Homily for 05/02/26

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

You may be seated.

A little bit of a gloomy Sunday.

I don't know about you, but whenever I can't see the sun, I just want to take a nap.

And uh Lord forgive me.

This is one of those moments where I think given the choice, I would be snoozing right now.

But thanks be to God.

I do not have the choice.

And so I get to be here with you all.

I heard that.

It was great.

There's a couple things in our passages that I would like to point out to you.

And it's actually rare in our lectionary, but occasionally there are alternative readings.

So this morning there's an alternative reading for the Old Testament reading from Deuteronomy that I'm going to do my best to include as well.

But the first thing I want to point out is as we continue into Easter tide, you'll notice this proclamation of the gospel has been getting louder and louder and louder and louder.

But the content of that proclamation has not changed.

What I mean is that in the passages that we have looked at for almost a month of Easter at this point, you see a retelling or a redeclaration of the mystery of God which has been hidden from all ages, but revealed in Christ Jesus to his church.

And so we see very famous proclamations of the gospel.

You see the road to Emmaus, where our Lord walks with the two disciples.

You see Saint Stephen, the proto-martyr, when he stands before the authorities in Jerusalem and they stone him to death.

You see now a proclamation of Saint Paul to the Gentiles as he travels around these Greek cities.

And what's interesting is this proclamation of the gospel does not change as we move out of the apostolic era.

So, for example, Saint Irenaeus, who was one of the church fathers, his most famous treatise is Against Heresies, but he wrote a book prior to that called On the Apostolic Preaching.

It's a very short book, and I commend it to you.

And it is his presentation of the Apostolic Doctrines.

This is the gospel preached by the Apostles.

Now, Saint Irenaeus and his presentation of the gospel, where does he begin?

Does anyone recall?

I know I tricked you.

We're talking about the Bible.

Let me stop for a second.

So in this book that maybe some of you have read, where do you think it begins?

No.

In the beginning.

God created.

It's interesting.

You open up St.

Irenaeus, and Saint Irenaeus does not begin with you're a sinner in need of grace, and God loves you, and Jesus died for you to take away your sin.

He begins with Genesis.

In the beginning, God created.

And then he gives you this beautiful presentation of all of history.

God in his foreknowledge, his providence, guiding all things to himself, culminating in his self-disclosure in Christ Jesus.

And when you read St.

Irenae, it begins to sound a lot like what happened at the road to Emmaus, where Jesus opens all of the scriptures to the disciples.

It doesn't say his favorite scriptures, it says all of the scriptures, front to end, and shows them meticulously in every part of the scriptures, Jesus.

In every single part.

And then we find Saint Stephen, Saint Stephen at Pentecost.

Well, a little after Pentecost.

Saint Stephen in Jerusalem, where Pentecost took place.

And he gives this presentation of the gospel to the authorities.

Where does he begin?

Not with Matthew, not with Mark, not with Luke, not with St.

John.

He begins much earlier.

He talks about Joseph going down into Egypt, and he paints this narrative beginning in Genesis.

So we see something very unique here.

That the gospel, according to the apostles, according to our Lord, and according to their successor, Saint Irenaeus being only one, the presentation of our faith is holistic, and it does not begin in the four books that start the New Testament.

It begins prior in Genesis.

And so when we ask, what do Christians believe?

We believe this, the scriptures.

Start to end.

And who are the scriptures about?

Jesus.

This is important for us as we approach this text because Saint Paul is doing the same thing.

He is once again entering into a disputation over the scriptures, and he is showing people, some who agree with him, some who disagree with him, Jesus in the scriptures.

And this is what distinguishes the Bereans from the other synagogue.

That they are those who are knowledgeable in the scriptures and therefore are able to find Christ in them.

And there are those, because of their hardness of heart, their unwillingness to believe the word of God, do not find Christ presented to them, and therefore do not find Christ.

The scriptures give us Jesus.

We believe that we truly receive Him.

I talk about this a lot.

The fathers tell us that we can eat the body of Christ and drink his blood with our ears when the scriptures are presented to us.

Because every syllable of the text is about Jesus and gives him to us.

So then, a question that we're left with is what happens when you do not like Jesus?

You lose the scriptures and their summation.

I think it's often neglected that just as there is a canonized text, right?

When I say canonized text, what do I mean?

There's a collection of books that we have in the Bible, and we call this the canon.

Now, canon is people are laughing.

It's okay.

Move on, guys.

There's this book, there's this canon of books that we read that have been set aside and we say this is the Bible.

Well, just as there is a text that the church has delivered to us, God and His providence has preserved for us, there are also canonized interpretations of that text.

There are some interpretations of the text that we are not free to question.

Not the historicity, but what that text is presenting.

So the scriptures have told us what the canon of the canon is, if you can pardon that expression I made up on the spot.

And he has a name, and he's a person, and it's Jesus.

Jesus is the interpretive lens, the hermeneutic of the Christian, which makes sense of everything that God has presented to us in the scriptures.

Jesus is the key to the law, which opens up for us life and life abundantly in the text.

But Jesus is always there in the text, hidden or revealed, he is present.

The stone established in Zion.

What can you do with this stone?

Well, you can build with it or you can trip over it.

And so you can trip your way through the scriptures, falling over this stone, Jesus, which is everywhere, behind every verse, behind every reference, every story, every salvation, every deliverance, every miracle is Jesus.

And so we can continue to stumble and fall over this stone which God has laid hidden in this field that we call the scriptures.

Or it can be for us the cornerstone and the rock of our salvation.

The way that St.

Peter presents this stone for us in the epistle seems to be there is no getting away from this rock.

There is no escaping it.

It can either be your undoing or it can be your salvation.

But it is here nonetheless.

And this stone is presented to us again and again and again and again in the scriptures.

And this is the stone that makes us into stones like it, at least according to Saint Peter.

Because this stone is the cornerstone building up a spiritual temple, we too can be made like it and become a part of that temple.

Okay.

Moving on.

Why did the devil fall?

What's another reason the devil fell?

Envy.

Envy.

The devil fell through envy.

Pride is right.

Alright.

Pride is right.

Pride is one of those vices which is by nature envious.

Because the proud person cannot see the good of any other person without envying them.

And envy, according to St.

Basil the Great, is feeling pain because of the good that you've received.

Even if it costs me nothing, that's envy.

Envy is the hatred I have of you because of the good you have received.

Even if that goodness does not come at my expense at all, I simply can't stand it.

And this is very proud.

This is a very arrogant outlook in life.

Okay.

The devil fell through envy.

Why did the scribes, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees persecute and crucify our Lord?

Envy.

Envy.

Why now have the synagogues turned out Saint Paul in his proclamation of the gospel?

Envy.

And in St.

Paul's epistle to the Colossians, he equates envy or covetousness with what sin?

Idolatry.

Idolatry.

The devil fell through envy and forsook God.

In Jerusalem they envied our Lord, and they forsook God.

And now God has come to them again by the mouth of Saint Paul, and their envy has cost them God again.

We need to be very careful, friends, about envy.

This passion which St.

Peter in his epistle tells us to put to death, this passion which does by its very nature lead us away from God and causes our forsaking of him.

We envy, and so we lose.

How then do we gain him?

If envy is the loss of God, which again, whether you're human or an angel, that's what happens.

How do we receive him?

How do we gain him?

The guys who have been here a while, like, I know what Father wants me to say.

Humility! The opposite of pride.

There's that great story of St.

Anthony the Great, which I talk about a lot because we have his relic over here.

St.

Anthony the Great has this vision of demons crowding the air.

Right?

The scriptures tell us that the devil is the prince of the power of the air, and so St.

Anthony he has this vision of the sky packed full of demons.

And he asks God this question: how can you move through that?

How do you get through this mosh pit of demons, which makes up all of the air?

How is there space or room to get through it?

And the voice that St.

Anthony hears tells him, humility.

Because you cannot go through the demons, you can go under the demons.

And God humbled himself even to the point of dying on a cross.

And so it is through the path of humility that we find God.

So then, if Christ is present in the scriptures, and humility is the means of receiving Christ, how ought we to approach the scriptures?

With humility.

I'm going to tell another famous story here at St.

Mark's.

I went to seminary with an insane monk.

Very bad.

Many people go to seminary with insane monks, and most monks are insane.

That's the way it goes.

And so my monk, not my monk, the Lord's monk, I happened to go to seminary with Brother Will, was an eccentric man who would play organ at two in the morning and would just walk around and start reciting poetry unprompted, entirely unprompted, right?

And we just pray and would just say things.

So he just walk up to you unprompted and say, like, isn't Jesus beautiful?

Like, yeah, man, it's great.

It's really good.

One of my favorite Brother Will stories is we had a Greek exam.

He opens his book, closes it, walks out of the room, and we never saw him again.

So I'm not sure he passed Greek.

But we had our New Testament class with Father Wheatley, and Father asked the same question that I asked you: how do we approach the text of Holy Scripture?

And again, Father is a New Testament scholar, and so there was something in the text he wanted us to see, and I'll never forget, he's waving his Greek New Testament like this, and he keeps asking, How do we approach the text?

How do we approach the text?

And he's frustrated because there's obviously something in his lesson that he saw that we didn't see, and had we been better students, we should have been able to see.

And you see Brother Will raise his hand and you see the light leave Father's eye.

There's this lone hand waving at him.

And you see Father Wheatley looking around the room, pleading with his eyes.

So Father Wheatley says, How do we approach the text?

Yes, Brother Will.

Brother Will stands up, which was not expected.

You don't stand as the, you know, this was a this was a will-ism.

This was not this was not necessary at all to stand up and stand by your desk as if it was the 1940s or something.

Okay.

He stands up almost out of salute and he says, with humility, you approach the text with humility.

To which Father says, Yes.

Alright.

We approach the text with humility because the text gives us Christ.

And only the humble soul can receive him.

This is integral to the narrative of St.

Augustine, if you read his confessions.

He does not like the scriptures because they seem so plain.

They seem so folksy.

They're poorly written.

He was someone who knew rhetoric.

He knew all the beautiful things people should be able to say, especially in a sacred text.

And then you open up the gospel and you read Saint John, and St.

John writes Greek like a third grader.

And you say, God can't be in this text.

And St.

Augustine said, God cannot be in this text.

And it wasn't until later in his life that he realized the simplicity of the self-disclosure and presentation of God in Scripture is because God loves the simple.

What if St.

John writes like a third grader because God wants to save third graders?

St.

Augustine says the scriptures are deep enough for an elephant to drown in, but shallow enough for a toddler to wade in.

And this actually connects nicely with what St.

Peter says here in his epistle, because it's interesting.

He gives us these vices that we are supposed to do away with.

These Herculean feats, putting to death our hypocrisy, our envy, our slander, right?

Put away our malice and our deceit.

Put away all these things that take us away from God, that build ourselves up.

Again, this is the sin of pride and of envy, which are often synonymous.

And then St.

Peter does not say, perform this Herculean self-destruction.

Perform this radical act of asceticism.

Put away all your malice, all your evil, all your vices, all these horrible things which make you what you are.

Put to death the self.

And he doesn't say, now take hold of gold.

Take hold of glory.

Take hold of meat.

Take a hold of divine wisdom or knowledge.

He says, having done this radical act of self-death, putting to death our deceits, our hypocrisy, our envy, our slander, he says, then we will receive milk for newborn infants.

I don't know about you, but to me the juxtaposition is wild.

He's asking us to do hard things and he's promising not something great, not something grandiose.

He says, now if you do this, which is impossible, if you do this impossible thing, the putting off of yourself, then you will be like a newborn infant.

Then you will receive the milk of simplicity, the spiritual milk, and then you may grow up into salvation.

There is a littleness of God.

He who comes and accommodates himself to our littleness, that he might save the little and make us great and strong.

This is the irony or the paradox of the scriptures.

I once had a teacher, and he said, Everybody asks if God is bigger than what we can imagine.

What if sometimes God becomes littler than what we can imagine?

Right?

What if you have to transcend the transcendent?

And the greatest of the great becomes the littlest of the little because he loves even the little.

And out of God's love for the little, he has commanded us to become little because it is the safe path for our souls.

Finally, we have in the Psalms this You brought us into the snare, and you laid trouble upon our backs.

You allowed men to ride over our heads.

We went through fire and water, but you brought us out into a place of plenty.

The psalmist says, God has brought you into a state of abuse.

God has let the enemy ride over your backs and over your heads.

We have been brought low.

We have suffered even.

This alternative passage we had for the Old Testament reading is taken from Deuteronomy 6.

This is one of the readings we could have had this morning, beginning in the 20th verse.

It explains what God has done here.

And it expects this question.

What were you doing when you delivered us?

When your son asks you in time to come, what is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the rules that the Lord our God has commanded you?

And then you will say to your son, We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and the Lord showed signs and wonders, great and grievous, against Egypt and against Pharaoh and all his household before our eyes, and he brought us out from there that he might bring us in and give us the land that he swore to give to our fathers.

And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God for our good always, that he might preserve us alive as we are this day.

And it will be righteousness for us if we are careful to do all his commandments before the Lord our God as he has commanded us.

Why?

The psalmist leaves us with a question.

God has led us through fire and water, and it was a painful process, to the point where it says, God brought us into a snare.

Why?

Because this is our salvation.

God who did not spare himself from falling into the snare, has made it the means of our salvation.

Not only a littleness in an ideological sense, but God, impassable, becomes passable and suffers.

And he brings us intentionally into that suffering.

Why?

That we might be saved, according to the Psalmist.

This is holiness to us, says Moses in Deuteronomy.

And these are the signs.

This is the evidence that God is God.

Recall the gospel that we read.

Jesus says, if you do not believe me, believe the sign that I have done.

What are the signs that He has done?

He's refined us like silver.

That is a work of God.

And it is a painful process in us.

God refines us like silver.

He causes the enemy to ride over our backs.

He overthrows our head.

And we stumble forward through the scriptures, through this life of faith.

But it is working salvation in us.

It is refining us like silver.

And this is the evidence of God.

And if we embrace it truly, with humility, with the eyes of faith, the words of our Lord are true.

That having seen Him who is presented to us daily, and especially in this moment as we hear the scriptures preached, and very soon as we come to receive His body and blood at the altar, having seen Christ Jesus, having believed His signs, our suffering being one of those signs, we will have seen the Father.

And with the apostles we can say, if we have seen the Father, it is enough for us.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.