The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity (October 9, 2022)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

This week, I taught my informal logic class about the fallacy of irrelevant goals or functions. An irrelevant goal or function is when something is measured according to goals it wasn’t intended to achieve. “How will running three miles a day help me make friends?” The goal of running three miles is not to help you make friends; it’s to help you get in shape or maintain a standard of health. The problem is that irrelevant goals or functions reveal that we don’t understand the nature of a thing or an endeavor. “Whoever dies with the most toys win” is a saying that commits the fallacy of irrelevant goals or functions because the saying assumes that the primary purpose of a human being is to accumulate wealth, but that’s not our ultimate goal.

One area where the irrelevant goals and functions fallacy is alive and well is when we talk about the nature and identity of the Church. For many people, church is a consumeristic place to be entertained, where their personal preferences can be catered to (and of course, what this means is that if you, as a consumer don’t feel your preferences are being satisfied, you can “church shop”). For others, church is about building a brand. It’s about marketing and franchising and growth simply for the sake of growth. According to this way of thinking about Church, the only goal is numbers: more people in pews, more tithes, etc. Still for others, church is a status symbol: I go to such and such church with all the other people who look like me, talk like me, and are in the same income bracket as me. And for others, church is a political action group, aimed at perpetuating their left-wing or right-wing agenda. The problem is that if we judge church by these standards, we have missed the point. If our goal is to be entertained as consumers, then we can go to the movies; if our goal is to build a brand, then we can go into the tech start up world; if our goal is to use church as a status symbol, then we can join a country club; if our goal is to be political activists, then we can join a political advocacy group. The Church, however, is not any of those things. And if we bring those goals to the table when we’re thinking about the nature and identity of the Church, we will always have goals that are at best irrelevant but at worst contrary to the Scripture, which will always malform our understanding of the Church and her vocation.

In the book of Ephesians, specifically chapters 4-6, the Apostle Paul is interested in detailing how the glory of God, which he discusses in detail in the first three chapters, is to be expressed through the life of the Church. In other words, St. Paul wants to tell us how we are to live as the Church in order to be the Church. Paul exhorts his audience to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.” In other words “live up to your calling.” What is that calling? To be a part of the Body of Christ. And what this means is that our focus as Christians is not on consumerism, branding and numbers, status, or partisan politics; our focus is on being Christians. St. Paul gives us four criteria that mark whether we are successful: lowliness, meekness, longsuffering, and forbearance. Lowliness meaning a humble mind. In the Greco-Roman world, much like our world today, humility was not a virtue. Humility is a virtue only because Christ exemplifies humility in the way he lived and died and he is what we seek to emulate. Meekness is often used interchangeably with humility or gentleness, but here, it seems that St. Paul means our lives should have a sole focus with a kind of tenacity that it cannot be distracted or derailed from the main goal, even by slights, injuries, or insults. In addition to lowliness and meekness, we must be longsuffering or patient. When we hear patience, we think of what we have to have to sit through the line at the DMV; however, there are two aspects to patience. There is the sense in which to be patient is to endure suffering or unpleasantness; however, there’s also a sense in which patience means being slow to avenge a wrong or retaliate. The patient person is one who doesn’t have to clap back immediately at insult or injury, but can trust in God. And finally, Paul tells us that we must have forbearance with love, no doubt a practical outworking of patience. We forebear each other in love because otherwise, we would not be able to live together. “He who is without sin.” So the Christian life is one that is primarily characterized by lowliness, humility, patience, and forbearance with love. These are necessary if we are to pursue our calling as Christians.

Here’s the important thing to remember: the Church as the “mystical body of all faithful people,” as we define it in the Prayer of Thanksgiving , is expressed in the local parish. But a local parish only exists in individual Christians. In other words, the parish is a microcosm of the whole Church and the individual Christian is a microcosm of the parish. In other words, the Church as a whole is only ever as healthy as the parishes that make it up and the parishes are only ever as healthy as the parishioners. Do we want the Church to be healthy? Do we want St. Paul’s to be healthy? That starts when we allow ourselves to be formed and shaped by the Gospel down in the very core of our being, when we begin to imitate the example of our Lord. This is not something we can compartmentalize; it impacts every part of who we are and it means we have to center ourselves on what’s important. It’s not about being the Church of What’s Happening Now, it’s not about building a successful brand, it’s not about being a country club, or a voting bloc. It’s about following our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ with all of our hearts, with all of our souls, and with all our minds.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.