The Eighth Sunday After Trinity

“‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord”, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”

A few weeks ago during the children’s talk you’ll remember me telling the story of my losing my temper when I was in grade one or two – a fairly unusual event for me.

As I told the kids/As you’ll remember – it was spring, cold, but beginning to warm up, and things outside were wet and slushy as they often are in March or April, and we were all out on recess in the yard behind my elementary school.

There was a whole bunch of kids running around at the time at the bottom of the small hill that bordered the back of the schoolyard, and I remember also that I was wearing a brand new pair of hunter-green sweatpants with a picture of a tyrannosaurus rex emblazoned on the left leg – sweatpants with which I was very pleased and thought were the cat’s pyjamas. Suddenly, while playing, I felt a shove and I was pushed down into the slush and mud which covered and soaked my dinosaur sweatpants. When I stood up I was furious and vengeful and so overcome with emotion that without hesitation I violently shoved Joey who happened to be running by me at that moment and who had nothing to do with my being shoved, into the same muck making him as wet and miserable as I was. We were both hauled off the schoolyard to dry ourselves and explained what happened.

While we can easily look at my schoolyard experience as a common thing amongst kids that age, I think it’s also a good example of what is the brokenness within all of our hearts; sure, I was young and it’s hard to regulate emotions when you’re 6 or 7, but even as adults we can sometimes comfort ourselves in our own hurts by hurting others, even if only by thinking or speaking ill of them.

St. James speaks a lot about this part of us in his Epistle saying that we are often divided within ourselves, that part of the human experience is to struggle with this division. Now that division might be between our responding in love and charity to someone or responding in anger; but in a more daily way we know that division when we are tempted to eat just a bit more ice cream than we are ought to, or spend a bit more money on something than we should. In cartoons this division is often depicted as the little devil on one shoulder and the little angel on the other.

And its clear for James that this division within us comes, fundamentally, from our frailty, our sin, the thing for which we need healing and redemption, but it’s something that is solved by growing in faith. James uses a lot of natural imagery throughout his Epistle to make this point, comparing our faith to a seed – just as we know that a seed is present if it produces a plant above the soil, so we know that faith is present and real if it produces good and evident fruit in our lives; faith isn’t what is produced, having faith or being a Christian isn’t just about ‘being a good person’, but if you have faith then that good living will spring up like the plant above the soil.

And God has put into plants this instinct to grow towards the sun, if I rotate the plant in my office so that the leaves are turned towards the dark room, by the next morning the leaves have turned around to face the window; the tiny seeds in the paper envelopes have within them the entirety of the tomato plant or the bean or the flower – you plant, and they grow. Or think of bees who hatch from their combs and immediately know what they are about and set about doing it.

But it is not like that with us. Unlike the plants and the animals that God has created we can turn away from the sun, refuse to grow, and keep ourselves from the business for which we were created – love, and kindness, charity, gentleness these things are not as instinctive or natural to us as collecting pollen is to the bees. My actions towards Joey on the school yard some 30 years ago, lashing out at someone who had nothing to do with my misfortune, my desire to make another person suffer simply because I had suffered, or those things we do each day but wish we did not do, or the anger we hold in our hearts for others is proof not that we are inherently bad, but that we are frail and broken and in need of help.

Just one verse before what we hear today in Paul’s epistle to the Romans, Paul says that if the Spirit of God that raised Jesus from the dead also lives in us, then like Jesus we will be given new life by God by that same spirit within us. And new life not just in the age to come, but right now, we can be those people who don’t push back when we’re pushed, who love when we’re hated, who give when we have little.

And so, Paul says, we are debtors not to the world and the flesh – that is, our own desires and our own feelings – but to God who has adopted us by our baptism as His Children, who loves us as the perfect Father, who helps us in our weakness and gives us that spirit of life to dwell in us. What we cannot do for ourselves, because of all the ways in which we are weak, God does for us as our Heavenly Father, His strength becomes our strength because he lives in us by his spirit.

The Gospel today is drawn from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, from Matthew chapters 5-7, and offers a brief and uncomplicated teaching.

Jesus’ teaching here is surely the inspiration for James and his teaching that a faith that does not produce good works, a good life, holy living – is dead. Jesus warns us against false prophets – wolves in sheeps’ clothing – who come to us with lies dressed up as truth, no less a threat in 2025 than 25AD. But, he says, it is by their fruits that you know them – their words may sound sweet but look at their lives, does their faith bear good fruit that we can see? Do they strive towards holiness and charity, or do they preach one thing and do another?

This, Jesus is telling his disciples, is how we are known in the world as well, “a good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit,” he says.

If we want to be the adopted children of God, heirs of His kingdom, then we must live as the adopted children of God. We live and we act as we do because of the kind of people we are.

Saying Lord, Lord is not enough.

It’s not enough to invoke God’s name, we must also not only do the will of God but want to do the will of God.

Thinking ourselves generous or sacrificial or even putting limits on how generous we will be is of no good unless we’re actually generous and sacrificial.

What good is saying or thinking that we are a forgiving person if we have yet to forgive another?

It’s not about wanting to be different people, but about being different people led by God’s spirit and loving and living God’s Will joyfully. This is why the collect today prays what it does – that God might protect us from the things that hinder our faith but give us the things that are profitable for us – not money or property, but what can truly profit us – to give us that willing heart to love and do what God wills and what God loves. Amen.