The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity (October 23, 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.

I have a group of clergy friends with whom I discuss preaching each week. I asked them what they’re preaching this week and one said that he was going to talk about the 4 guys who brought their paralyzed friend to church even though they had to dig a hole through someone’s roof and then ask his congregation “who did you bring to church?”

That is not what I’m going to do today. In fact I want to start by posing a scenario for you. I know a couple from back home who have been married for around a decade and they’re getting divorced. The husband decided he doesn’t want to be married anymore and so he’s leaving his wife. To make it even more tragic, if you go to his social media, it is incredibly depressing: a picture of him golfing, another picture of him golfing, another picture of him golfing, another picture of him golfing, a picture of a nice car, another picture of him golfing, and another picture of him golfing. You get the point. It’s sad because his priorities are so out whack that his mind is darkened; he can’t see what’s important so he’s ordered his life around chasing a little white ball around a field. This proves a point: a life oriented around the wrong thing can be ugly. This points us to three related concepts: truth, justice, and beauty. When we talk about truth, we’re talking about reality; what really is. Justice is right behavior which is to act rightly in light of truth. And beauty is the result of truth and justice — the symmetry of a well-lived life that accords with the Truth. Unfortunately, the world as we experience it is built on the human desire to make and define its own truth, and when we do this, the results are unjust and ugly — when we ignore reality, we’re not free like John Lennon imagined in his song; quite the opposite: we will be miserable and we will look to fill our emptiness with things that harm ourselves and others. And so in the Christian Church, we pledge to fight against the world, the flesh, and the devil and to follow Jesus who is the truth, and so we pursue that Truth and, alongside it, we pursue virtue because virtue is the ethical expression of being a Truth follower.

A thing is true insofar as it corresponds to Reality. That something can be true or false implies that there is such a thing as Truth: but what is Truth, as Pilate asked. This is a question St. Paul answers in our reading this morning: “the truth is in Jesus,” he says. We might think of elsewhere where Jesus specifically says “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” In other words, the truth is not a series of disjointed facts, but it originates with God, specifically the Second Person of the Trinity in whom all things that exist have their being. And what this means is that our relation to God is our relation to the Truth. Of course, this means we can have a positive relation to the Truth (through Baptism into Christ) or a negative relation to the Truth when we reject him through our beliefs or behaviors.

The problem is that all of us are born into a rejection of the Truth. The man with palsy in our Gospel reading who was brought to Jesus is us. We can’t heal ourselves, we need him to heal us. The sickness we have is not a sickness in the body or a disability, but a “vanity” or “futility of the mind. What Paul means when he says this is that we have an aversion to truth, an aversion to God, that often expresses itself in open rebellion against him. John Chrysostom tells us our minds become vain or futile when futile things become our preoccupation: big houses, masses of wealth, luxuries, all these kinds of things. But this mental futility spills into the rest of our lives because we are integrated wholes. When I was a teacher full time, I could tell you exactly who the students were who played video games constantly without even hearing them talk about it. You know how? They were disinterested in learning, even more than the average student. They were always tired. And they couldn’t have a meaningful conversation about serious things. If we focus on things that are futile, our minds become futile.

This ignorance, this lack of coherence to reality, has an affective consequence that St. Paul calls “blindness of the heart.” Blindness of the heart is synonymous with another biblical phrase: hardness of heart. This speaks to a lack of remorse because the person becomes so calcified by their sin that they are no longer atune to the natural horror of their sinful actions. The heart turns to stone and unless it is pricked by divine grace, it is oblivious to the tragedy of sin. When we reach this state, we fall into what Paul calls lasciviousness which is a big word to describe debaucher, a lack of restraint in moral attitude and behavior. Ignorance takes away our awareness of proper boundaries, our calloused hearts then throw off any restraint and this produces a kind of mental darkness. The problem is that each of us have inherited this propensity and the only solution is for the Old Man to be cast off.

If the underlying cause of all this is the futility of the mind, then the solution, according to Paul is to be “renewed by the spirit of your mind.” First, we are renewed in our spirit, which is done in and through the sacrament of Baptism that implants new life in us. But our mind comes around a little slower. God teaches us and we are enlightened, but we must participate with him and the grace he gives us. And so this renewal of the mind means we intentionally join ourselves to clean and pure thoughts (which originate from God). It means we cling to the Truth and conform ourselves to it. This requires a two-fold action: namely that we purge—remove the old, put away harmful behaviors—while simultaneously grabbing onto what is true, good, and beautiful. These two actions are really two sides of the same coin which we might call “putting on Christ.” What this phrase “putting on Christ” means is that we become like him. Becoming like Christ can be described by many terms: sanctification, theosis, dvinization, Christification. But the point is that we are to grow in holiness and righteousness “after the image of him that created” us (Col 3:10). In other words, by pursuing virtue, we become servants of the Truth; renewal of our minds requires an ethical expression because we have to follow the Truth with our whole being. How we think and how we act are not unconnected.

Putting off the old and putting on the new are recognitions that the Truth permeates everything; just like the man with palsy, we do not leave our encounter with Truth the same. The Christian life is a response to Jesus’ healing words: “pick up your mat and walk.” We are being renewed, we are putting off the old and putting on the new, we are going further up and further into the mystery of God. Jesus is the Truth and everything revolves around that fact.

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