Homily on the Fourth Sunday in Advent 2014 at St. Luke’s Church, Augusta, Georgia

St. Matthew xxv.41:  “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:”

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

 

I read an anonymous quote this week which seemed appropriate to share with you this Sunday, the fourth of the Four Last Things, Hell:  “Everyone will live forever. Not everyone will enjoy it.”

 

Satan hates us so very much.  For all the rebellion and hatred he bears to God, he cannot hurt God directly, for God is all powerful.  Even when he thought he could hurt Christ, he could not tempt Him into sin.  He could not break Christ on the Cross.  Instead, Christ broke the power of Satan and Hell on the Cross.

However, Satan can hurt God’s creatures.  Unlike the angels, we men are made in the image of God.  Satan seeks to destroy us like a ravening lion. So when Old Scratch and his demons get their filthy claws on us in Hell, they torture for all eternity.

Both man and angel are created, are designed, are built to bask in the presence of the great giver of life, the Lord God Almighty.  As much as man and angel may hate God and seek to flee from his presence, so both are horribly distressed by great longing for God.  That impure corrupted longing turned long ago into distorted loathing and hatred and contempt for the erstwhile object of love.

As Fr. Von Cochem says about the Devil:

Of all the fallen spirits, not one is so abominable as the chief of all, the haughty Lucifer, whose cruelty, malice and spite render him an object of dread not merely to the damned, but also to the devils subject to him. This Lucifer is called by various names in Holy Scriptures, all indicating his malignity. On account of his repulsiveness he is called a dragon; on account of his ferocity, a lion; on account of his malice, the old serpent; on account of his deceitfulness, the father of lies; on account of his haughtiness, king over all the children of pride; and on account of his great power and might, the prince of this world.

The other devils and demons are fallen angels who are not as mighty or created as perfectly good as Lucifer, and therefore are not so evil and ugly as him.  Just as men often in Scripture behold angels and attempt to worship them because of their beauty and goodness, so we would hardly be able to abide the presence of demons in their unhidden form because of their ugliness and wickedness.  That we can scarcely contemplate how miserable in appearance devils are is why they are often portrayed in a gruesome and grotesque manner.

Immediately after making my confession on retreat at Holy Spirit monastery in Conyers, I was visited in a nightmare by a creature so horrible in countenance that I could only barely describe it.  I was immensely terrified and would have been frightened away from spiritual matters entirely – thus acquiescing to the damning of my soul – were I not fortified in the Holy Sacraments and prayer.  The Sacraments are the grace of God the Son and prayer is ultimately of God the Father – when mediated by God the Holy Ghost, we are invincible to all demonic spiritual attack.

Hell is the place reserved for Satan, his demons, and cursed men.  It is a place of everlasting fire.  St. Matthew xxv.41:  “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:”  Hell is real and everlasting, as is Heaven.  The wicked and damned go to Hell forever, and the righteous and saved go to Heaven forever.  St. Matthew xxv.46:  “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.”

The Roman Christians in antiquity would stand prayerfully together as they would be mauled to death by wild animals in the Coliseum.  They could die heroically at peace in our Lord while vicious beasts, deranged by hunger, would pounce upon them, pull them down, and tear their flesh with fang and claw.  They could die this way because they had victory in Christ and knew that Hell had worse to offer.  Think upon that, dear souls!  How ruthlessly did the lions rip into their flesh!  Would the angry hungry evil angels be more merciful than a brutalized innocent animal?  Our brethren knew that the feasting of demons upon their Resurrection bodies would go on for eternity – and the demons would never eat their fill or satisfy their lust for flesh.

Oftentimes I have heard that the company would be better in Hell than in Heaven, as if Hell would be some great party that would never end.  Perhaps the companionship would not be near as boring as would be the squares in Heaven.  But loving-kindness is entirely missing in Hell.  There is no camaraderie amongst the damned.  Hell is the realm where all are embittered against each other, mocking and cursing with enmity for all.

 

St. Mark ix.43-4

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:  Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

Christ says this not to injure our bodies.  Sin does not work in our hands and feet and eyes.  Sin works in our hearts.  But indeed we should be counted among the blessed if we were to lose our hands and feet and eyes in this world and flourish in Heaven above for all eternity!  The holy martyrs certainly thought so.  St. Lawrence the Deacon was roasted alive.  Yet knowing that Christ was his redeemer, he famously said to his executioners to turn him over, for this side was done!  How could he be so bold as he died a death of torture?  Because His savior lived!  And St. Lawrence was about to join Him in Heaven.  Truly the slings and insults of this world are nothing compared to the agonies of Hell.

So Christ says it is better to cut off your own body parts and live maimed than to go to Hell intact.  And three times here in St. Mark’s Gospel Christ tells us why:  “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.”  The filthy, rotten, tormenting, grotesque demons of Hell do not die in Hellfire.  They gnaw on your soul for eternity.  And the fire never wanes or dies either.  For age unto age the blast furnace heat far exceeds the fire into which King Nebuchadnezzar threw Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.  That pagan king heated up that furnace seven times beyond its regular blaze.  So very hot was it that the men who threw the three Jewish lads into it died from exposure to the heat.  Yet God sent his angel to protect the young men in there.  But Hellfire is profoundly hotter than the furnaces of Babylon, and God keeps his holy angels far from pits of Hell.

The rich man asked Father Abraham to send Lazarus with his finger dipped in water so to cool his burnt parched lips.  But Father Abraham told that wicked soul that he had enjoyed his good things in his life and not done justice.  There was no relief for him who had ignored the righteous soul starving at the gate, stepping over the poor man on his way about town.  There is no relief in Hell, there is no companionship in Hell, there is no clean air to breathe in Hell, there is no rest from torment in Hell, and there is no peace and quiet in Hell.

The unforgiving oven of Hell continuously burns all flesh therein.  And since all the cursed souls in Hell possess their eternal bodies, the stench of burning flesh does not abate over the millennia.  The cries of the cursed, the stench of the damned, the torments of the devils, the separation from God, and the sheer inescapability of it all are too gruesome for us to understand but in the extremes of our language.  For we still possess our frail bodies of our mortality.  We still live our lives of decision.  We may yet turn to God.  We may yet spurn Satan and embrace Christ.  Our judgement is still yet to come, for we mortal men remain alive … today.  But as death and judgement await us, so does either Heaven or Hell.

 

St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians ii.9, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”  Wonderful bounteous beauties await those who follow Christ unto the end.  There, in Heaven, we will eternally witness and experience the dynamic loving-kindness of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  But those in Hell are denied this, the Beatific Vision.  The damned do not behold God, for they lived without God; they lived for themselves, and so they remain tortured by the lack of God for which they were made in the company of all the foul spirits who rejected God for themselves.  Thus, those in perdition suffer the company of the most selfish wicked souls ever created while those in bliss enjoy the great love of those who put you above themselves.

We were made by God to enjoy God.  To be denied God for eternity is the greatest sorrow man can know.  Now we are on the earth in our mortal life, and so we can only barely glimpse what the damned miss.  For we ourselves are yet getting to know God.  We still foolishly believe that something other than God may bring us greater joy than our Creator.  St. Bonaventure said, “The most terrible penalty of the damned is being shut out forever from the blissful and joyous contemplation of the Blessed Trinity.”  St. John Chrysostom said, “I know many persons only fear Hell because of its pains, but I assert that the loss of the celestial glory is a source of more bitter pain than all the torments of Hell.”  Every moment we feel loss or long for something we cannot have, we are touched by the lack of God in our lives.  So we try to fill up our emptiness with the delights of the flesh and the world, with passions, honors, riches, sensual gratifications, and all the vain and fleeting pleasures of this realm.  But all of these things are hollow and empty.  God alone is the one true source of the soul’s happiness.  To be finally denied the only source of happiness is logically to live in eternal despair and agony.

The eternal sorrow of the damned will recall their many occasions to turn from the way of wickedness, all the wrongs committed against God and neighbor, and all the many times their friends and family urged them to amend their ways.  Thus their conscience will pain them beyond measure, along with the stench, the heat, the cries of the lost, and the torments of demons.  They will forever know that they could have avoided such an unbearable fate had they only responded truthfully to the Lord of life instead of making their own way according to their own perverse and peculiar thoughts.  Alas, the presence of their own minds, will, conscience, and memory, cause the damned everlasting torment so unspeakable that our stomachs quiver in disgust.

 

Dear children of God, do not listen to the whispers of this world, which are either the hushed tones of sinful men or fallen angels.  David said (Psalm xiv.1):  “THE fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”  You will hear that there is no God, no punishment, and no Hell.  You will be told that you may live your life however selfishly you wish and will never have to answer for your crimes.  But those words tempt you away from Christ and straight into the maw of Satan.

 

To avoid Hell, you must believe in Jesus Christ and give your heart to Him, you must be Baptized into His Death and Resurrection, and you must repent of your sins.

To grow in Christ as a living branch of his Body, you must obey the Six Precepts or Duties of Churchmen.  That is, worship every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation.  Receive the Body and Blood of Christ frequently.  Give our Lord the first tenth of your income in the tithe.  Seek after righteousness by keeping your conscience clean of all sin and confess your sins if you fall.  Fast like our Lord did when directed to by His Body.  And keep the marriage laws of the Church, witnessing to the holiness of Christ.

If you are doing all these things, then seriously attend to prayer, good works, and studying the Holy Scripture.  It is possible and not all that difficult to live such a life.  Besides avoiding Hell, the soul who carefully lives a Christian life will grow closer and closer to our Lord while you still draw breath on this earth, after which He will not forget you in the world to come.

 

St. Matthew xxv.41:  “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:”

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

 

 

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Homily on the Feast of Christ the King 2014 at St. Luke’s Church, Augusta, Georgia

“We give thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light:  Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:”

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

 

“Baptized into Christ’s Kingdom”

We are subjects of two kingdoms.  We are subjects of Christ our King and citizens of these United States, or whatever country you hail from.  How we live our lives in this green land of America is both informed by our Heavenly King and will influence our life in the hereafter.  Also, our life under Christ our King informs our citizenship here on earth in this great country of ours.

 

Now the kingdom of this world is not simply the domain of Satan, even though St. Paul does call it “the power of darkness”.  The kingdom of this world is that broken part of Creation, of the cosmos, that does not claim Christ as Lord.  Whereas we like to think that the saving work of Christ in the cosmos is expanding, in our own culture we see little evidence of it.  Think for instance of thirty-five years ago, when the popular television series M*A*S*H sympathetically depicted a chaplain amongst its characters.  Such a thing is foreign to television today.

Indeed, university students are increasingly told that their faith holds no bearing – or only poses a burden – on their education, when the original universities were explicitly Christian.  Unelected judges overturn same-sex marriage bans and abortion restrictions partially on the claim of there being no reasonable or non-sectarian basis for them.  In several states of this Union, courts and legislatures require citizens taking out any insurance plan to pay for elective abortions, regardless of their consciences, even though it is simply avoided.

But despite all this and the recent news out of Houston with sermons being demanded of preachers, other governments in the kingdom of this world have had it much worse.  This Wednesday we celebrate the Feast of the Martyrs of Uganda, the dozens of Anglican and Roman Catholic boys who were the sex slaves of the pagan king of Uganda and refused his lustful desires.  For their disobedience to the king of this world and their obedience to the High King of Heaven, they were put to death.  Earlier, the king had grown angry with the missionaries from the Church of England and the Church of Rome as they kept criticizing him and his support of Moslem missionaries.

This past week in Morning Prayer, we read in First Kings about Elijah, Ahab, and Jezebel, how the righteous prophet squared off against the wicked monarchs of Israel.  But before Elijah, Samuel warned Israel against having an earthly king, warning them in I Samuel viii.18:  “And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day.”

 

Worldly governments clearly fail to set out a righteous course for us to live in.  But the government of Christ the King exemplifies all good and glorious things.  Our worldly governments tell us that things which are clearly wrong are right; the government of Christ the King unerringly tells us what the wrong things are with such accuracy and precision that we cannot actually avoid them perfectly.

Today’s Epistle mentions “the inheritance of the saints in light”.  This refers to the Kingdom of God.  In the next verse, “the power of darkness” is the antithesis of the Kingdom.

“And he is the head of the body, the church:”  Coming right after speaking of “all things” and spiritual beings, this shows that the last verses here, vv 18-20, demonstrate an equivalency between the cosmos and the Church.  This is tied to the universal mission of Holy Church, to bring all people to Christ and His kingdom.  The work of the Church is Christ’s salvific work in the whole broken cosmos.  Later in ii.10, Christ is called the “head of every rule and authority”.  Christ created all and rules all, and we are members of His Body in that cosmos and Holy Church.  Each one of us is part of something epic and big.

 

Now, there is one way into Christ’s Kingdom:  Holy Baptism.  We read in St. John iii.5, “Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.”  This is our passport, our entrance; this is how we immigrate from the kingdom of the world to the kingdom of God.  When we are buried with Christ and then share in His Resurrection, we join with Him mystically and sacramentally.  When Christ commands His disciples at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel, He says,

“All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

Before we are Augustans, Georgians, or Americans, before we are black, white, or any other race of this world, before all these things, we are under the banner of Christ our King.  By virtue of our supernatural sacramental Baptism into the life and death of Christ our Lord, we are brothers and sisters of the Nigerian schoolgirl held in some African camp more fully than we are brothers and sisters to our natural sister who does not believe.  By virtue of our belief in Christ our King, we are brothers and sisters of the impoverished but faithful Haitian farmer more than we are brothers and sisters to our unbaptized brother with whom we grew up.

 

So what does this new citizenship look like?  We read in Ephesians v.1-5:

“Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour. But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints; Neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient: but rather giving of thanks. For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.”

First, we must walk in sacrificial loving-kindness.  We must love the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our soul, and with all our minds, and we must love our neighbors as ourselves.  This is unbelievably difficult, but we have no alternative.  God is love, and we are to conform ourselves to God.

Second, we are very specifically told to avoid wicked behavior.  After all, Christ says, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”  So we are to avoid fornication, uncleanness, covetousness, filthiness, foolish talking, jesting.  We are not to be whoremongers, unclean, covetous, or idolaters.  Essentially, we are to pay attention and keep the Ten Commandments.

We are to love and we are to keep moral lives.  Third, we are to give thanks.  It is no mistake that each of our regular services in our Book of Common Prayer includes a prayer of thanksgiving.  We are to thank God for the goodness in our lives.  We are to thank God for our lives, God himself, other people, and all the goodness of God.  Love without thanks is hardly love indeed.

 

Today’s Epistle begins, “Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:”

Moving from darkness into light reminds the Christian soul of the Exodus, especially the miraculous passage through the Red Sea.  While Moses his prophet stretched out his hand, the Lord caused the wind to blow on the sea, exposing the seabed so that the people of Israel could escape from Pharaoh and his army, freeing them to reach the Holy Land.  So likewise, we are in bondage to sin and death in the kingdom of this world, no matter how fine it is otherwise to us.  And God brings us out of “from the power of darkness”.  Through the miracle of Christ’s death and Resurrection, we transfer from one side to the other.

 

Having passed from the old way of death to the new way of life, Christ having given us the forgiveness of sins, so we are to imitate our God and King.

The way we worship is to obey.  And we become like Christ.  When the early Church worshipped Christ their God, they became more and more like Christ, and they grew like wildfire.  The early Christians did not visit and attend congregations to find out which ones were the most like what they wanted, asking to make the service the way they wanted, requiring the teaching to be like they wanted.  In all things, they obeyed Holy Church, they obeyed their Lord and Savior, they became like Him as disciples, and they grew and spread.  This is the way not only of faithfulness to God, not only of resisting the sinfulness of the world, but is also the way of evangelism, growth, and maturity.

Almost like the Anglo-Saxons of Wessex over eleven hundred years ago, our king is our best man, the man who exemplifies our ideals, the man whom we seek to emulate.  Blessed Alfred the Great, King of Wessex was one such king of this world; Christ, the King of Heaven and Earth, is the king of the whole cosmos and of the whole Church.

With God, we know who is king.  We know that His rule is always right and holy.  We know that we have no say in His rule.  And indeed, while God wants our whole selves, our souls and bodies, we actually live in great freedom, freedom from sin, death, and Hell.

God the Father calls us to live our lives in the service of Christ our King.  We are to live meek, humble lives in penitence and holiness, avoiding sin, and loving our God with our whole being and our neighbor as ourselves.

 

“We give thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light:  Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:”

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

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Homily on the Feast of St. Luke 2014 at St. Luke’s Church, Augusta, Georgia

“WATCH thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry. For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand.”

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

 

“The work of the evangelist”

Why do we sing the Gospel during the Mass?  Why do we stand when it is proclaimed?  Why do we sometimes process the Gospel out amongst the congregation to proclaim it?  Why must the Gospeller be in Holy Orders?

We read in Isaiah lii.7:  “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!”

Beautiful feet?  That sounds over the top.  Yet over-the-top is how we proclaim the Gospel both here at St. Luke’s and in catholic churches around the world throughout the ages.

St. Luke’s Gospel tells the story of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, from before His Annunciation till His Ascension into Heaven.  His is the Greatest Story Ever Told, and our patron saint, St. Luke the Evangelist, is one of the sacred four who told the story so that the rest of us might hear it.

 

The patron saint of our parish wrote almost as much of the New Testament as Saint Paul.  He is the only Gentile who wrote one of our Gospels.  According to Colossians iv.14, we know that he was a physician.  As a doctor and writer of a Gospel, he is considered the patron saint of doctors and healers.  His sign as evangelist is the ox with wings, giving us the name of our newsletter, the Winged Bull.

He is also the patron saint of artists.  During the Middle Ages, many Guilds of St. Luke encouraged and defended artists in important cities in Rome, Flanders, and across Europe.  Here at our parish, our Creative Christians group continues this tradition by encouraging both Christian art and Christian artists.

But St. Luke did not only write a Gospel leaving us inspired depictions of the life of the Blessed Mother, our Lord Christ, and the early Church.  St. Luke also did the work of an evangelist by journeying with St. Paul on at least two of his mission trips, staying with him in Rome.  Our patron is counted among the Seventy who Christ commissioned and sent out to do ministry in today’s Gospel lesson.

 

St. Luke wrote his Gospel in Greek, helping spread the Good News of Christ throughout the pagan Gentile world of the First Century.  The Early Church suffered greatly for proclaiming the Gospel.  St. Paul and all the Apostles save St. John met their Lord in the martyr’s death.

And lest we think that the persecution of Christians is a bygone practice, this Wednesday we celebrate the faithful Christian witness of eight Anglican clergymen whom the Japanese killed for preaching the Gospel in occupied New Guinea during World War II.  Tens of thousands of priests and millions of faithful Christians died at the hands of the Communists in Russia and elsewhere in the Twentieth Century.  The Moslems have killed far more over the centuries, and they are still at it today.

Closer to home, we hear rumblings of persecution.  I warned in my annual report last year of coming troubles.  As St. Peter writes in his first epistle, “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:”

This week, news came out of Houston, Texas which has troubled the hearts and minds of many Christians.  Let us look into what the facts are:

The city council and mayor of Houston passed an ordinance which would permit women to use men’s bathrooms and men women’s bathrooms and allowing people to file complaints with the city government if they are not allowed to use the bathroom they want.

Houston preachers and others organized a petition for a referendum to overturn the ordinance at the November election.  The city government claimed that too many of the signatures were not valid and refused to schedule the vote.  Christian activists then sued the city to accept the signatures and thus the petition and put the ordinance to the vote.

In response, the city’s lawyers issued subpoenas to five conservative preachers to hand over sermons to determine of any preaching related to homosexuality, so-called gender identity, or even the mayor.  A subpoena is a legal writ compelling someone to appear before court or to surrender documents to the court.  These preachers would now have to surrender to a law court any sermon mentioning any of these topics.

The mayor has asked if the preachers gave instructions on how to sign the petition.  The city attorneys hold that the subpoenas are valid because the preachers worked to organize the repeal petition and are thus pertinent to the case.

Both conservative and liberal ministers have spoken out against the subpoenas.  There has been a public outcry over the city’s actions.  An interdenominational coalition of over 400 churches in Houston have opposed these subpoenas.  This local action has sparked national debate.  Some pastors have refused to hand over sermons.

The mayor and city attorney then agreed that the original subpoenas were too broad.  New subpoenas have now been drawn up which do not ask for sermons, but rather for speeches and presentations, and do not ask about homosexuality, but still ask for other things besides those on the petition.

You may ask what a conservative pastor’s PowerPoint presentation on the ordinance has to do with the validity of the signatures on the petition.  The answer is:  Nothing.  The city’s attorneys are still reaching beyond the appropriate legal necessity at hand, which has the effect of threatening the free speech of the preachers and the public practice of religion by the ministers of Christians.

A Christian – or another religion’s – minister preaching, speechifying, or presenting on the sexual nature of God’s Creation and on the divinely ordained morality which faithful people must practice are not crimes, do not threaten the state, and indeed support the wholesomeness, integrity, and the commonweal of the people.

The representatives of free American citizens are not called to sift through the words of religious leaders, looking for sedition.  The city is not a political organization which cannot tolerate dissent.  The governmental structures of this world have no legitimate role in approving or disapproving the voice of the Bride of Christ.  Our American governments have no legitimate role in intimidating preachers or believers.

 

We Continuing Anglicans directly descend from those who were quickened with zeal by the Assize Day Sermon by Blessed John Keble at St. Mary’s Church in Oxford, in which he publicly from the University Pulpit criticized the Whig-controlled Parliament for reducing the number of bishops in Ireland without the approval of the Church of Ireland.  As your priest and rector, I stand in a very long line of bishops and priests who have criticized the state when the state has had the worldly effrontery to admonish and attempt to control Holy Mother Church.

This very day last year, Archbishop Haverland sat right there and in the words of our Book of Common Prayer challenged me “faithfully to feed that portion of the flock of Christ which is now intrusted to you; not as a man-pleaser, but as continually bearing in mind that you are accountable to us here, and to the Chief Bishop and Sovereign Judge of all, hereafter.”

It would certainly please many people if we decided that we would ignore the things of God and whole-hearted accept the things of man.  But that would be forsaking God by making us pleasing to men, and I have been told not to be a “man-pleaser”.

My wife once saw a person wearing button which answered an unasked naughty question with “No thanks, I’d rather go to heaven.”  We lives our lives in this world, oftentimes forgetting that our lives are given to us by our good God in Heaven.  We may choose to do many things.  But we will be called to divine judgement one day.  All choices are not the same.  Some are right, and some are wrong.  When we are enticed, seduced, and tempted to make a wrong choice, it is good for us to say, “No thanks, I’d rather go to Heaven.”

I know you.  I know that most of you won’t budge if this Houston business happened here.  You know me.  You know that I won’t budge if this happened here.  We know our archbishop.  We know that he won’t budge if this happened here.

And this hasn’t happened here in Augusta.  Indeed, we elected a preacher of the Gospel as our mayor.  But this has now happened in these United States.  My dear children of God, I would rather you live your lives in peace, but I tell you this day that we will soon be facing worse, and not just in Texas, but here on the banks of the Savannah River.  Our sister parish across the river, All Saints’, Aiken, witnesses to the Gospel in a state where a Federal court might force their county to issue marriage licenses to people of the same sex.  Dark days are coming.

We here at St. Luke’s will continue to preach the Gospel of Christ our Lord, especially to those who need to hear it.  Many stories are told of the old Roman martyrs, some of whom are named in our Mass, who witnessed to their tormenters and executioners to great effect, converting souls in the Holy Name of Jesus.

If anyone in this world wants to know what I preach, come here to St. Luke’s most any Sunday at 10:30 and hear for himself.  I even put my sermons up on a webpage.  I would love for everyone out there to hear me preach about our Lord and Savior!

The government can hear our public proclamation.  Those who try to order us about and deny us our freedom both to practice and proclaim the True Religion of Christ are the ones who need to hear it the most.  We shall not back down.  St. Luke our patron did not back down.  St. Paul did not back down.  Fr. Keble did not back down, and neither did the faithful gathered together at the Congress of St. Louis in 1977.

We at St. Luke Church are uniquely positioned to proclaim the Holy Gospel to souls in peril here in Augusta as the times grow darker.  We preach the unadulterated truth, the whole Gospel, all the Sacraments, without Roman and Eastern doctrinal accretions, and we do so in the traditional language of this nation.

Everything St. Luke wrote was to tell other souls about Christ.  He commended Christ to everyone at all times.  He wrote down timeless truths about our Lord that the other Evangelists did not record.  When we stand under the name of the Evangelist St. Luke, we stand for spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And like St. Luke, we are not only to sit down and tell other people about Christ, but we are to get up and tell people face to face, traveling to them to share the good news of Christ our Lord.

 

After St. Paul says in today’s epistle, “WATCH thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry”, he continues and says “For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand.”

The day is coming when we will have to answer for our faith in Christ.  That day may come when we draw our last breath and slip beyond the veil of this mortal life, when we will face the individual judgement.  Jesus will look at each of us and know what we have done with the life He suffered and died to save, that life which the Holy Ghost bestowed with graces.

Or the day is coming when someone out there will make us chose to follow the world or to follow Christ.  Maybe someone will try to seduce you into sexual sin.  Maybe a crook will tempt you to help him commit a crime.  Maybe your own elected government will coerce you to deny Christ and follow the popular godless way.

Will you stay the course and profess your faith in Christ when your livelihood and social standing are threatened?  Will you stay the course and profess your faith in Christ when your life is required of you?  What will you say when they come to coerce you to renounce your faith?  Are you able to say that today?

 

“WATCH thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry. For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand.”

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

 

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