SERMON PREACHED BY THE REV'D JOHN ARCHER AT THE CHURCH OF THE ADVENT
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2007 - THE TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

With the possible exception of Christmas, no holiday season intrudes upon the popular imagination more than the festivals of late October and early November. No, I’m not talking about the World Series or leaf-peeping or even the ghost of Oktoberfest past … I mean the celebrations of departed souls that fan out across the week just ahead… All Saints’ Eve (better known to the world as Halloween), All Saints’ Day itself, and the solemn feast of All Souls.

In this time of year as the weather begins to move from the auburn warmth of fall into the starkness of winter, it’s fitting to examine our own lives against those who lived out their years on God’s earth, and then passed from it, into another realm. But the dark portal of death - and the unearthly domain that lies beyond it - pose perhaps the greatest challenge to human confidence. In the face of this last great unknown, our soul becomes uncertain, even fearful. Because we see through a dark glass and cannot know what lies ahead, faith has certainly played a large part in the quest for the spiritual capacity to welcome immortality by removing death’s sting, and replacing it with a sense of victory.

Early in Christian history, the Celtic marking of the coming of the dark side of the year - called Samhain or “summer’s end” - mingled pagan perspectives on the dead with the Christian commemorations of All Hallows Eve and the remembrance of saints and souls that followed. Modern examples of such blended traditions lie fairly close to home; you need go no further than Salem in October.

In point of fact, American culture has long seen a singular virtue in taming and thereby conquering the fear of the unknown, generated by all kinds of frontiers. Faith has been supplemented with accessible customs as we have found imaginative ways to portray our fears, and to satirize and even market our doubts away. The gamut of domesticated elements of commemoration for those who have died - and the curiosity about the possibility that they now live in a world beyond our imagining - ranges from impossibly cute to eerie to cartoonishly gory, from the warm feeling you get when dropping a peanut butter cup in the bag of the charming re-incarnation of Harry Potter who appears at your door, to tales of ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night, to the shrieks and nervous laughter that rise up if you can summon the foolhardy courage to sit through a scary movie.

However harmless or picturesque or tasteless, these home remedies do homage to a universal human tendency. For centuries, death and the life that follows death has been a fascination that eventually seizes just about everybody: the Christian, the skeptic, the amiable agnostic, the smug intellectual, the youth for whom the prospect of death seems impossibly remote, and the elder whose position in time makes acquaintance with the end imminent.

The watch word for human reactions to the inevitable and the unknowable is almost always the same: it’s the desire for control. In a nation such as ours today, where people are living longer than ever before, where the calculus of immortality seems ever more achievable, where technology explains away mysteries that summoned wonder or perhaps froze the heart in generations past, where destiny seems to be tameable through sound project management, where God’s ways seem less mysterious when viewed through the soft contacts of our own proud accomplishments, it’s not just the desire for control that shapes our notion of this final frontier… it’s the celebration of our supposed power to customize our destiny.

But we should not think that this is purely a hallmark of our own age, some byproduct of a society grown too wise to be anything other than foolish. A look at the Scriptures today will show us that this is no modern monopoly. The Pharisee in this morning’s Gospel parable has the old school version of this state of dis-ease. He believed in a reward for the righteous in the afterlife, but his tradition was not strongly burdened with preoccupations about the hereafter. The Pharisees lived “in the now,” and believed that the agent for control of one’s destiny lay in adhering to the centuries-old interpretation of the Law delivered to Moses, that set out a blueprint for living a godly life. They were proud of the way that their teachers had codified these conditions of control, and were not shy about parading that knowledge. In so doing they were, in their view, literally sharing words to live by. Surely one couldn’t be blamed for feeling a little superior.

Yet Jesus offers this parable “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt,” about “two men [who] went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.”

The Pharisee, [Jesus’ story goes] standing by himself, was praying thus, “‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’”

When I first read the lessons to in preparation for this sermon, I got to this last line and thought, “Boy, I’m glad I’m not being asked to preach on stewardship this week!” Keep in mind, however, that there’s nothing wrong with the Pharisee’s actions. His practices are altogether admirable. At issue are his pride in believing that he can simply will his justification before God by his own actions and the transparent contempt that he shows for others who do not match his self proclaimed standard of virtuous behavior. Against that, the tax collector presents the perfect foil:

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’” I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted."

Humility, the polar opposite of control, is the key to justification in the eyes of God, both in this life and in the life to come. It’s important also to note that humility is an attitude, a way that one is, not something one does. The Pharisee strives to conduct himself in hopes of bending the vision of heaven with the weight of his actions. The tax collector doesn’t trust himself even to make the effort to lift up his eyes to where all suppose heaven to be, but instead throws himself on the mercy of God, who is visible to this sinner purely because the eyes of his soul are opened by faith.

The Apostle Paul, himself a Pharisee, knew from hard experience that the course of one’s life is like a race, like a long fight that challenges a child of God both to act and to keep the faith. His conviction was that his every action in life was a preparation for the Lord’s coming, when victory over death would be Christ’s full gift to the faithful, secured through the outpouring of his own life on the cross. With that in his mind and heart, like the Pharisee in the parable, Paul considered his own end with confidence:

As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing.

But he also knew that salvation was not his to control. It was not his action that would save him. Like the tax collector, he knew also that he was utterly dependent on God’s mercy:

The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and save me for his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

We too, poised on the threshold of life eternal, with signs all around us of the great unknown of death and life, command the best vantage for taking the parable and St. Paul’s words to heart. While we can enjoy the customs that have grown up around this autumn constellation of the saints, we can, in faith, look for other signs that point to the certainty and the key to eternal life with God. God’s mercy is the condition for our entrance to heaven. God’s Christ is the means for that gift of mercy to enter the world. Christ’s Body and Blood are the tokens both of the grace and the gift: as one saint called them, they form the “medicine of immortality.” Our faith will give us the inner sight to perceive that mercy at work, when we call on God to help us surrender our desire to control our destiny and demystify the secrets of eternity.

Such is the paradox: of the redeemed sinner, the Pharisee become apostle, the child of earth become a child of God in Christ. The year is waning, the memory of the saints is bright as a new planet on the horizon, and the Advent of Christ - a new beginning for the recitation of the story of his sacrifice and promise - is but a few short weeks away. What better time to cast aside our fear, and place our trust again in God - Father Son and Holy Spirit.

Amen.