done our duty." We remember that the master lifts us up and gives us a place in his presence.
AMEN
The Rev. Dr. Robert Certain
rgcertain@stmargarets.org
04 October 1998