The Third Sunday in Advent (December 12, 2021)

If you read the Collect and Lessons for today, the theme of ministry comes to the fore. Besides being Gaudete Sunday, this upcoming week is what we call an Ember Week. Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday are days set aside for fasting and prayer, specifically prayer that God would raise up godly men to be priests in his Church.

As I was meditating on the lessons this week, I was reminded of a story from the history of Anglicanism. The Church of England is a state Church. This can bring with it certain advantages but the problem is when you have a state that loses its Christian conscience, it creates problems for the state Church. This was what was happening in the 1800s: as modernism became increasingly popular in England, it was influencing the Church. Further, the State began using the Church in order to make money. In 1833, the Irish Church Temporalities Bill reduced the number of bishoprics and archbishoprics in Ireland and made adjustments to the way church property worked so as to open the door for secular control over church land. A group of young clergy and scholars at Oxford banded together to fight this troubling trajectory in the Church of England. They became known as the Oxford Movement or the Tractarians, after the many tracts they produced. The emphasis of the Oxford Movement was that the Church should understand itself as a theological entity before it is a political or an arm of the State. The very first Tract produced by the Tractarians was written by a great theologian named John Henry Newman and it was titled “Thoughts on the Ministerial Commission, Respectfully Addressed to the Clergy.” In this tract, Newman reminds his brother priests and deacons that they serve a Church that possesses Apostolic Succession: that the Bishops of the Anglican Church can trace their line back to the Apostles themselves and received the power and authority delegated to the Church by Christ as a result. Priests and Deacons share in that ministry and serve their Bishops. So, looking around at a Church that was capitulating to the political agenda of secular politicians and that was liberalizing, Newman urges his brothers to “act up to your professions. Let it not be said that you have neglected a gift; for if you have the Spirit of the Apostles on you, surely it is a great gift. Do not be compelled, by the world’s forsaking you, to recur as if unwillingly to the high source of your authority.” Newman’s tract is profound; and the advice to ministers that they act up to your professions is important. Ministers need to hear that every so often because losing sight of the ministerial vocation means a minister cannot succeed, churches cannot flourish in the way they’re supposed to, and the Church as an entity cannot achieve its task of being the Body of Christ.

I am reminded of a story I once heard from some Methodist friends. In many places, Methodist ministers exercise itinerancy: they move around to new churches every few years (usually four). The story my friends told was of a minister who went to a new Church and met with their equivalent of a vestry and asked each member to write down the top 3-5 expectations/responsibilities they had of the minister. When the minister went through their answers and wrote them on the whiteboard, there were 35 different expectations. He asked, “How do you expect me to meet all these in a given 40-hour work week?” And of course, there is no real answer to this.

For Anglicans, this problem is resolved by ministers living up to their calling because that calling is clearly laid out in the liturgy for the Sacrament of Ordination which is on page 546 of the Book of Common Prayer when the Bishop lays hands on them and says: “Receive the Holy Ghost for the Office and Work of a Priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the Imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained. And be thou a faithful Dispenser of the Word of God, and of his holy Sacraments; in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

So there are three major responsibilities: forgiveness of sins, which we do in the liturgy and in private confession, dispensing the Word of God, and dispensing the Sacraments. The priest, then, has a well-defined task: ministry of Word and Sacrament, and as a result, they don’t work for man in an ultimate sense, but for God who will judge their work just like he will judge all of us on the last day.

And this leads us to the reading today where St. Paul addresses the issue of ministry in his first letter to the Corinthians. Paul affirms the ministerial charge we find in our Ordination liturgy when he says that a minister of Christ is a steward of the mysteries of God. Now the word for “steward” in the Greek refers to the chief servant in a house. Just as a trustworthy servant might be charged with managing the household for their masters, so a minister is charged by God through the bishop to lead his cure. How does he do this? By stewarding the mysteries of God. For Paul, the word mystery seems to be connected to the Sacraments but also to the proclamation of the Gospel. In 1 Corinthians 2, he defines the Gospel as: “Jesus Christ and him crucified.” It’s the seemingly foolish message that on the Cross, Jesus won the ultimate victory. So, being a steward means boldly proclaiming this to the Church and the world and making that sacrifice present in the sacraments. And a minister should embody this Gospel not only with his words and sacramental actions but in his whole life. As a student becomes like their teacher and a servant like their master, so a minister becomes like Christ. This means the minister leads the way in being foolish (according to worldly standards). The minister is not a businessman or a politician or anything else. Despite seeming foolish to the world, the minister carries the authority and power vested to them by Christ through the bishop and carries out his work of preaching and ministry of sacrament to open the eyes of the spiritually blind and heal the spiritually afflicted.

Having this clarity about the task of ministry means that St. Paul had very little concern about the Corinthian assessment of his ministry: “But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man’s judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self. For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord.” The context for Paul’s words here is that he was writing to a very divided church at Corinth. According to his words in chapter 3, verse 4, there some people in the parish bragging about being of Paul and others about being of Apollos. Further, there were ethnic divides as Jews and Gentiles were negotiating how the could worship together. Paul’s point to them is that in God’s economy, different people have different roles and vocations—he planted and Apollos watered—but because different players and actions serve the same end and are done in the service of the same God, then there’s not competition between ministers but harmony. But in the midst of a plethora of human judgments, St. Paul couldn’t place stock in human opinions, deferring instead to God’s judgments.

Now what does it mean that Paul didn’t consider human judgments of himself? Well it’s important to note that this doesn’t mean Paul acted without tact or was obnoxious. It’s not an excuse to be a straight up jerk because a minister is a servant. At the same time, Paul’s words here really open a window into his spiritual and psychological health because they reveal that he understands that while people will have varying assessments of him based on their knowledge (or lack thereof), experiences (positive and negative), and expectations (stated and unstated), these are ultimately subjective. Even his own self-assessment lacked any sort of credibility in his mind. So what this means is that Paul didn’t allow the parishioners at Corinth to ultimately control him, nor did he allow their agendas to overrule his fundamental role as a steward of God’s mysteries in Word and Sacrament.

Paul’s ministry, then, was ultimately offered to and judged by God. “A am not hereby justified,” not by the ill-informed opinions of the Corinthians or even by his own positive or negative assessment of himself; but ultimately by God. In the rest of chapter 4, beyond the end of our reading today, Paul explains that the fact that his ministry is ultimately judged by God is why he endures all sorts of things: he became a fool for Christ, was weak, despised, poor, and reviled. But even in the midst of all this, Paul understood his purpose: to preach and administer the sacraments so he could be a blessing to those who would hear and receive.

Under the entire reading runs an important principle: taking judgment into our hands, whether of ourselves or of others, is prideful presumption that usurps the prerogative of God and, in the case of the Corinthians, disrespected the Sacrament of Ordination. Instead, Paul what Paul is saying is that it’s more important to be about one’s business for the Lord rather than put out fires or work to build an impressive image. And this is where the passage takes an Advent turn: “Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God.” Judgment is coming. And when it arrives, all will be brought into the light, including that which is hidden in darkness and everything that’s hidden in the heart will be made manifest. If we think this verse is about the judgment of others, however, we miss the point. We don’t gleefully await for God to judge what we perceive to be the faults in others. Rather, we must engage in self-examination: what are we clinging to that might be inhibiting our progress: is it a wordly understanding of success? Is it pride? is it nostalgia? Is it lust? Is it a false sense of superiority? Whatever it is, now is the time for us to deal with it because we know that judgment is coming. That we don’t know when should create urgency in us. This is why, in the Litany in the Book of Common Prayer, we pray to be saved from an unexpected death.

So what are the takeaways that we learn from today’s Epistle for this Advent season?

The first takeaway is the reminder that what counts as “success” out there is not “success in here.” What is wise according to God is considered foolish by the world and what is wise out there is foolish to God who has put the wisdom of the wise to shame. It’s the beautiful but scary theme of reversal we see in the Magnificat: “he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden. For behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” and “He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.” Christians are to be a people transformed by the renewing of their minds and this means that our metrics for success do not rely on numbers, business acumen, or political success. Are these things always bad? No. Do they constitute the ultimate criteria for success in the Church? Absolutely not. Success for the Christian is based on the Cross which is subversive to these wordly standards.

Our second takeaway for today is that Word and Sacrament should be central in our lives as Christians. We encounter the Word first and foremost in the sermon but also through Bibles studies, the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, and in the liturgy of Holy Communion which includes not only Scripture readings, but also the introit, offertory sentence, comfortable words, and a Eucharistic Prayer that are all thoroughly rooted in the Scriptures. And alongside hearing the Word, we receive the Sacraments: Baptism gave us spiritual life and made us a member of Christ. We receive the Sacrifice he made for us on the Cross when we receive the Lord’s Supper. Our lives need to be based on the Scriptures and oriented by the Sacraments.

Finally, our reading and this whole season is a reminder of the impending judgment. In particular, we must remember that judgment is God’s job, not ours. But we should always remember that his judgment is coming and, in the interim, we must live up to our callings which may vary based on our vocations but are ultimately aimed at the same end: growing in holiness and spreading the Gospel. So, may the rest of this Advent season be a faithful time of preparation for us so that we might be ready when the hidden things of darkness are brought to light and the counsels of hearts are made manifest.

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