"Deepen (Follow Me)": A Sermon on Matthew 4:18-22

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Calling of the Apostles (Sistine Chapel, 1481)

I preached this homily this past Sunday at the 5:30pm Uptown contemporary service at Church of the Incarnation. It's part of a sermon series on discipleship that's part of an initiative at Incarnation called "3D Faith." Check out Incarnation's website for the other sermons in the series.

"As Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the lake—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him." (Matthew 4:18–22)

Have you ever noticed that the Gospels give two different versions of the calling of the disciples? We just heard Matthew’s version: Jesus shows up and says, “Follow me,” and “immediately they left their nets and followed him.” But John’s Gospel says they were called in a different way. We heard John’s version last week. Do you remember it? Two of John the Baptist’s disciples are hanging out with him and Jesus walks by and John says, “Hey, there goes the Lamb of God.” And the two disciples get curious and tag along after Jesus, and he sees them following him and asks what they’re looking for, and they ask to see where he’s staying, and he says, “Come and see,” and so they do. Anyway, one of these guys was Andrew and the next day he gets his brother, Simon, and brings him to Jesus, and Jesus looks at him and says, “You’re Simon; I’m going to call you Rock” (which is what Peter means). Pretty different from Matthew’s version, right? In John’s version Andrews calls Peter, but in Matthew’s Jesus calls them both. There Jesus says “Come and see,” here he says, “Follow me.” Why the difference?

Back in the fourth century, a preacher named John Chrysostom wondered about the difference, too. Here’s what he suggests: What if Matthew is telling the story of the second time Jesus called Peter and Andrew, and John’s version is the story of the first time? He notices that in John’s version John the Baptist is not yet in prison, while Matthew goes out of his way to say that John the Baptist had already been arrested when Jesus calls the disciples. What if Andrew and Peter followed Jesus for a while and, hearing that John the Baptist was arrested, went back to their old way of life, leaving Jesus to return to fishing? What if Jesus finds them fishing because they had stopped following him? If this is the case, what does it say about Jesus?

Chrysostom sees in the different stories a Jesus who is as persistent and patient as a master fisherman. He says, “Jesus neither resisted them at first when they desired to withdraw from him, nor having withdrawn themselves, did he let them go altogether. He gave way when they moved aside from him and came again to win them back. This, after all, is exactly what fishing is all about.”[1]  He sees Jesus as a seasoned fisherman, rather like the one in the Old Man in the Sea, who can tell from the pressure of the line between his thumb and finger when to let the line run with the fish and when to reel it in, who feels a gentle touch on the line and is happy. [2]  If Jesus is like a master fisherman, he says “come and see” to bait the disciples and “follow me” to hook them. 

If Jesus is like a fishermen, then he’s fishing for you and for me. He wants to catch us. He wants to draw us out of the deep. He wants us, but he will not force us to come to him. He is patient, luring us to him, calling to us, “Come and see, taste and see my goodness.” He does not force us to follow him, but lets us nibble at the bait. But he is persistent, and he does not give up on us. He keeps casting his net. And there comes a time when he says, “Follow me.”

Stanley Hauerwas says there’s a difference between admiring Jesus and following Jesus. [3] Lots of people admire Jesus; he’s a pretty impressive guy after all, going around healing people and driving out demons and talking about love and forgiveness and peace. Crowds of people admired Jesus; they were attracted to him, and came from all over to see him preach and teach and heal. Maybe Andrew and Peter initially admired Jesus; they went and saw where he was saying. And then they went back to their fishing and their nets. But Jesus doesn’t let them go altogether; he fishes them out and says, “Follow me.” “And immediately they left their nets and followed him.”

You see, that’s the difference between admiring and following Jesus. You can admire Jesus all day long and then go back to whatever you were doing before. But if you want to follow Jesus, you must change your life. You’ve got to leave your nets behind. And not just once, but again and again.

What are “nets”? Well, lots of things! Good things and bad. “Nets” can be anything that draws us away from the love of God, anything that keeps us from putting our whole trust in the grace and love of the Lord Jesus. The world, the flesh, and the devil—the things we renounce in Baptism—are “nets.” The idols in the epistle lesson are “nets”; the many false gods from which the Thessalonians turned “to serve a living and true God” (1 Thess. 1:9). Greed and envy and ambition are nets. Fear is a net and shame, and so is regret over past choices. 

But good things can be the most subtle nets. In the Gospel lesson, the “nets” are, well, nets. But they’re not just objects; they represent the source of livelihood of Simon and Andrew, and James and John; they represent their wealth.  And what did Jesus say about that? “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt. 6:24). And James and John didn’t just leave their nets behind, they left behind their boat and their father. Even our families can be nets. A respectable, responsible middle class lifestyle can be a net. Our loves can be nets.

Whether good or bad, “nets” are those things that keep you from giving your whole self to God. “Nets” are those things in which you are tempted to place your entire trust, which you are tempted to idolize. For, as Martin Luther said, “to have a god is to have something in which the heart entirely trusts.” [4] But, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”—only the living God, who raised Jesus from the dead and called Israel from Egypt and light out of darkness, is worthy of your entire trust. If you place your entire trust in “nets”, you’ll find that everything flows through them; you won’t catch what you’re looking for in them.

The problem with nets is that they don’t go deep enough; they only skim the surface. As C.S. Lewis puts it, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased,” he says. [5] But Jesus calls us to leave our “nets” behind, because only he can truly satisfy the desires of our hearts. He says, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. […] But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you as well” (Mt. 6:25, 33). Often “nets” are good things, but Jesus calls us to something better. Being with Jesus, putting your whole trust in his grace and love, is the best thing. As Augustine famously confessed, “You made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Jesus calls us to leave our “nets” behind because he wants what is best for us. When he says, “Follow me,” we can hear him saying, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Mt. 11:28–29). Because Jesus gives us in himself what we are seeking in our nets, we can let them behind and follow him without fear or worry. Because we find what we seek in him, we can bear the cost of discipleship. Because Christ is our life, we can risk the loss of our lives in following him.

Paride Taban is a retired Roman Catholic bishop from southern Sudan. He was ordained priest in 1964, and was one of the few remaining priests in southern Sudan during years of war. He was made bishop of the Diocese of Torit in 1983 and lead his people for two decades through some of the most difficult years of Sudan’s brutal civil war. When he retired in 2004, he moved to a remote area of Sudan and founded the Holy Trinity Peace Village where people of different ethnicities and religions live together. Bishop Taban knows what it is to risk his life to follow Christ. I can scarcely imagine the sacrifices he has made. I mention him, though, not because of how much he has left behind to follow Christ, but because he says something that suggests that what really matters in discipleship is how we hold what we have. He says, “Life is a very precious gift. If you grasp it or hold on to it with all your might, you will crush it. Hold it loosely in your hands, grateful for the gift.” [6]

In other words, discipleship is a matter of the heart, a matter of holding your life loosely, a matter of lifting it to God the Giver of Life. And God wants your whole heart, your whole life. As Gregory the Great puts it, “the kingdom of heaven is worth as much as you have.” [7] And what do you have that you have not received?

You can only give your life one day at a time, though. You can only follow Jesus one step at a time. When Jesus called the disciples and they left everything and followed him, they did not know where the road would lead. But they took the decisive step out away from their nets toward Jesus. I wonder what concrete step Jesus is asking you to take today? I wonder how you will leave the shallows and cast out into the deep, into the deep, deep love of Jesus?

Maybe, though, you feel all tangled up in your nets and that you can’t get free. You’re all tangled up and you’re gasping for breath. The good news is that Jesus wants to come to you and slowly disentangle you.

At the end of John’s Gospel, Peter is all eaten up with shame because he’s denied Jesus. That’s the net he’s tangled up in. But the risen Jesus comes to him on the shore one bright morning and asks him three times, “Peter, do you love me?” “Do you love me?” “Do you love me?”

You see what Jesus is doing? He’s disentangling Peter from his net, from his shame and regret. And then he says to him, “Follow me.”

We can follow Jesus because he comes and frees us from our nets.

[1] John Chrysostom, Gospel of Matthew, Homily 14, in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Matthew 1–13, p. 71.

[2] Cf. Hemingway, Old Man in the Sea.

[3] Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew (Brazos Theological Commentary), p. 57.

[4] Luther, Large Catechism, 3.10.

[5] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory.

[6] Paride Taban, The Long Road to Peace, quoted by Ross Kane, "We Need Training in Transcendence," Faith & Leadership.

[7] Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies, 5.2, in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Matthew 1–13, p. 71.

"The Field and the Barn"

Aleksey Savrasov, Rye (1881)

A sermon on Matthew 13:24–30, 36–43 (readings here), preached today at Church of the Incarnation, Dallas. Recording here.

♱     ♱     ♱

The Tree of Life is a strange and beautiful movie by Terrence Malick.  Perhaps you’ve seen it. The film revolves around the life of Jack O’Brien and his relationship with his brother and parents.  It surrounds this family drama with epic scenes: the creation of the world, gestation and birth—even dinosaurs and the Reunion Tower.  Most scenes, though, are intimate flashbacks to Jack’s childhood in a 1950s Texas town.  In an important sequence, Jack as a twelve-year old boy is swimming with a group of boys on a beautiful summer afternoon.  Everything is sunshine and smiles.  Then tragedy:  a boy floats facedown in the water.  Men dive in.  Try to resuscitate the boy.  Fail.  Jack is right there  The scene shifts and Jack’s family is coming out of a church in funeral clothes.  The boys are silent but turn summersaults in the graveyard.  The scene shifts again and Jack is playing with friends.  There’s laughter.  But in a whispered voiceover, we hear what’s on Jack’s mind.  He’s crying out to God:  “Where were you?  You let a boy die.  You let anything happen.”  

If you are like me, you’ve whispered similar protests to God.  “Where were you?  You let anything happen. You let good people suffer. You let injustice unchecked.  You let the Holocaust happen.  You let Hiroshima happen.  You let my grandfather’s mind get eaten by Alzheimer’s.  You let my friend lose his job.  You let me get cancer.  You let...You let…You let...”  

We protest because we believe God is good and able to set things right, but things continue all wrong and we don’t understand why he doesn’t just step in and fix it.

The parable in today’s Gospel lesson raises precisely this problem:  Why does God seem to let anything happen?  You know the story: a man sows good seed into his field, but his enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat.  The poisonous weeds grow up alongside the wheat, and their root systems become intertwined.  When the man’s servants see the weeds, they want to pull them up right away.  But he refuses!  He doesn’t want to risk rooting up the wheat along with them.  “Let them both grow together until the harvest,” he says, “and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn” (Mt. 13:36).

As Jesus explains to his disciples, the man in the story signifies himself, the Son of Man who sows the good seed, the good news of the kingdom, in the world.  The weeds signify the devastation born of the lies sown by the Enemy, the sin and evil that corrupt the goodness of creation.  The wheat is the people of God, the precious crop the Lord of the harvest waits to gather into his barn.  The weeds are destined for the fire, but the righteous for the glory of the Kingdom of God.

“Everything will turn out alright in the end,” Jesus seems to be saying, “you just have to be patient.”

But this doesn’t answer our question:  Why does God wait to pull up the weeds?  Sure, it’s nice to hear that God cares about the wheat and will bring it into his barn and all, but I’m stuck here in the field with all these weeds around me!  How does this help me bear living in the here and now?  Where death threatens to tear my loves from me, where the devil and the world’s pomp beset me, where there’s never enough to satisfy my desires, where I walk “by faith, not by sight,” where the whole creation groans.  “How does the hope of “the life of the world to come” help me endure all this suffering and evil?”, we ask.  My spouse is dying, and I’m worried about finances, and there are school shootings, and Syria’s falling apart, and it may come out alright in the end, but someone’s got to do something before everything goes to hell!

So we set about trying to fix things ourselves.  We’re self-reliant Americans after all.  And a lot of the time this strategy seems to work pretty well: We train better lifeguards, and fewer boys drown; we develop new medical technologies, and life expectancy increases; we get tough, and crime decreases; we reform education, and test scores improve.  

But then there are the times this strategy doesn’t work out so well.  Often even our best efforts have negative unintended consequences, and our impatience leads to disaster.  We seek justice, but put an innocent man on death row.  We want to prolong the life of our loved ones, but pump them full of medicines until they’re numb and place them in institutions where they die alone under fluorescent lights.  We work hard to provide for our families, but our marriages fall apart.  We try to reform the church, but end up sowing division.  We respect the dignity of every human being, but neglect the worship of God.  We seek to do good, but evil results.  All we wanted was to pull up the weeds, but we’ve uprooted the wheat as well.  We were not able adequately to disentangle the roots.  

And that’s the rub, isn’t it?  The root systems go deep, deep down: both wheat and weeds grow together in our hearts.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn puts it powerfully in The Gulag Archipelago:  “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.  But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” [2] Solzhenitsyn continues, “This line shifts.  Inside us, it oscillates with the years.  And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.  And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil.” [2]

That the line between good and evil passes right through my heart helps me see the Lord’s delay in rooting out evil as good news.  If it were otherwise, a considerable portion of my heart might cling like clods of dirts to the roots of the weeds he pulls out.  As it is, waiting for his coming leaves room for repentance.  Our Lord is coming to judge the quick and the dead, and if he does “let anything happen” in the interim, it begins to seem like kindness and mercy and patience towards me, rather than negligence. St. Peter confirms this when he writes, “The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pt. 3:9).  The Lord forbears for our own good.  Even in our own hearts, “he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mt. 5:45).

Knowing God forbears also with the evil in my own heart does help me endure life in the field.  Yet if we had just this parable to go on, we might think that God is standing somewhere off at the edge of the field, at a remove from the sufferings of our lives.  Thankfully, though, we know God not as a bystander to our lives, but as involved with us and for us.  He has made us, and we are his.  He cares for us.  He plants his people Israel; he stoops to tend their soil.  He prunes old branches and grafts in new.  And in Jesus, he has rooted himself in our field. Jesus is God-with-us.  He is both farmer and plant—the root of Jesse, the true vine.  He knows what it is to grow up alongside weeds, because “he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isa. 53:4), endured hostility and suffering and the cross.  He is the grain of wheat that has fallen into the earth, so that it might bear much fruit (cf. Jn. 12:24).  Risen from the dead, he is “the first fruits” (1 Cor. 15:20) of the great wheat harvest of the Resurrection.

This is the best news:  in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has already acted decisively to set things right.  He is making all things new.  He is the one who will establish his reign of justice and peace, who will relegate “all causes of sin” and all evil (Mt. 13:41) to the past; who will swallow up death forever.  

Because his redemption is sure, we can live in the joyful hope of the Resurrection.  Because God has won the victory, we can live without defense.  Because God is in control, we can live without needing to take control.  We do not need—indeed, are not able—to fix the devastation of the world.  All we need do is be faithful to God. [3]

And God is able to use our simple faithfulness in his care for the world.  Indeed, our faithfulness, our fortitude in the face of evil, is itself a sign of God’s renewal of creation.  “The truest fortitude,” says John Milton, is patience.  The truest fortitude is not allowing wrongs suffered for the sake of the good to turn us from following Christ.  This fortitude, this patience, is the fruit of the Holy Spirit.  That is, its presence is a sign that the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is at work in our lives.  Patience is a foretaste of the peaceable Kingdom.  Our patient faithfulness anticipates the glory we will have in the Resurrection, when we shall forever “behold the fair beauty of the Lord” (Ps. 27:4) and “be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn. 3:2).  

God is able to use our faithfulness in his renewal of the world.  Therefore, we can live joyfully in the midst of the sufferings of this present time.  I can’t say it any better than St. Paul:  “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Rom. 5:3–5).  

♱     ♱     ♱

[1] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, Part I, Chapter 4, “The Bluecaps,” in Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and Daniel J. Mahoney, eds., The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005, p. 231.

[ 2] Ibid., Part IV, Chapter 1, “The Ascent,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader, pp. 265–6.

[3] My debt to the work of Stanley Hauerwas in the paragraph is obvious.  See, e.g., Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics, and Stanley Hauerwas (with Charles Pinches), “Practicing Patience: How Christians Should Be Sick” in The Hauerwas Reader (eds., John Berkman and Michael G. Cartwright), pp. 348–366.

"A Perpetual Love and Fear"

Canon Andrew White, "The Vicar of Baghdad"

A sermon on Matthew 10:16–33, my first as a deacon, preached today at Church of the Incarnation.*

"And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell." —Matthew 10:28

In Baghdad there is an Anglican church called St. George's.  In many ways, St. George's is like any other parish:  there are baptisms, Holy Communion, sermons, pastoral care, weddings, funerals.  There’s a school there.  But St. George’s also has a dental clinic and a medical clinic where patients receive free treatment and medication; most of the clinic's patients are Muslims.  There's even a food distribution center.  But what really distinguishes St. George's from other churches are the bomb barricades that surround the building, the four security checkpoints that anyone visiting the church must go through, and the armed guards.

The Vicar of St. George's wears a flak jacket over his clericals and his cross.  That man is the Reverend Canon Dr. Andrew White, an English priest known as the "Vicar of Baghdad.”  He’s served St. George's since 1998.  At a hefty 6'3", traveling by helicopter and escorted by an armed convoy on his parish visitations, he's been described as "a gospel-toting James Bond."[1]  Like 007, Canon Andrew regularly faces mortal danger without fear.  Indeed, he describes almost nonchalantly the terrors he's endured:  "I've been hijacked, kidnapped, locked up in rooms with cut off bits of fingers and toes and things.  I've been held at gunpoint, been attacked, you know, the usual thing." [2]  Terrible things have happened to him, he says, but worse have happened to his Iraqi colleagues.  One year, eleven of his staff were killed.  Nevertheless, in the midst of all this violence and death, Canon Andrew exudes a sense of joy and utter fearlessness.

Canon Andrew embodies the fearlessness to which Christ call his disciples.  As we heard in the Gospel reading, when Jesus sends out his twelve disciples, he tells them not to fear.  Or rather, he tells them what to fear.

Let’s recall the story:  Jesus summons the twelve apostles and gives them his authority to proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God and to heal the sick and suffering.  He sends them out with instructions to take neither money nor extra provisions, telling them to rely on the hospitality of strangers, to trust in God's provision.  Jesus sends them out with nothing to hinder their reliance on God's power.  They have nothing other than the authority he has given them and go with nothing to promise—not health or wealth or even success—they offer only life in the Kingdom of God, life with Christ.

He warns them of the opposition they will face as they announce the coming of God's reign, which calls into question all competing claims of allegiance.  He is sending them out "as sheep in the midst of wolves," because they go unarmed into a world made violent through the delusions of sin.  Jesus is straightforward about the cost of heeding his summons.  "Beware of men,” he says, “for they will deliver you up to councils, and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake. [...] Brother will deliver brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all for my name's sake" (Mt. 10:17, 18, 20).  Jesus warns the disciples about these wolves so that they may not fear the wolves.

As sheep relying only on the gifts of the Spirit, the disciples are unavoidably vulnerable; [3] they will suffer for the sake of the good.  But Jesus promises that those who patiently endure will be delivered from evil.  He promises those who follow him that they will find, as the prophet Jeremiah did, that the Lord is with them as "a dread warrior" to deliver their lives from the hand of evildoers (cf. Jer. 20:11).  As was the case for Jesus, this deliverance may happen beyond death in resurrection, but nevertheless the Lord of hosts will vindicate all those who trust in him.  The sheep should not fear the wolves ultimately because Christ, the Lamb that was slain, has conquered death.  Therefore, the sheep need not fear to follow Christ, even to the point of suffering death.

Not only need the sheep not fear, but they can "rejoice and be glad" when they are persecuted on account of the gospel, because this is what happened to the prophets and to the Lord Jesus.  For, as he says, "it is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master.  If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household?"  When they are maligned, the sheep are sharing in the suffering of their master, and for this reason they can take courage.  As John Chrysostom put it, Christ does not take away the terrors, but stands with the disciples in their perils:  "All he promises them is that they will suffer with him the utmost ills." [4]  With him.  To be with Christ is sufficient consolation for those who seek to follow him.

Jesus calls his disciples to fearlessness by teaching them what to fear: "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (v. 28).  That is, do not fear persecution, because in your suffering you are drawn very close to the one who was despised and rejected of men.  And do not fear death, because the love of God is stronger than death.  Instead, fear God, the maker of all things, and judge of all men.  Jesus is not here advocating a sort of Theo-phobia—being afraid of God in the same way we are of spiders, or the number 13, or heights.  We ought not fear God as we do evils.  For God is love, good all the way down, and in Jesus we see that God is always for us.

We ought to fear God, though, as our Creator.  We are his creatures and he is wholly Other than us, dwelling in light unapproachable, appearing “in cloud and majesty and awe.”  He is the Living One, pure act, utterly free, untamable, a consuming fire.  When God reveals his glory—on Mount Sinai in giving the Law or on Mount Tabor in Jesus’ transfiguration—people are bowled over; they fall to the ground in awe and wonder.  There’s an old Yiddish proverb that expresses it well:  “God is an earthquake, not an uncle.”

So, we are to fear, to revere, God as our Creator.  We are also to fear God in the sense of fearing that which would separate us from Christ.  This is a subtle point, so I want to be clear here.  On the one hand, once Christ has taken hold of you, there is no thing that can separate you from the love of God in Christ.  Nothing in all creation.

On the other hand, this side of heaven, we remain subject to temptation and continually need to pray, “Forgive us our sins.”  So we should fear turning from the Lord and giving into temptation. Fear putting yourself above your Creator, fear disobeying the commandments of God, fear turning away from the warmth of God's love to the coldness of the isolated self, fear not to be with the Lover of your soul.  Turn to God and cling to him not because you are afraid of punishment, but because of your affection towards him.  Fear the Lord God out of love, humbly seek to do what pleases him and to avoid what displeases him.  As you grow in love, your fear of the Lord will take less and less the form of concern not to displease him, and more and more the form of love, of affection and solicitude—you will be more and more like the child who seeks to please a loving parent, like the bride who beautifies herself for her husband. [5]

Fearing God rightly is the key to not fearing death. I suspect Canon Andrew, "the Vicar of Baghdad,” can face mortal danger without fear precisely because he fears God.  By God’s gift, he fears God rightly and so does not fear death.  He is like the prophets and apostles and martyrs who—as Augustine puts it—"in fearing, feared not; because fearing God, they did not regard man." [6]

The extraordinary witness of someone like Canon Andrew might lead us to think that such fearing in order not to fear is a sort of heroic virtue, something only for spiritual giants—and therefore not something we commoners should bother cultivating.  That would be a mistake for at least three reasons.
First, it is our Lord’s command, and he gives us the strength to carry out his commands.

Second, even spiritual giants are made, not born.  Canon Andrew is the bold and joyful Christian he is today because of a lifetime of discipleship.  My wife has a little print that reads, “The saints were saints only because they wanted to love God to the uttermost.”  That’s about right.  Although we should add that this desire led these would-be saints to set about doing all they could to put the love of God first.  The saints became exemplary witnesses to Christ’s story because of a series of acts of faithfulness—washing dishes, reading Scripture regularly, stopping to help someone in need, praying when they didn’t feel like it.  Through such small acts, love grows, and as love grows, so does the fear of the Lord.

The third and most determinative reason is that the fear of the Lord is a gift.  The long tradition of the church has held it to be the first of the gifts of the Spirit.  And because the fear of the Lord is a good gift, the one who gives good gifts to his children will not fail to give it to us if we ask.  In fact, we already have asked for this gift in today’s collect, when we prayed, “O Lord...make us have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name, for thou never failest to help and govern those whom thou hast set upon the sure foundation of thy loving-kindness.”  If our Lord was able to make a rag-tag group of Galilean fishermen into his apostles who would turn the world upside down, and if he was able to make an Englishman who suffers from multiple sclerosis into the fearless “Vicar of Baghdad,” he is surely able to pour out his gifts on us here in Dallas.  “Ask, and it shall be given you" (Mt. 7:7).

So: fear God and fear not!

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?  And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father's will.  But even the hairs of your head are all numbered.  Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows" (Mt. 10:29–31).


Amen.

* For those who care about such things, Incarnation uses the BCP Lectionary, which explains why the readings are different from parishes using the RCL.
[1]  Timothy George, "The Vicar of Baghdad," First Things.
[2]  From documentary “The Vicar of Baghdad,” produced by ITV in the UK (part I, II, III, IV).
[3]  Here, and elsewhere, I am dependent upon Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew (Brazos Theological Commentary).
[4]  St. John Chrysostom, Homily on the Gospel of Matthew, 33.2, quoted from Matthew 1-13: Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, p. 119.  NPNF 1 10:215ff.
[5]  Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 19 (“Of the Gift of Fear”).  I depend heavily on Thomas’ discussion of “filial fear” and “chaste fear”.
[6]  St. Augustine, Homily on Matthew 10:28, NPNF 1 6:306.

The Resurrection as Reintroduction: Rowan Williams on Icons of the Resurrection of Christ

Fresco of the Anastasis ("resurrection"), Chora Church (14th c., Constantinople)

Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor.

The classic icons of the Resurrection depict the Lord Jesus’ descent among the dead. In the icon, Christ stands astride the shattered gates of Sheol, surrounded by a mandorla that figures the depths of the divine life,   He grasps Adam and Eve by the hand, while other characters from the history of Israel—David and Solomon, Moses and Samuel—look on.  

In a rich meditation on the icons of the Resurrection, Rowan Williams suggests that they show “the effect of God’s action on human history up to that point, and, implicitly, the effect of God’s action on all history.” [1]  The icon dramatically depicts Christ’s liberation of human beings from the place of bondage and division into the peace of God.  “We are compulsive dividers, separators, and in these divisions we deny ourselves the life God is eager to give,” but Christ is “the one who bridged all these divisions.” [2]

The icons of the Resurrections, Williams suggests, fit with the theological vision of the great seventh-century Christian thinker, Maximus the Confessor, who “speaks of how every one of the great separations human beings have got used to is overcome in the person and the action and the suffering of Jesus”:

“The divide between man and woman, between paradise before the fall and the earth as we now know it, between heaven and earth, between the mind’s knowledge and the body’s experience, between creature and creator—all are overcome in the renewed humanity that Christ creates.” [3]  

So in the icons where we see Christ reaching out to both Adam and Eve, “it is as if he is reintroducing them to each other after the ages of alienation and bitterness that began with the recriminations of Genesis.  The resurrection is a moment in which human beings are reintroduced to each other across the gulf of mutual resentment and blame; a new human community becomes possible.” [4]  Christ stretches out his arms of love across all our divisions and gathers us into one new humanity, for “he is our peace” (Eph. 2:14). 

If the resurrection is “an introduction”, it is so “because the resurrection of Jesus brings us into friendship with the divine life itself”:

“It is because the uttermost of death and humiliation cannot break the bond between Jesus and the Father that what Jesus touches is touched by the Father too.  As he grasps Adam and Eve, so does the Father; as he draws together the immeasurable past with all its failures and injuries, it is the Father to whom he draws it.  Because of his relation with the Father , a new relation is made possible between ourselves and this final wellspring of divine life.  The Christ of this icon, standing on the bridge over darkness and emptiness, moving into the heart of human longing and incompletion, brings into that place the mystery out of which is life streams.” [5]

Thanks be to God, for “Christ’s love has gathered us into one,” congregavit nos in unum Christi amor. [6]

[1] Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ (Eerdmans, 2003), p. 24.

[2] Ibid., p. 30.

[3] Ibid., pp. 30-31.

[4] Ibid., p. 31.

[5] Ibid., p. 40, 41.

[6] From the antiphon “Ubi caritas."