Gospel Basics: The Eleventh Sunday After Trinity (August 11, 2024)

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

The German philosopher who lived from 1844-1900 Friedrich Nietzsche hated Christianity. You know what he called it? A slave religion. Unlike the atheists today who want to take all the good things about Christianity and sever them from their religious foundation, Nietzsche recognized the radical implications of there not being any God: God is dead, and we have killed him, Nietzsche said. Nietzsche’s view of the world was an amoral one in which the strongest survive by asserting their will to power, something that can be achieved by subjugating, exploiting, or killing the weak. Today, we are confronted with an Epistle and Gospel that shows just how stark our Christian view of reality is from those who would reject it. But in order to understand this stark divide, we should first ask ourselves, “What is the Gospel?” It’s important for each and every one of us to know. This isn’t just a question for people who are more advanced in their faith, or a question relegated to me, Fr. David, and Fr. Dennis. The Gospel is the heart of our faith and it really behooves each and every one of us to to not only know it “up here” but also to inhabit it, live into it, and make it the center of our lives. Fortunately, for us as Anglicans, we have a lot of great tools that help us understand the Gospel, but it’s also true that Anglican and Episcopal churches haven’t done a good job catechizing their people on even the basics of the faith. It only takes us a few minutes to look around the Anglican landscape in the West to see a lot of decay that is unfolding after decades of poor catechesis. Indeed, the Church as a whole is confronted by a number of false gospels that masquerade as the Christian faith. The prosperity gospel that tells people they should believe so they can receive financial blessings and live comfortably is a false gospel. Moral therapeutic deism, the view that God just wants us to be nice to each other and feel good about ourselves, is a false gospel that has misled many young people. Both the political Left and Right have their own false gospels with their own versions of messianism that distort the truth of Scripture and obfuscate the Christians true and heavenly citizenship. The good news for us, however embattled the Church appears to be today, is that this has always been the reality: there have always been false competing gospels; but the Church has remained faithful to her calling since her inception and has preserved the Gospel that our Lord entrusted to his Apostles. We see that in the Scriptures, in the historic liturgies of the Church, and the kerygma of the Church, a Greek word that means “proclamation”. And so given our readings from 1 Corinthians 15 and St. Luke 15, today is a good day for us to step back and ask what is the Gospel and how should we respond to it? If we don’t get the basics right then nothing else matters.

In 1 Corinthians 15, St. Paul offers us a succinct summary of the Gospel. In fact, like a good preacher, he gives us three points that make up the Gospel proclamation.

The first facet of the Gospel is found in verse 3, “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.” Jesus Christ, the Son of God, became Incarnate of the Blessed Virgin Mary and died for our sins. We were created by God for God, but were separated from him, and we continue to do so, by sin. God created us and sustains us; we exist because of him. We owe him everything. Sin, even the small ones that seem insignificant, create a debt that we can never pay because its in addition to everything. There is nothing more we can do to give God the honor that he’s owed in a way that makes up for those sinful things we’ve done or left done. Only out of his pure and infinite love does God step into time and space by taking on a body and rational soul from the Blessed Virgin Mary in the person of Jesus Christ who lived a perfect life and offered it to the Father as we killed him. He can pay for us because he was truly God and truly man. And St. Paul recognizes that this sacrifice was according to the Scriptures: we find foreshadows of it in the Garden when God covered Adam and Eve with the skin of an animal; we find it in the Old Testament sacrificial system that involved the blood of bulls and goats; and we find it in the words spoken by the prophets who lived generations before the time of Christ, but nevertheless anticipated this precious death as an atonement for our sins.

The second facet of the Gospel is found in verse 4: Jesus “was buried, and rose again the third day according to the scriptures.” The fact that he was buried means that he was truly dead. He didn’t swoon out of consciousness as some modern scholars have speculated; he didn’t have his body stolen as some of the Jewish religious leaders speculated; he didn’t have his body replaced at the last minute as the Qu’ran speculates. No, Jesus died—his body and soul were separated and he descended to the dead to preach to the souls imprisoned there. But, as St. Paul goes on to say in chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians, death did not have the final word; Jesus didn’t stay dead. And his resurrection is the firstfruit, an anticipation of things to come: one day, we’ll be resurrected like he was resurrected, leading us into eternal life.

The third facet is found int verses 5-8: “He was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.” Many people have tried to discredit the Resurrection as either a complete fiction or as a metaphor. Maybe you remember John Shelby Spong, a late heretical bishop of the Episcopal Church who believed that the resurrection means Jesus just lived on in the hearts of his followers. But here, St. Paul stakes his entire ministry on the historical fact of the Resurrection. It was a real, historical event with eyewitness. Over 500 of them. One could perhaps write it off if Jesus only appeared in secret or if there were conflicting reports. But no, Paul tells the inquirer to go ask: there were five hundred members of the Early Church who saw Christ and many of them are still alive! Further, the testimony of the Apostles and early disciples is unexplainable apart from the historical reality of the Resurrection. These were men and women who saw Jesus die and they knew that once a person dies, they typically stay dead. Think about the Road to Emmaus: the disciples who were unwittingly interacting with Jesus were despondent because they thought this movement of Jesus followers was ended by the crucifixion. And many of these men and women went to their deaths with full confidence that Christ had resurrected, that’s nonsense if it’s only a metaphor or if it was a cover up. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life,” John begins his first general epistle with these words that convey not only a reasonable hope, but a full and complete confidence.

And so, if we had to summarize what the Gospel is, we can say it’s that Jesus Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again on the third day. This is not a story that stays external to ourselves: look at what happened to St. Paul’s life when he came in contact with it. He alludes to this in the reading this morning: “I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because i persecuted the church of God.” Christ appeared to him on the Road to Damascus as he was going to persecute Christians. Immediately, Paul changed directions and went from the Church’s busiest persecutor to its most ardent defender and evangelist. Once we become aware of who we have been— sinners, enemies of God—and then what God has done for us, it’s impossible to stay the same. Everything must change.

We see this radical difference on display in the Gospel reading this morning of the Pharisee and the Publican. Two men are praying, one a Pharisee, an upstanding and supposedly righteous religious leader; the other a publican, a sinner. The Pharisee acts like the older brother in the prodigal son story we read two weeks ago, filled with ascetic disdain, he sees the publican as an embarrassment whose only use was to bolster his own sense of self-righteousness: “Thank God I’m not like him, a sinner!” But the publican, just like the Prodigal Son, is willing to humble himself, refusing to even lift up his eyes to heaven: “God be merciful to me a sinner.” The question we are confronted with is who do we want to be?

According to Paul, we are to receive, stand, and keep the Gospel in memory if we want to be saved. As an aside, it’s interesting he speaks about the memory here, because the other place he speaks of it in Corinthians is about the Eucharist which we do in remembrance of Christ. But remembrance is more than just replaying an event in our mind’s eye; it’s about reliving it. That’s what we do here week after week and even daily at Communion: we relive the Gospel story: “We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.” This is the Gospel. And if we want to spread it, we have to inhabit it.

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