The Sixth Sunday After Trinity (July 7, 2024)

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.

Last week, we talked about the Church as a divinely instituted organism which means that the Church, despite all its human features, has a supernatural mission and power working through it; today, we’re going to look at how the Christian person is a supernatural creature. To do that, I want to make a brief excuses to the book of Acts. In Acts chapter 8, we get the story of Philip, the Apostle, and his preaching of the Gospel. After having a successful missions trip to the Samaritans, Philip goes south where he encounters an Ethiopian Eunuch writing in a chariot while reading a scroll of the Prophet Isaiah. The Eunuch doesn’t seem to understand what he’s reading and so Philip proclaimed the good news about Jesus. As they were traveling down the road together, they came to some water and the Eunuch remarked, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” So they pull over and Philip baptized him right then and there. Note that upon hearing the Gospel, the Eunuch immediately wants to be baptized; he doesn’t want to “make a profession of faith” or “pray the sinners prayer”; he wants to get baptized into the Church, which is the ultimate profession of faith. This story, the urgency with which the Eunuch wants to be baptized is a testimony to what the Scriptures say about Baptism. 1 Peter 3:20–21 “in former times they did not obey God, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The Sacrament of Baptism saves us because God has affixed to it the promise of new life. It becomes the channel for grace to be pumped into our lives. And we need to be aware of a very important maxim about grace: grace doesn’t destroy nature, but perfects it; what that means is that baptism doesn’t erase who you are, but elevates you fully into the life of God so that your life is open to a new horizon of possibilities. Baptism changes us from the inside-out.

Why does Baptism matter so much to our faith? St. Paul argues that it plants us into the story of Christ: “so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death. Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” The great Anglican theologian E.L. Mascall explains this by saying, “It is because baptism is a real insertion of human beings into the ascended manhood of Christ that the Church is Christ’s own body, flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bones.” Baptism identifies us with Christ because we sacramentally share in his death and resurrection, a foreshadowing of our ultimate resurrection at the last day. In sharing this experience with him, we are grafted into his Body, which is why St. Paul uses that language of being baptized into Christ. For St. Paul, though, Baptism isn’t just a story we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better; baptism brings with it real moral transformation. While we are the same people before and after baptism, we do not live the same way after baptism as we did before. In dying the death of Christ, Paul argues that we are freed from sin so that henceforth, we don’t serve it. This purgation brings us a kind of freedom. But a Christian understanding of freedom isn’t freedom to do whatever we want; it’s freedom for the service of God. And so our freedom makes us live unto God, just as Christ did. Baptism is the gateway to this new life.

Now I want to say a quick word about virtues. Virtues are habits that point us toward the good. If a person gets up every morning and goes on a run, we might say they have the virtue of self-discipline; we recognize that virtue because of their pattern of behavior. There are two kinds of virtues: natural (also called cardinal virtues) and supernatural (also called theological) virtues. Natural, or cardinal, virtues are typically listed as fortitude, justice, temperance, and prudence. They are available to everyone, whether they’re Christian or not, you acquire them by practice. You want to be brave? Read stories about brave people, Place yourself in situations where you have to act bravely and work hard to build it up as a habit. The other kind of virtues, the supernatural or theological virtues, which are typically listed as faith, hope, and love according to St. Paul, are gifts given to us by the Holy Spirit at Baptism; they’re not virtues we can drum up in ourselves. Of course, once we receive these gifts, we need to guard them and cultivate them through practice; but we must recognize that they come to us from the Holy Ghost through Baptism and that we have to tend them diligently, just like a gardener might tend the beautiful plants in their gardens. Just because they have different origins doesn’t mean that natural and supernatural virtues are opposed; quite the opposite. We could argue that the natural virtues better prepare a person to receive the theological virtues because they have been trained on some level to recognize and act towards the Good. But we can also say that the supernatural virtues transfigure or elevate the cardinal virtues. Justice, rendering to others what they’re due, is beautiful on its own, but how much more beautiful is it when it’s infused with love? Prudence, knowing the means to the end, is beautiful on its own, but how much more beautiful is it when it’s infused with hope? Fortitude, bravery or the willingness to endure hard things for something good, is beautiful on its own, but how much beautiful is it when it’s infused with faith? In this way, we can say that Baptism brings us the gifts of the theological virtues in germ, but we have to tend and care for them so that we can continue to grow into who are supposed to be.

With that in mind, let’s turn our attention to the Gospel reading which is part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. How can all this stuff about Baptism and the virtues help us better understand what Jesus says about the dangers of anger and the call, as Christians, to overcome it? First, it’s important to note that the kind of anger Jesus describes here is a precursor and participation in murder; it is the internal ground from which the physical act of murder may or may not proceed. Certainly, not all anger leads to the physical act of murder, but those toxic emotions can produce a kind of murder in the heart in which we deem the object of our wrath to be unworthy of life, a judgment that is not ours to make. It’s certainly possible to use the natural virtues to combat anger. Temperance, the virtue of moderation, would call on us to curb anger to limit harm that may be done to others or ourselves. Justice would place boundaries on our anger by reminding us that we should give to the other what they’re due and thereby prevent excessive forms of violence directed at the other. Prudence may tell us that if we allow our anger to fester, bad things can happen. But true perfection, the kind of perfection we’re called to as Christians goes above and beyond what these natural virtues can provide; it requires us to have grace, and to disseminate that grace to others through our actions. For the Christian, merely not being angry or not hating isn’t enough. The supernatural virtue of faith believes that God is not only our Creator but the Creator of even the person with whom we’re angry; the supernatural virtue of hope recognizes the possibility of grace to transform us, the other person, and the relationship that we have with them into something beautiful; and the supernatural virtue of love recognizes that this person is a brother or sister and that we should treat them as such. You could apply these to any vice or virtue; they will vary in their expression, but the basic expression is the same. We can minimize most of our vices using the natural virtues, but the theological virtues that come to us from the Sacraments lead us into a participation in God’s own life, they launch us into a new plane of existence.

St. Athanasius once said that God became man so that man might become God. What he means is that Jesus took on our human nature so that he could unite it to his divinity so that all of us might be united to him as well. St. Irenaeus says something similar: “The glory of God is a man fully alive.” We bring the most glory to our Creator when we become who we are supposed to be. So we shouldn’t settle for the natural virtues, as good as they may be; Baptism reminds us that we are supernatural creatures, that human nature has been divinized. Grace changes us from the inside-out, giving us those precious gifts of faith, hope, and love so that we might grow into him who is our head, Jesus Christ.

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