The Second Sunday after Christmas Day
The St. Thomas More Society Scranton, Pennsylvania
2301 N. Washington Avenue
Scranton, Pennsylvania 18509
January 2, 2005
The second century heretic Marcion maintained that the Old Testament Scriptures were not divinely inspired. In fact, he insisted that they were not of God at all, but instead had as their source an evil god that existed as a rival to the God revealed in the Jesus Christ. In other words, Marcion rejected what we heard in the Gospel last Sunday, that the Word of God existed from the beginning, became flesh, and dwelt among us. To posit a rivalry between the God of the Old Testament and Jesus Christ, as Marcion did, is essentially to forget who Jesus is.
I raise this issue because we are, after all, still in the midst of celebrating Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation. At Christmas we remember that from eternity Jesus came, He became a man, and in the Ascension He returned to heaven, from whence He will one day come to be our Judge. I believe that much of the false teaching we are leaving behind in the Episcopal Church originates in Marcion’s error, an error Jesus’ own contemporaries made while he still walked the earth. That is, in the lesson from John this evening we see Jesus’ neighbors fail to recognize who Jesus is. They regard him purely from a human point of view, unable to apprehend that the God of their fathers, the Giver of the Law, the Maker of heaven and earth, is made manifest in Jesus of Nazareth.
Throughout my time in seminary and later as a clergyman I often heard Episcopalians say, for example, that Jesus never said anything about homosexual activity. This reveals a very limited understanding of Jesus the Word’s role in the creation of the universe and the composition of the Law. To make such an assertion is to divorce the second Person of the Trinity from the Trinity Himself, as if Jesus’ earthly ministry existed in isolation and is more authoritative than anything that happened before or came afterward. To deny that Jesus had a role in the Old Testament is truly to stand with Jesus’ neighbors, asking, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?”
Such a myopic view of our Lord is dangerous. Jesus says in today’s lesson from the Gospel, “Not that any one has seen the Father except him who is from God; he has seen the Father. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life”. To believe that Jesus is who He says He is, this is the key to eternal life. We must believe in the pre-existent Christ if we hope to receive the inheritance Jesus promised his disciples. If we pretend that all we can know about what Jesus has done is found only in the Gospels we do nothing helpful for the spiritual life of Christians. Rather, such fantasy would be to engage in the creation of a new religion, much like Marcion did eighteen centuries ago, and in encouraging people to participate in such a religion, we would imperil their souls.
What we must keep ever before us, and what Jesus kept ever before those to whom he ministered, is the reality that this life is a precursor and all but a shadow of the life to come, the life God intended for us from the beginning. Though we cannot see it, though we perceive the truth of it only by faith, the life we hope to inherit is far more substantial than the life we now enjoy. As John tells us in the lesson from the epistles, “...the world passes away, and the lust of it”. All that we can see, all that we can touch and perceive with our senses is temporary. What is eternal are not the things God has given us, but the life God has bestowed upon us.
I recognize that in telling you this I am to a great degree preaching to the choir. Those of you here this evening have left substantial things behind in order to participate in this new ministry. As I have said before at the organizational meetings in the basement of this church, we have brought nothing with us from our former fellowship of faith, except for that Faith we hold so dear. This willingness to make such sacrifices, to leave behind what our fathers initiated and we sweated to nurture and grow, this devotion to eternal matters is representative of the orientation to which John calls us. To compromise on such matters would be to compromise our ability to share with others the eternal Truth, the eternal Way, and the eternal Life. To make such compromises to preserve the things of this world that we have acquired over the years would be to choose Jesus the son of Joseph and Mary to the exclusion of Jesus the Son of God. As Christians we must cease seeing things from a human point of view, and be ever open to perceive God’s call to life. And in parting with old friends and old places to begin anew you have taken a huge step in the right direction, as painful as it may feel at times.
In our pain, however, there is promise. The sacrifice we have made together means that Episcopalians throughout the Lackawanna Valley, even throughout the Diocese of Scranton, now have a choice. Certainly they can choose to remain where they are, choose to preserve an institution that becomes increasingly ‘of the world’ on a daily basis. Or they can choose to accept the invitation Pope John Paul II has so graciously offered us, to stand in the Catholic faith in which we were reared without forswearing those elements of our heritage that are of an eternal nature. In establishing the St. Thomas More Society we seek to preserve from our Anglican heritage only what is eternal, the prayers we have offered week after week to our Heavenly Father, the fellowship in His Son with each other that we hope to see perfected in the life to come, and the spiritual gifts of the Holy Spirit that we have offered in service to our fellow man throughout our walk with our Lord. In our will to reject what is of the world and to hold fast to what is eternal, I anticipate a fruitful ministry to our brothers in need, so many of whom need desperately to see offered and received the sacrifices that Love requires. Moreover, we must expect for this Society growth beyond our ability to imagine, just one of the signs with which God blesses ministrations that are of His will.
As we look ahead with these expectations we ought to be careful to heed the wisdom present in this evening’s lesson from Ecclesiasticus, wherein we are advised that all we do be done in a spirit of humility. We are agreed that the denomination we left behind had strayed far afield from proclaiming God’s good desires for His people. But we must be equally certain that God will accept the repentance of those complicit in the deception of our fellow workers, certain that God’s forgiveness can transform heretics into saints just as surely as His grace has changed us. If those beholden to a lie are to come willingly into the presence of the Truth, we cannot be arrogant as we make our presentation. As we see our numbers grow and our witness increase these blessings must be to us a continual reminder of our dependence upon Him who has led us thus far, a reminder that success in the Church represents God’s strength in our weakness.
While an effective witness is one motive to remain humble, there is an even more compelling reason to ‘be unassuming in all we do.” That reason, of course, is God in Christ Himself. God in His wisdom did not come to us to call us to repentance in the guise of a conqueror and king. He came in the most vulnerable way, as a helpless baby amidst the storm of man’s sinfulness. He did not coerce us to assent to the truth, but persuaded us by His own sacrifice of Himself that sacrifice for man is the way to win men’s hearts. Therefore, go to your neighbors with an invitation as Jesus came to us, offering the sacrifice of yourself that others might choose the eternal life of God. You may find that all they are waiting for is the love that humility implies.