The Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity (September 12, 2021)

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.

The Church is a strange thing. To many, it’s little more than a social club. But the Church is so much more than that. The foundation of the Church is Christ and his work on the Cross. It has a divine origin because Christ appointed and commissioned the Apostles to administer the benefits of his work through preaching and administration of sacraments. Further, we’re told in John 16:13 that the Holy Ghost would “guide” the Church “into all truth.”

Yet, there’s a tension here: the Church, while divinely initiated, often looks very human. We have split into so many denominations and traditions (even our own Anglican tradition has been split into about three major streams). At the parish level, clergy and parishioners are both human which means the sermon could be preached better, the Mass could be said clearer, the people and clergy can often order themselves into cliques or political factions. We can look at the scope of Christendom and conclude that there is no perfect tradition or denomination and there is no perfect parish.

Our Collect this morning gives us a reminder: the Church is kept not by our work but by the mercy of God. Our frailty means we fall. We will all buckle under the pressures of concupiscence and temptations. But God’s grace and mercy in the preached Word and the administration of the sacraments is what propels the Church forward, keeping us from all things hurtful and leading us, as the Collect says, “to all things profitable to our salvation.”

This is in keeping with St. Paul’s words in Galatians 6. Concluding his diatribe against the Judaizers, an early heretical Christian faction that insisted on making converts to the Church Jewish, Paul provides a reminder that they believe the errant things they do to avoid persecution. They don’t want to suffer for the cross so they go with a more socially acceptable. While the Judaizers sought after glory from other humans, Paul reminds us that true glory comes not from our flesh or worldly accolades but from the Cross of Christ. At the cross, Paul doesn’t just see Jesus but himself, co-crucified, dying with Christ, dying to the world. The person co-crucified with Christ emerges as a new creation: the old is gone and the new has come.

The Church, by God’s grace, is the domain where this happens. In the Sacrament of Baptism, we die and are resurrected with Christ. In the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we receive the Body and Blood which is the sacrifice of Christ on our behalf and, in response, we place ourselves upon the altar to become living sacrifices.

So we see that the Church is, in spite of its human appearance, a divinely originated organism guided and powered by the Holy Ghost on the basis of Christ’s work. Because we understand the divine nature of the Church, we can have the strength to face the human elements—the seeming divisions and imperfections. We obey and serve the Church not because it’s a social club, not because it’s a political party we happen to agree with. We obey and serve the Church because we obey and serve our Lord, the Head of that Church. But, as we live in the Church, we live under the reign of King Jesus. “No one can serve two masters” — in the context of our reading, Jesus was speaking about money but the principle is true universally: our incorporation into the Church becomes the most fundamental aspect of our being. It contextualizes our vocations as parents, workers, citizens, etc. Membership in the Church isn’t just another thing about us but is the organizing principle of our lives. There is no neutrality, there is no middle ground. By joining the Church, we are following the Way of the Cross, forsaking all others.

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