[Sermon delivered at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona on the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, October 16, 2022]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
It is not often when the Proper Scriptures for a Sunday all come together and suggest a common theme (a regular criticism about the Revised Common Lectionary that crops up at least once a week online). When I read the readings for today, the following verses jumped out at me:
“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”[1]
“Your commandment has made me wiser than my enemies,
and it is always with me”.[2]
“For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.”[3]
“And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”[4]
At this point you may be thinking, “Uh, no, I don’t see it.”
Humour me for a moment.
What we have here are small passages of Holy Writ about discerning the Will of God. Now, like most excisions of Scripture out of context, taking these as they are could well lead to misinterpretation with various and sundry negative effects, so we need to take great care to ensure that we do not create a stumbling block out of whole cloth, if you may forgive me for mixing metaphors.
In this collection of Scriptures, the Prophet Jeremiah shares that “after those days” God’s Law the knowledge of His will, will be intuitive to His people. The Psalm tells us that this Law, knowledge of the Will of God, is the foundation of wisdom; in fact, that whole psalm (all one hundred and seventy-six verses of it) is a love-song to the Will of God expressed in His Law. Then we take these very positive and optimistic verses and put them next to the verses from the assigned Epistle and Gospel.
I would not use the terms positivity and optimism to describe these passages.
What we have here is an inversion of the popular impression of the Old Testament versus the New Testament. Common opinion views the Old Testament as negative, full of, “Thou shalt nots,” and, “He did evil in the sight of the LORD,” and negative views on society and on the coming judgement. In contrast, popular opinion views the New Testament as positive, focused on the peace and delight of the Beatitudes, offers of forgiveness, affirmations of grace. These views, as I said, are common, but they are distortions. Both Testaments focus on the human condition, current issues, present troubles, and even looming disasters of varying degree. They also focus on the good to come, God’s grace and mercy, a coming time when God will make right all the troubles and woes not just of His chosen people but of all the nations, and even the whole of the afflicted cosmos. Both Testaments deal with what we have now as well as what is promised in the age to come.
Keeping that in mind, we can then review these seemingly contradictory passages together in a different light. Jeremiah looked at the faithlessness around him at the twilight of the Kingdom of Judah and caught a glimpse from God of an age to come when the problems of this age would pass away, and that God and His people would be reconciled. The psalmist revelled in the blessed state that comes when one’s will unites perfectly with that of the Most High. Both looked to the ideal, to the age to come, a time that they looked for, but did not quite see, whose echoes that they sought, but never quite heard. As Our Lord put it,
“…Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it”.[5]
The realization of the prophetic vision and the promise of the Law belonged solely to Our Lord and that revelation is contained in our New Testament Scriptures. However, in the specific passages we are looking at, St. Paul and Our Lord do not speak of the age to come or of the wonders of the Kingdom of God, but at the current age from the present to its end. If one carefully reflects on this, this is consistent with the context of the prophetic message and even the psalms. This new covenant which Jeremiah proclaimed replaces the current covenant which Israel did not keep.[6] The psalmist contrasts the perfect union of human and divine will, the love of the Law, with those who do not keep it, who by implication set themselves on an evil direction and shy away from aligning themselves with God’s will.[7] St. Paul cautions St. Timothy to remain constant in Holy Tradition, to adhere to what he had been taught of the Kingdom of God, because even then people were abandoning tradition to cherry-pick what they like and discard those parts of tradition they do not like, replacing uncomfortable doctrines with ones that do not irritate their consciences or poke holes in their vision of an easy-going everything-goes God, or worse yet, a very partisan God.
Sound familiar?
These are not comfortable words for us living in a pluralistic society, where forging one’s own way is the war-cry of our generation, where the adage, “An ye harm none, do what ye will,” is the creed by which a more enlightened society is supposed to function. Instead, we have the tension between discerning the Will of God and exercising our God-given free will. Herein lies the great risk taken by God, that as we work out this tension we still deviate from the true path. In Greek, the word for sin, ἁμαρτία, literally means to “miss the target” or deviate from the true path of the arrow’s flight. St. Paul is well aware and strives to remind St. Timothy that picking, choosing, or inventing any doctrine that does not fully proclaim the truth of God, or foster a closer relationship with God, or affirms the pains that God took to redeem us and reconcile us, causes us to stray from the arrow’s path and ultimately harms us. Even Jesus tells us,
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”[8]
Why is the path narrow and the road hard? The fact is the path to eternal life is one not of action only, not of intent only, but action and intent. Our intent is to reconcile with God and unite our wills with His. The natural outgrowth of that reconciliation is that our actions must be in line with the Gospel. Here, the adage, “The end justifies the means,”[9] has zero place on the narrow path.
How do we practice this within a pluralistic society? After all, we do live in a culture that permits alternate and opposing, even insane, points of view, in which it is very easy to lose track of the true path of the arrow’s flight. As Christians, to keep the arrow’s flight on trajectory, we need to keep firmly in front of us sound and solid doctrine. We have the Holy Scriptures, the Holy Tradition, the Oecumenical Councils, the Creed. However, we are not called to blind and unthinking application of them, instead we are called to study and discern and honestly evaluate them to yield proper discernment and interpretation to avoid partial or erroneous application of them, causing them to divert the arrow’s flight. This requires the full engagement of our intellect and reason. We have all seen many stray from the proper flight path, either by giving up on discerning the right path and just doing whatever is easiest or most expedient, or by blindly subscribing to a set of rules and disengaging reason, mindfulness, and true discernment whether their interpretation of the rule truly is the will of God. Our Lord rightly asks the question whether at the end of the age will anyone still possess a living and lively faith, or will they succumb to the easy way out.
There are no easy solutions, but there is a path. We have the treasury of the faith: the Law, the Prophets, the Gospel of the Kingdom, and the Holy Tradition. We must persevere in it and proclaim it. Proclaim it in deeds, proclaim it in words, mindfully engage with it, but never ignore it, so should we stray from the bullseye, we have the means to correct our aim. St. Paul tells St. Timothy to be persistent. Our Lord tells His disciples to be persistent. Will Jesus Our Lord find faith on the earth when He returns at the end of the age? Only if we persist in our struggle and in our prayers and in our reasonable adherence to the Holy Tradition, and truly support each other in the process.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] Jer. 31.33 [2] Ps. 119.98 [3] 2 Tim. 4.3-4 [4] Lk. 18.8 [5] Mt. 13.16-17 [6] Jer. 31.31-32 [7] Ps. 119.101-102 [8] Mt. 7.13-14 [9] While incorrectly attributed to Machiavelli, his writings on political expediency implied it. He himself derived the concept from the philosophy of consequentialism and from other classical thinkers.