2nd Sunday of Advent

Deuteronomy 11:18-21, 26-28

Psalm 31:1-5, 19-24

Romans 3: 21-25a, 28

MATTHEW 7:21-27

Sermon -- May 29, 2005

DOING THE WILL OF GOD

“You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.”

In other words, God is saying to the children of Israel that they are to take God’s words seriously – very seriously. God’s words are to be important to them. In fact they are to be absolutely central in their lives and to be the power shaping their lives.

Shortly after I heard that Fr. Hubbard had had surgery and learned that I would probably be preaching today, I read through these passages. As I returned to them the next day, I was surprised to find that the word “teach” did not appear in the first sentence. In my thinking, I had changed God’s command to one of learning a set of rules or a body of knowledge. Even the “teach” in the second sentence is not about this.

You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul. Harper’s Bible Dictionary notes that “‘the word of God’ in scripture does not usually refer to the written word at all but rather to God’s or his emissaries’ speaking and inspiration.” The “word” is the power of God. God speaks and the universe and all that is in it is being created. God speaks through Moses and the first born of Egypt are killed and the children of Israel are delivered from bondage. God speaks through Jeremiah and judgment is heard and done in Judah. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and the world knows redemption.

You shall put the power of God in creation, the power of God to bind and to free, the power of God to kill and to raise up, the power of God to bless and to curse in your hearts. This is to put the power and inspiration of God in your heart and soul so that you become transformed and are the bearer of that power. Nothing else is to have a higher claim on you.

If the children of Israel do this, God promises them a blessing. If they do not do this and do not fill their hearts and souls and those of their children with God’s words, God promises them a curse.

“Now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it. . . . For there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift. . .” Simply put we have all chosen to put in our hearts something other than the word of God, and we have done other than the “word” of God.

First let me say that Paul is not expounding a doctrine of original sin here. We are not all inevitably destined to do this, but inevitably we all do it. Through the grace which is in Jesus Christ, God has redeemed us and set us free. (The words “redeemed” and “redemption” in the Bible refer to the price paid to purchase a slave’s freedom.)

The biggest problem with the law is that, inevitably, it becomes about us getting it right, about us being so good, about us being so righteous. Somewhere in it all God disappears, and we are written large (and frequently in God’s name). Then we have Pharisees. Do not kid yourselves. Pharisees were not just a sect in Jesus’ time or just Jews. There are many, many more Pharisees who attend church every Sunday morning today or who attend synagogue on the Sabbath today than there were Pharisees in Jesus’ time.

Through Jesus, God has redeemed us from the awful power that enslaves us to ourselves and to other things that keep the power of the word of God from being in us and working through us. By God’s action and through faith, we are set free to live in and through the word and power of God. Through faith we are again free “to put these words of mine” in our hearts and souls; to teach them to our children; to talk about them when we are at home and when we are away; when we are up and around and when we are resting; to make them the most important things in our lives.

Jesus said, “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. . . . then I will declare to them, I never knew you; depart from me.” Matthew 7:21 & 23

The grace of God and faith do not set us free from doing the will of God. They set us free to live in and through the power of God.

Many of those condemned by Jesus in this passage were no doubt viewed as good, perhaps even outstanding persons. They had done truly great things in the name of Jesus. They preached great messages, healed many, they had prophesied in the Lord’s name. Yet, at the judgment they are not known. They are sent away. They are condemned. All that they did was washed away because it was in the Lord’s name, but it was about them.

I believe one of the great mistakes in the history of the church was the decision that some are called to be “religious.” The rest just need to come to church, receive the sacraments and be obedient to the teachings of the “religious.” By the way, both Catholics and Protestants do this, so do not just condemn one group.

I am more and more convinced that all are called to be “religious”. All are called to place God’s word in their hearts. The greatest task of the church is to be a community of formation—to be a place where we are opened to the Word; where we are led and supported in our quest to be opened to God’s presence and power to change.

It was seventeen years ago this month that I made my life profession and vows in the Third Order, Society of Saint Francis after a period of nearly five years as a postulant and novice. For over twelve years of that time, I have been involved in one way or another in the formation process of persons from the time they become aspirants to the time that they are elected to profession. Earlier this month I became the Formation Director for the Province of the Americas of the Order which covers North and South America and other parts of the world. Doing all of this formation work, I have come to know the stories and journeys of dozens and dozens of people. Many, many different qualities can be found in them. Each is special and unique. They also represent an amazing diversity. At the same time, each is amazingly ordinary. Among them are bishops, priests and deacons. There are lay people, some who have key roles of leadership in the local church, diocese and even the national church. Some have no such positions. Some have Ph.D.s. Some verge on being illiterate. They have all kinds of lifestyles, from being homeless or in prison, to living in fairly standard housing that is like everybody else’s. What all have in common is a deep desire to be opened to the Word of God, to place it in their hearts and to live from it.

We tend to dismiss “spirituality” as optional and “spiritual” people as otherworldly. Nothing could be less true. The Jewish people have been set up far too often as straw people to be easily knocked down by Christians. They are not. More than one person has asked why they have survived—a small group of people from a small country that was defeated over and over again. They have been forced into exile on more than one occasion, one lasting nearly two thousand years, and have known severe persecution—not for years, decades or even centuries but for millennia. Still they survive. Why? The one answer that seems to keep coming back is that they took the Word of their God very, very seriously.

We tend to think of spiritual people as impractical. Some of our greatest and most practical leaders have been deeply spiritual people. We tend to think of mystics and spiritual people as generally off in a fog or vision. The visions of the Lady Julian of Norwich, which became the basis of her life and writing that still inspire so many today, occurred over a period of about three days and took about forty-five minutes. We tend to think of spiritual people as very pious. Piety has little or nothing to do with being spiritual. You can be very pious and not spiritual. You can be spiritual and not pious. One of my favorite stories is about Teresa of Avila, the great 16^th century Spanish mystic and good friend of St. John of the Cross. Among her many activities, she reformed the Carmelite Order and founded many new houses. These activities and her work as a spiritual director and teacher required her to travel over much of Spain, most of it by foot or on a donkey. One day as she was traveling, a thunderstorm overtook her and the donkey she was riding. As they approached a stream, the donkey’s foot slipped and she fell off into the stream. As she got up, she slipped and fell into some mud. Getting up, soaked and covered with mud, she looked to the sky and shook her fist saying “If this is how you treat friends, no wonder you don’t have many!”

In a wonderful little booklet Leading from Within: Reflections on Spirituality and Leadership, Parker Palmer quotes Vaclav Havel, the first president of post Soviet Czechoslovakia, from a speech that he gave before the U.S. Congress. In that speech Havel says: “consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim. For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed—be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization—will be unavoidable.”

All else must come from it. Amen.

(The Rev.) William O. Breedlove

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church