Twenty - second  Sunday after Pentecost 2023

By Tom Ward

O Lord!  How long?  Have compassion on your servants!... Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children. (Psalm 90: 13 & 16)

Today’s lessons have got me thinking about completeness and incompleteness, success and failure.  I’m not using the word “versus” in these pairings, success versus failure or completeness versus incompleteness.  I am intentionally using “and”.   That’s because, although these are two sets of antonyms or opposites, they are closely linked.  Often they can be hard to tell apart.

Something only partly done can with time become satisfying and sufficient.  I think of Gaudi’s great church, Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.  Building started 141 years ago.  Current plans optimistically call for completion in another decade or two or three.  But when I visited and climbed all over that amazing structure, it was more than enough.  Another example would be the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.  A popular nickname for it is “St. John the Unfinished.”  Construction began in the same year as Sagrada Familia, 1882.  It was suspended in 1997, with the building two-thirds complete.  What’s there is quite enough, the second largest Anglican church in the world.  As a boy, I ran all over the place and got lost several times.  With both Sagrada Familia and St. John the Divine, seeds planted decades ago have taken on lives of their own.  Incomplete, and yet somehow complete.

It’s similar with success and failure.  How often do we think we’ve succeeded in doing something, only to discover not?  And the other way around.  How often have we supposed ourselves to have failed and been surprised when the reverse turned out to be true?  I can think of lots of examples from cooking meals in the kitchen.  However, here’s an example from my family’s history.  When the Communists came to power in China, the mission in Wuhan to which my grandparents and parents had devoted so many years had to close.  My father and mother felt that they had utterly failed; the church, the hospital, the schools shut.  Colleagues, fellow parishioners and friends were imprisoned.  Yet when they made their first return visit 33 years later, hundreds of Chinese Christians joyfully greeted my parents.  We got to worship with them, a huge crowd.   My father marveled at how the Church had grown despite official hostility and persecution.  Seeds which seemed to have fallen on barren ground three decades earlier had in fact sprouted, taken root, and borne much fruit.

O Lord!  How long?  Have compassion on your servants!... Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.

Let’s look back at today’s Old Testament lesson.  It has Moses standing on the edge of the Promised Land, looking at the destination toward which he has been traveling for 40 long, difficult years.  And he won’t get there.  God says to Moses: “I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.”  Then Moses dies, up on the mirador at the summit (pisgah in Hebrew) of Mount Nebo.  Mount Nebo is a real place which tourists visit today.  But it’s in Jordan, not in Israel or in Palestine; it’s 36 kilometers from the King Hussein Bridge border crossing.  In fact, Mount Nebo is closer to Amman, Jordan’s capital, than it is to Jerusalem.  Puchica, wow!  So close, and yet so far!  How must Moses have felt at realizing he would never reach his objective and have to trust that others - Joshua, Caleb and the rest - would.  Sometimes folks say that Moses led his people through the wilderness to the Promised Land  He didn’t.  He led them to the Madaba Governorate of Jordan.  

So did Moses die with his life’s mission complete, or incomplete?  Was he a success, or a failure?  

O Lord!  How long?  Have compassion on your servants!... Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.

Now let’s look at today’s Epistle.  Some context: 1st Thessalonians is either the oldest or the second-oldest of Paul’s letters.  He wrote it to Christians in Thessalonica after an angry mob forced Paul to flee from the city; he had been there just three weeks.  Paul acted, as he admitted in a later letter, “in weakness, in fear and in much trembling.”  (1st Corinthians 2:3)  The Thessalonian mob was one of many that attacked Paul while he was preaching the Gospel.  He was chased out of the very next place he went, Berea; Paul mastered how to make a hasty retreat.  He traveled on to Athens, where Paul had mixed results.  Then he went to Corinth, where he settled for some time and had great success.   It was in Corinth that Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonica that he had founded but abandoned in a hurry.  He had heard that it had survived and in fact was thriving.  Without Paul.  On its own.  Unlike Moses, who was looking ahead to a place he had struggled to get to but never would, Paul was looking back at a place he had reached but fled ingloriously and to which he would never return.

So was Paul’s work of evangelism in Thessalonica complete, or incomplete?   Was he a success there, or a failure?  What would the Thessalonians say?  You know that the largest church in modern-day Thessaloniki, Greece is dedicated to St. Demetrios.  He lived two centuries after Paul and became the city’s patron saint.  A church dedicated to St. Paul was only built in Thessaloniki 16 years ago.  It testifies to the fact that the seed of Christian faith in Thessaloniki was indeed planted by Paul.

O Lord!  How long?  Have compassion on your servants!... Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.

And then we come to the Gospel.  For several Sundays now we’ve been hearing about Jesus’s disputations with the Jewish authorities and elites in Jerusalem - Herodians, Pharisees and Sadducees.  Although political enemies, they were united against Jesus because they feared him and the masses of his lower-class followers and simply curious onlookers.  But they feared the crowds, and attempted to trick Jesus into saying something blasphemous, inflammatory or wildly unpopular to turn opinion against him.  It was an intellectual game of cat and mouse, or cats and mouse.  Jesus was the mouse; different groups of Jewish leaders were the cats taking turns at pawing him.  Their questions were clever if often contrived (remember the one about the woman who was married to multiple husbands?).  Short-term, Jesus came out ahead with his answers.  But all too soon his luck ran out when the powers-that-be used bribery, military force, and extrajudicial measures to arrest, humiliate and murder Jesus.  

So was Jesus’s ministry complete or incomplete?  Was he a success, or a failure?  Or both/and?  Remember how dejected and disheartened the disciples were after his crucifixion and how gradually their spirits were lifted as they each had resurrection experiences?  By how strong they became in their faith and how they planted the seeds of what has grown into a large and varied Church today.

O Lord!  How long?  Have compassion on your servants!... Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.  

You know that today is Reformation Sunday, celebrated each year on the last Sunday in October.  Reformation Day itself is the same as Halloween.  On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses to the door of the Schlosskirche (Castle Church) in Wittenberg, Germany.  That has traditionally been regarded as the start of the Protestant Reformation.  Anglicans acknowledge the day, but it is much more important in Lutheran and Calvinist traditions.  Luther’s courage and conviction are indeed to be celebrated.  But it was no easy road he traveled.  An ordained Catholic priest, Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X (which has never been lifted, not in 601 years).  He was held prisoner for a while in Wartburg Castle.  He inspired a rebellion of peasants against the ecclesiastical and political authorities, which they brutally repressed.  That was followed by a hundred years of religious war in Europe during which between 6 and 16 million people died - a bloody birth to our modern age.  

Luther was an electrifying preacher who spoke to the mass of church-goers in words they understood.  His sermons were printed on the new Guttenberg presses and widely read.  He translated the New Testament into German; it too was printed and began to be read by millions.  Luther introduced congregational singing of hymns, formerly reserved to priests, cantors and choirs.  He composed and wrote many hymns himself; one such is Ein feste Burg, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” which Eric Moe performed just now.  The melody is Luther’s; the words are Luther’s.  It thrilled me to sing it as a boy; it still does.  The fourth verse talks of the power of the word of God, which each of us receives directly and not through any religious hierarchy:

That word above all earthly powers,

No thanks to them abideth;

The Spirit and the gifts are ours

Through him who with us sideth:

Let goods and kindred go,

This mortal life also;

The body they may kill;

God’s truth abideth still,

his kingdom is forever.

Luther democratized the church.  In the process he made many enemies.  Many people died fighting for and against Luther’s vision of what it meant to be a Christian.  When Luther died in 1546, there was no agreement on what “Lutheranism” meant and there was no formally established Lutheran Church - not yet.

Was Luther’s reformation of Christianity complete or incomplete?  Was he a success, or a failure?  You know a seed is something complete in and of itself, but it is an incomplete version of what it is destined to become.  Or to put it another way, a seed is never a success by itself.  But it is also never a failure if it gives birth to something new.

One last example of the fine line between completeness and incompleteness, success and failure.  It comes from the life and death of Luther’s namesake, Dr. Martin Luther King. You all know King’s many achievements and the impact he had on American society.  I won’t go into all of those - we’d be sitting here all week.  Perhaps you also remember some of the stirring speech thatr King gave shortly before he was assassinated in Memphis.  He had gone there to support a strike by garbage collectors, who are among the lowest of the lower working classes.  King’s speech ends with a memorable account of what I think Moses, Paul, and Luther matt have also felt when their missions on earth were cut short.  And I would say maybe our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as well.  Let me end this homily with the words of the greatest preacher I have ever personally heard (although not in person but in a TV newscast):

Well, I don’t know what will happen now.  We’ve got some difficult days ahead.  But it doesn’t matter with me now.  Because I’ve been to the mountaintop.  And I don’t mind.  Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.  Longevity has its place.  But I’m not concerned about that now.  I just want to do God’s will.  And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over.  And I’ve seen the promised land.  I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.  And I’m happy, tonight.  I’m not worried about anything.  I’m not fearing any man.  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Praise God for the vision of Moses.  For the faith of Paul.  For the courage of Martin Luther.  For the confidence of Martin Luther King.  And, above all, for the saving grace bestowed on us by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.  Alleluia.

https://chrisgoringe.net/2020/10/love-your-neighbour/