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.”

I have this fairly vivid memory from my childhood about a particular day at school when I was probably only in grade one or two. As you might imagine I’m a pretty even-keeled person and even since this day have never laid a hand on anyone in anger. But not this day.

I remember that it was the spring, it was cold but beginning to warm up, things outside were wet and slushy as they often are around March or April, and we were on recess or lunch in the back playground at my elementary school.

I remember that there was a whole bunch of us running around playing some game in an open area behind the tiny hill at the back of the schoolyard. It’s funny how some things stand out so clearly in your memory while others don’t; I remember the weather that day, I remember exactly the location, I even remember that I was wearing a brand new pair of green sweatpants that had the image of a dinosaur on one side of them – I was very pleased with those sweatpants.

Suddenly, while playing, I felt a great shove from behind me and I was pushed down into the mud and slush, dirtying my brand new dinosaur sweatpants and making me cold and wet. I stood up, crying, furious, and vengeful, and without hesitation decided that the person running by me at the time – Joey – had been my assailant. I violently shoved Joey, who had nothing to do with my being pushed, into the same muck and water thereby making him just as miserable as me. Needless to say we were both hauled into the school to dry off and explain what had happened.

We just finished our study on the Epistle of James last week which we’ve been reading together for over a month, and throughout the Epistle we heard James describe in very plain terms what it’s like to be a human. In broad stokes, James says 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 our responding in anger, but in more simple and daily ways, 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 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 – an image I talked about a few weeks ago – we know the faith is present and real if the seed produces a plant that is visible above the soil, our minds, our hearts, our lives, and our actions must be outpourings of the faith we have within.

As I watch our plants and garden grow, especially these last few hot and sometimes wet weeks, I am constantly amazed by what we see in plants. That God has put into them this instinct to grow towards the sun, that 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 already within them – you plant, and they grow. Or think of bees who hatch from their combs and immediately know what they are about and they do 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 they are 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 desperate 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 2023 than 23AD. 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.

What is the point of saying that we are generous if we are not actually generous?

Of saying 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. This is why the collect today prays that God might take from us the things that hinder us and give us the things that are profitable for our faith.

And here today we gather in this Memorial service to remember loved ones who have fallen asleep in the Lord, but whose lives bore fruit and who can still teach and inspire us in our own walks with God, showing us what lives lived in the Spirit can do for us.

Amen.