Homily for Septuagesima Sunday, 2022

Fr. Jesse Barkalow - Septuagesima Sunday (February 13, 2022)

A liturgy, like a family meal. it is both a fixed and a changing thing. There are some components of a family meal that are fixed: preparation, gathering the participants, prayer, the acts of eating and drinking, and the work of cleaning up, to name a few, and some components change: the food itself changes with the seasons of the year. And the company at the table changes over the course of time. we have new and familiar faces at the table: immediate family, extended family, friends, neighbors, strangers, sometimes even our enemies join us for table fellowship.

The liturgy of Holy Communion is a particular and fixed act of worship, but it also contains components that change. As the seasons of the church change, certain parts of the liturgy change with it: the textiles, the candles, the incense, the music, the Scripture readings, and some prayers. And each season of the church year, like the seasons of nature, have a theme that govern these changes.

Winter is a season of rest, dormancy, sparseness, anticipation, and preparation. Lent is a season of humility, quiet, contemplation, reflection, and rejuvenation. Spring is a season in which the energy and the life that has been quietly maturing in hidden places, is finally revealed, and Easter is a season of Spiritual bounty, when God’s grace and abundance are let off the leash and given room to run (so to speak), when truth, beauty, and goodness are put on full display in all their God-given splendor.

Today we have entered into the season of pre-Lent. But we are not in this season by choice. We must not let our modern lives confuse us into thinking that we have control over the seasons. We enter Lent the same way we enter Winter, willingly or unwillingly, but by God’s good design. It is true that we have quite a lot of power over nature in our modern, industrial world. We can shut out the winter cold with central heating, we can drive away the winter darkness with electricity, we can ignore the winter fast by shipping in avocados from Mexico and fruit from south-east Asia. But none of this changes the reality that it is winter, it merely puts us into conflict with it. We pay dearly for these anti-seasonal luxuries: utility bills are expensive, food prices are exorbitant, and we struggle to handle difficult things when they inevitably break through our defenses.

This is true of the church seasons as well. The seasons are there, whether we live with them or against them. We do not decide, either corporately or individually, that we want to live through Lent and Easter, they always come. We get to decide to align our lives with the life of Christ, who established the seasons of the church through his life, Or we decide to ignore God’s design, and fight against what Christ set in motion through his life on earth.

If it sounds like this is leading to a dangerous place, a place where God expects something of us, and maybe even God’s family, the Church, expects something of us, A place where we are treated less like children and more like young adults, like people who are maturing into the stature of Christ and capable of hard work and real discipline. Well, let’s follow Paul, who followed Jesus, and see where he takes us in today’s epistle reading. In fact, it is just a little later in 1 Corinthians that Paul admonishes us to ‘be imitators of him, as he imitates Christ.’

So, what are we supposed to do with our epistle reading from today, which reads this way in the ESV:

‘Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it.  Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.’

Why is Paul, the apostle of Grace, talking about running races and disciplining his body? anyone who has ever competed in anything knows that ‘free gift’ has no part in competition. If the prize is just given out, instead of being awarded to the winner, then by definition it’s no longer a competition. Who would watch the game tonight, if the coin flip decided the winner. Unless I’m missing something, and I just don’t have as much of God’s favor as the rest of you, then I think we can all agree that the foundation of any competition is work and not grace. The harder you work, the faster you run and the fastest runner wins.

We probably all have at least one of those friends who can easily pick up any new hobby or sport that they try because they live lives of discipline. That’s one reason I don’t use social media. I don’t feel the need for constant reminder that people are better than me at everything. Disciplined people adopt a new hobby or activity and they quickly improve, while those of us who lack discipline, have to learn discipline itself, as well as the new hobby, in order to make any progress.

            So how dare Paul, the church’s greatest voice against works-righteousness, talk about racing! Or is it possible, is it possible that our God is more like a loving Father than an eccentric vineyard owner? Is it possible that God is less like Elon Musk, and more like a man who wants to see his children grow in maturity, strength, skill, and even enjoyment?

When we look at the parable of the vineyard owner in today’s gospel reading, we learn that this world, our own souls and bodies included, belong to God. And that it is up to the Creator to choose what he does with his creation, not up to us. If we begrudge God his generosity toward others then we shut ourselves out from Him. It is a fact of the kingdom of heaven that we cannot accept God’s generosity toward us when we will not allow it for others.

And this just might be the underlying fear of what is sometimes called ‘works-righteousness.’ We don’t want to accept that our brothers and sisters might work harder than us, might do more than us in the kingdom, might be more disciplined than us, but neither do we want God to be generous, giving every worker the same pay, not matter what they have done. We don’t want to see everyone getting paid the same thing, despite how hard they worked. We also don’t want to be told that others have worked harder than us. We don’t want to be told to discipline our bodies, to fast, pray, and give, except as much as we are already doing it.

If we read our Bibles, then yes, reading Scripture is important. If we pray, then yes, prayer is important. If we tithe, or If we fast, then yes, they are important. But if not, well then don’t go preaching works-righteousness to us. Don’t go telling us that we are in a race and that discipline matters.

But The lesson of the gospel reading is not that God’s mercy is unjust (faith without works, as James calls it). And neither is the lesson of today’s epistle reading that salvation goes to those who earn it (works-righteousness). The lesson of the gospel is that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. And the lesson of the Epistle is that anyone who wants to win a race is going to train for it. In other words, run the race before you, but make sure you know where the finish line is. Beloved, we’ve been set free from sin and death, we’ve been brought into God’s vineyard, we’ve been given a chance to join the race, and it was not through our own doing.

That is the unequivocal call of the gospel to all of us: That, first, we turn around by repentance; and that we then work out our faith, with the whole company of saints, in fear and trembling. Wherever we happen to be as we come to the altar in repentance this morning, it is from there that we start our race back to the Father, through the Son, by the power Holy Spirit. Some of us might be a long way from the disciplined life of God’s family, and some of us might be working hard to conform ourselves to the Rule of life through prayer, fasting, giving, and devotion. 

But if any of us are indeed going somewhere, if we are indeed moving toward resurrection life, Then we had better live lives like athletes, like people who take every decision into consideration in the light of the goal they are working toward. If we want to endure to the end of the race, to take hold of that which has been set before us, Then we had better take Paul’s advice and imitate him as he imitates Christ.

Who knows the race better than Our Heavenly Father who designed it, better than the Son who was the first to finish the race, better than the Holy Spirit who is there with us, strengthening us, for from the beginning to the end. If we want to endure the race, we had better allow God’s ordained seasons to form us into the likeness of Jesus. We must allow the disciplines and the practices that have come down to us from Christ, to shape us. The disciplines that took the Apostles and the saints through to the finish line.  ‘I do not run aimlessly’ says Paul, ‘but I discipline my body and keep it under control.’

If we are indeed no longer spectators, then we will live like it.  After all, we are completing for something much greater than a gold medal, or a ring. Are we going to wait around for the 11th hour, because there’s a rumor that some people joined the race late, worked less, and still received the prize?  Are we indeed in the race, or do we hold secretly in our hearts the famous words of St. Augustine from his Confessions, ‘Lord, grant me chastity and continency, but not yet’ (7.17).  Few of us are as self-aware as St. Augustine, but maybe we’ve allowed ourselves to live with the less honest version of his prayer, maybe, when we don’t want to be disciplined, we say something like: ‘I’m just a sinner saved by grace’ But that is not what Jesus means when at the end of today’s gospel reading when he says: ‘the last will be first, and the first last.’ Look at what St. Ignatius wrote to the Church in the passage we read for cell group this week:

‘let us be eager to be imitators of the Lord, to see who can be more wronged, the more cheated, who the more rejected, in order that no weed of the devil may be found among you, but that with complete purity and self-control you may abide in Christ Jesus physically and spiritually.’

And Ignatius is not saying anything that he did not get from Paul and the Apostles. In chapter 4 of 1 Corinthians, Paul paints a picture for us of what the life of a star athlete looks like. A little bio piece on being one of the greats in the faith. He says,

‘I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men…To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.’

And still, Paul and the other Apostles, saints and legends though they be, do not hold first place, they were merely imitating Christ, to whom we all must ultimately look as our example in this life. And it is Christ who,

‘though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.’

As it says in Philippians 2.

It is Jesus and his race, his victory on the cross, and the eternal life he shares with us, that brings us to together at the Lord’s table this morning.  It is by the work of Christ, the witness of his Apostles, and the faithfulness of his Church through the centuries, That we come together, to be strengthened, for our own race. And it is in imitation of Christ and of those who have gone before us, that we lay down our own lives, giving ourselves to God and to our neighbor, submitting ourselves to discipline.

Because this is the discipline of God’s family. We, gather, we pray, we fast, and we give, in order that we might be imitators of Christ, ‘forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, pressing on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.’

amen