[Sermon composed for the Sunday broadcast at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix AZ (https://www.stmarysphoenix.org/online) for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 18, 2021]
✠ In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen
This morning I want to turn your attention to four passages from our proper Scriptures for this morning:
“Tremble, then, and do not sin; speak to your heart in silence upon your bed.”[1]
“Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out.”[2]
“You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him.”[3]
“Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”[4]
Here the Psalm, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistle, the Gospel are all united in this message, that,
a) Sin must be shunned,
b) Sin must be forgiven.
These are things we all know. We know the hurtful things that deny God, deny the good God has placed in each of us, deny the needs of others is all around us. We know that. Take a drive during rush hour if you still have doubts. Read or watch the news.
“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”[5]
Regardless of how you feel about St. Paul, the early part of his Epistle to the Romans is a very good exposition of the endemic problem of sin and corruption in the human condition. Now, it is no secret to many of you that my formation was heavily influenced by the Orthodox churches. Their view that corruption is a hereditary affliction and is the root of our continual trajectory toward sin and ultimately total death not just physical but spiritual influences my preaching and that of countless other men and women who with us proclaim the Gospel of Christ.
Many philosophies deep down recognize this tendency toward the Abyss, whatever they call it, and offer ways for the concerned to move past that, to quell the passions, to achieve a positive, affirming state. As tools for enacting one’s own turning to God, some of them are not half bad. In fact, some of them may be fairly good, but…
They fail to address the root of the problem, that corruption and those sins that have already driven a wedge between us and God. The teachings of the Apostle John make it very clear that there is no sin in God, sin cannot exist in God, and sin cannot abide God. There are things we have felt, thought, and done that dig that trench and dig it deep. Where the Christian faith differs from many other faiths and philosophies is that it recognizes that humanity has dug a hole too deep for itself to get out of no matter how hard we try, but not so much for God. As Jesus Himself put it, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”[6] And what was possible for God was,
There, there is the Christian message. No matter what we do the corruption is still there, but in Jesus Christ God has dealt with it and washed it away, and better yet, in Jesus’ Resurrection, the prospect of eternal corporeal life is extended to a weary humanity.
That brings me to the second point of today’s homily. The Resurrection. Our Western concept of the afterlife prevalent in media and popular piety is in a word…heretical. Consider the popular ideas about the afterlife that may or may not have some grounding in glances at Scripture but ignore the impact of the Resurrection:
We live on in the memories of those we leave behind.
We live on as bodiless spirits in whatever plane we merit.
We have some sort of existence that may have some sort of physicality to it, but not this flesh and blood sort of thing.
Jesus was not interested in bodiless spirits wafting about eternity. If that is all God wanted, He would have stopped at the creation of the angels and let it go at that! Jesus did not give the bereaved glimpses of their deceased loved ones as spirits drifting into the light with gazes of benediction on those left behind like some sort of first-century Long Island Medium or Ghost Whisperer; He gave them their dead back walking, talking, living, and breathing in their bodies. It is kind of hard to walk into the light when in that form you are more likely to walk into a tree. Jairus’ daughter,[10] the Widow of Nain’s son,[11] Lazarus,[12] these were people who had died (and in Lazarus’ case had gone over quite badly) and suddenly through the power of the Incarnate Word were walking about in perfect health.
When Jesus Himself died horribly on the cross, he did not come back as a formless spirit, a wraith to bestow luminous blessings on those left behind, he got up and walked out of the tomb. Our witnesses here are clear. The injuries sustained in scourging, beating, crucifixion, and stabbing (do not forget the spear in the side) are ones you do not get up and walk around from as if nothing had happened on the same weekend. And it was not an appearance of either the death or an appearance of the life, but Jesus suffered horribly, died horribly, and then rose again. He ate fish supplied by others to prove it, He let His disciples touch Him and check out His wounds to prove it.[13] He stayed with them during the Great Forty Days to prove it. And it was not just the Twelve. It was not just Mary Magdalene. Many disciples got to see to their great joy that their Lord, OUR LORD, had indeed risen and was alive and had a body.[14] Granted, a more improved model but still corporeal and human all the same. Humanity 2.0 as it were.
So, we have two ideas to work with from our propers today that I want you to take home.
We are engaged in a huge effort to address the corruption in our lives and around us.
Jesus’ Death and Resurrection addresses the root issue which prevents #1 from being a futile exercise.
When we Christians receive our Baptism, we share in Jesus’ Death and Resurrection. We link our deaths and our corruption to His Death and link ourselves to His Resurrection. In that we share a hope of a bodily resurrection much the same as that of Our Lord. He has addressed our base corruption so that we can in hope pursue our repentance and turning back to God without the fear that our corruptible natures will prevent us from bridging the gap, for Jesus has addressed that gap.
As we let that sink in, let us also remember that we also share in the Apostle’s duty of bearing witness. Witness to what? Think about it. We are bearing witness to the fact that we can turn back to God, and He will be right there. When we walk the way of Christ, God is there beside us supporting us, behind us pushing us, before us beckoning us on. Turning to God is not to turn and see some hint in the far-off distance. Thanks to Jesus, when we turn to God, God is right there in our faces. Yes, that is scary. Yes, that is up close and personal. But thanks to Jesus, God is with us if we but turn to Him. Thanks to Jesus, we will be together with God forever as living, breathing creatures of His love and compassion.
Consider these words we said earlier:
Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.[15]
Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over Him. The death that He died, He died to Sin, once for all; but the life He lives, He lives to God. So also consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ our Lord.[16]
Christ is raised from the dead, the first fruits of them that slept. For since by a man came Death, by a man has come the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive![17]
Do not keep it a secret, the Lord is Risen Indeed!
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Saviour save us. Amen.
The Risen Jesus Appears to the Disciples, Mosaic from Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, 6th Century CE
[1] Ps. 4.4 [2] Acts 3.19 [3] 1 Jn. 3.5-6 [4] Lk. 24.46-47 [5] Rom. 3.23 [6] Mk. 10.27, cf. Mt. 19.26 [7] Jn. 1.14 [8] Rom. 5.8 [9] Rom. 6.4 [10] Mk. 5.21.24, 5.35-43; Lk. 8.40-42, 49-56 [11] Lk. 7.11-17 [12] Jn. 11.1-44, 12.1-2, 12.9-11 [13] Lk. 24.36b-43 [14] 1 Cor. 15.4-8 [15] 1 Cor. 5.7-8 [16] Rom. 6.9-11 [17] 1 Cor. 15-20-22