Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This past Monday evening, I got to have a grand time meeting with our prospective youth candidates who are discerning the Sacrament of Confirmation for themselves, ahead of Bishop Poulson’s annual visitation to Grace Church in late September. I had fun, at least! But what made it particularly enjoyable for me was that their curiosity and commitment represented the very stuff of what Confirmation is all about. Most had been baptized as infants, as is our custom, and I talked about how every grace that makes the Christian life possible was given to them at that moment. It was at their baptisms that they were liberated from the bondage of sin and death, united to Christ, and made “partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light” (Colossians 1:12). It was at their baptisms, in short, that they received the gifts of the Holy Spirit, who took up residence within them and set them out on the journey towards perfection -- the journey, that is, on which they would become gradually conformed to the pattern of Christ. 

Put off your old nature which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new nature, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you….

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Last week, I preached about the big dilemma that makes human life so complicated. The dilemma, that is, of our bondage to the passage of time and the punishment of death. We are surrounded by “things temporal” even as we ourselves are temporal things. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, but because of the Fall, human lives are now damaged in the midst of a world that groans. Our sin not only disrupts our unity with God and alienates us from our neighbors, but it also disrupts our very selves. We are out of whack, in other words: we retain the immortality of the soul that God gave us as creatures made in his image, but our bodies are no longer in harmony with that gift. We are out of tune. Our bodies are mortal bodies, subject to time and its forces of decay and death.

Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal….

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Parents have an intimate awareness of the passage of time when it comes their kids. When Julie and I became brand-new parents, I remember feeling a bit annoyed when empty-nesters would remind us, as if imparting some sage wisdom, that “they grow up so fast!” That is, until I woke up one morning and it was the first day of school all of the sudden and I exclaimed to myself, “they grow up so fast!” It must be a sacred mantra. Anyway, I’m sure that someday I’ll get to utter it to some unsuspecting new parent who will find it annoying until they too receive the epiphany and join the club.

O God, who hast taught us to keep all thy commandments by loving thee and our neighbor: Grant us the grace of thy Holy Spirit, that we may be devoted to thee with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure affection….

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
​
Our Collect this morning bids us to pray that God would grant that we would be “united to one another with pure affection.” It’s a petition that gets right to the mission of the Church, which our Catechism in the back of the Prayer Book defines as the mission “to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ” [1]. It would be difficult to come up with a better definition than that -- what Christian, after all, could not be moved by such a goal? 

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In our reading from Deuteronomy this morning, God reminds the people of Israel that “the poor will never cease out of the land” -- a statement that our Lord himself echoes in Matthew’s Gospel when he tells his disciples that “you always have the poor with you” (Matthew 26:11). This was something that I was never allowed to forget about at my previous parish in Champaign, Illinois. The church was something like a hub for the homeless population in Champaign -- which was quite significant -- and the church grounds served as a reliable place for them to set up makeshift dwellings for themselves at night. It was a regular part of my routine to be greeted at the church door by some individual who was still asleep on a pallet of cardboard boxes and I would gently wake them to be able to get in and start my day. We also had a long-standing ministry of handing out sack lunches from the church office every weekday morning to the homeless and the working poor -- no questions asked. All of this struck me as exactly what a church should look like.