Homily for the 3rd Sunday in Lent, 2022
“Christ Shall Give Thee Light”
The Third Sunday of Lent, 2022
The Rev. Dcn. Kyle Hughes
THE COLLECT.
WE beseech thee, Almighty God, look upon the hearty desires of thy humble servants, and stretch forth the right hand of thy Majesty, to be our defence against all our enemies; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
THE EPISTLE. Ephesians 5:1-14
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 sweet-smelling 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. Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience. Be not ye therefore partakers with them: for ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light; (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, and righteousness, and truth;) proving what is acceptable unto the Lord. And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them; for it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret. But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Therefore it is said, Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.
THE GOSPEL. St. Luke 11:14-28
JESUS was casting out a devil, and it was dumb. And it came to pass, when the devil was gone out, the dumb spake; and the people wondered. But some of them said, He casteth out devils through Beelzebub, the chief of the devils. And others, tempting him, sought of him a sign from heaven. But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth. If Satan also be divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand? because ye say, that I cast out demons through Beelzebub. And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out? therefore shall they be your judges. But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you. When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace; but when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils. He that is not with me is against me: and he that gathereth not with me scattereth. When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.
Tags: St. John Chrysostom, St. Benedict of Nursia, Evelyn Underhill, John Henry Blunt, Peter O’Brien
“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” You may be seated.
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Throughout the seasons of Christmas and Epiphany, we have come back time and again to the theme of light as a way of thinking about the person and work of Christ and, by extension, our life in Christ. At the Christmas Eve vigil, for instance, we looked at how the prologue of St. John’s Gospel set forth the Christmas motif of the light shining in the darkness, considering how Jesus Christ is the Light of men, the promised Lamp for the people of God as we make our pilgrim journey through this world. As we discovered, the Light shines that we too might bear light in the darkness around us; to return again to a powerful quote from Evelyn Underhill, “every Christian is, as it were, part of the dust-laden air which shall radiate the glowing epiphany of God, catch and reflect his golden Light.” Then, on the second Sunday after Christmas, we reflected further on what it means for the light of Christ to enkindle our hearts and for that light to shine forth in our lives, emphasizing how it is at baptism that Christ’s light floods our souls, setting us on a lifelong journey of allowing the light of Christ to increasingly transform every aspect of our persons. Finally, throughout the season of Epiphany, we celebrated the arrival of Jesus as Savior and King, considering how we might shine the light of Christ to the world around us. We should not, then, be surprised to see that the theme of light continues into this season of Lent. Turn with me in your booklet to our primary passage for this morning, the Epistle reading, from the fifth chapter of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, and we will consider how the Apostle Paul calls us to “wake up” and walk as “children of light,” that we may, with the help of the Holy Spirit, build our defenses against all assaults of the darkness.
Let’s start at the end of the passage, in verse 14, in which St. Paul quotes what appears to have been a familiar saying, “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” While clearly drawing on biblical language from passages such as Isaiah 26:19 and 60:1, this quotation, in the eyes of most biblical scholars, is likely taken from an early Christian hymn–and perhaps, more specifically, from an early Christian baptismal hymn. The conjunction of imagery involving the movement from death to life and the appearance of light is, as we have seen, commonplace language for how the earliest Christians articulated their theology of Holy Baptism; it is, we recall, the case that at our baptism Christ fills us with His light. Thus, the hymn fragment is suggesting that apart from our baptism into Christ, we are by nature asleep, dead. By contrast, our baptism is the means by which we are awakened, made alive. This image helps us to see the objective change in our status as a result of our baptism. And yet Paul himself recognizes that, subjectively, our experience of that transformation, that lifelong process of the Spirit making us alive in Christ, may be harder to see. That is, in fact, precisely why Paul sees the need to remind the Ephesians of their baptism by quoting this baptismal hymn fragment: the Ephesians were not, in fact, living in accordance with their identities as “children of light,” as he puts it in 5:8, but were instead acting according to their old nature by continuing to partner with the “children of disobedience,” as he describes those who are apart from Christ in 5:6.
Indeed, the whole point of this passage is to contrast the old life and the new. In particular, Paul contrasts the “fruit of light,” which “is found in all that is good and right and true” (5:9), with “the unfruitful works of darkness” (5:11), which in this context appears to be primarily referring to sins of sexual immorality that derive from our disordered desire to covet what is not rightfully ours. Like Jesus, Paul extends the category of sexual immorality from actual instances of fornication or adultery to something seemingly harmless. I like to tell my high school students that Ephesians 5:4 would be an excellent school verse that we should slap on all our school marketing materials and plaster on the walls of all our classrooms: “Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving.” That is to say, in the New Testament, the demands of sexual morality extend beyond merely engaging in sinful sexual actions to also encompass thoughts and words. Paul, of course, is not opposed to sex; rather, because it is a gift from God, we are to rightly receive it in its proper place with “thanksgiving,” which commentator Peter O’Brien calls “almost a synonym for the Christian life.”
In any event, it is worth noting that as much as some Christians and some churches may wish to minimize or downplay the Bible’s teachings on sex, here we have just one example of the biblical writers identifying Christian sexual teaching as a non-negotiable element of what it means to walk in the light. Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, that it is precisely this issue of sexual morality that our surrounding culture targets for deconstruction, painting those who hold to the biblical teachings as not simply killjoys but as haters whose opinions are causing harm and need to be canceled. What is more surprising, though, is the seemingly unending succession of scandals involving well-known Christian leaders, churches, and parachurch organizations who have failed to walk in the light when it comes to what they themselves profess to believe regarding sexual ethics. While these well-publicized failings have had very negative consequences for Christian witness to our broader society, we are not doomed to repeat these same mistakes. In particular, I want to call on the young people gathered here this morning, the next generation of leaders in the church and in the world, to radiate the goodness, truth, and beauty of the biblical teaching on marriage and sex, to hold out to those both inside and outside of the church the wondrous facts of our creation as male and female, of sex as a divine gift between husband and wife for mutual encouragement, the procreation of children, and the mystical imaging of Christ and the Church, and of chastity, fidelity, and self-control as virtues that will lead to flourishing in our own lives, in our families, and even in our society at large. Let us not be deceived, let us not partake in the works of darkness, but instead, let us be filled with the light of Christ, staying true to our baptismal commitments by living in accordance with our identities as “children of light.”
The urgency of Paul’s exhortation is underscored by this morning’s Gospel passage. On the surface, what we have in Luke 11:14-26 is Jesus performing one of his many exorcisms. What is particularly intriguing about this passage, though, is what Jesus says about demon possession starting in verse 24: “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and finding none it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there. And the last state of that person is worse than the first.” So let’s follow the logic here: a man has a demon, but the demon is cast out. Seems good, right? But this has only encouraged the demon to go and gather its demon friends, and to come back with a full demon posse that overwhelms the man’s defenses, rendering him even more demon-possessed than he was at the start of the story. What exactly are we to make of this? With this passage in mind, let’s go back to Ephesians 5, on which St. John Chrysostom exhorts us as follows: “The devil stands hard at hand; he is going about roaring to catch thee, and turning everything against thy life. And art thou sitting down and talking folly? Look at the countenances of men in battle; the stern eye, the eager and beating heart, the spirit collected, but anxious and trembling. In camps all is order and discipline. If they who have visible enemies observe so great silence, art thou, whose chief warfare is in thy words, enjoying thyself with jests, and raising a laugh as if the matter were a mere nothing? Now is the time of watch and guard; such things are of the world, and can have no place here.” The problem with the twice-possessed man of whom Jesus speaks is that he is, in the words of Ephesians 5, “asleep.” After his exorcism, the guards on the perimeter of the man’s camp, so to speak, are laughing and joking, enjoying themselves, totally unaware of the enemy’s imminent assault. And so he is utterly routed in battle, his soul in far greater peril than even before. This Gospel story, then, is a picture of precisely what Paul is describing in more abstract terms in Ephesians 5. We must, as Chrysostom described in another of his homilies, guard the gates of our souls, vigilant against anything that we might be taking in that would corrupt or deform our souls away from the love of God and neighbor.
The nineteenth-century Anglican theologian John Henry Blunt likewise ties these two passages together, and connects them back to baptism as well as to this season of Lent that we are presently in: “The sense of Satan’s power was so strong in the early Church as to lead it to make exorcism an invariable preliminary of baptism. Every act of penitence is a kind of exorcism, and every Absolution is the conquest of Satan by Christ. But unless the swept and garnished soul is preoccupied with good, evil will return to it. In all Lenten discipline, therefore, the occupation of the soul by the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit is the true bar to the entrance of the seven evil spirits, and works of mercy will guard against the dangers and deadly sins to which inactive devotion makes it liable.” In other words, brothers and sisters in Christ, we have been baptized into Christ, filled with His marvelous light, and yet it is nevertheless still the case that the devil prowls like a roaring lion, seeking to devour our families, our souls, and all that is good, beautiful, and true. No wonder, then, that this morning’s Collect calls on God “to be our defense against all our enemies,” for it is only by his Spirit, only by his power, that our defenses can be secure. And yet, though the victory is Christ’s alone, we nevertheless have a role to play in constructing our defenses; this season of Lent, therefore, is one of those opportunities by which we can cooperate with the Spirit in the work of fortifying our souls.
How, though, does this work in practice? The passage from the Rule of St. Benedict that we looked at in cell groups a few weeks ago continues to inspire me: “The life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent. Since few, however, have the strength for this, we urge the entire community during the days of Lent to keep its manner of life most pure and to wash away in this holy season the negligence of other times. This we can do in a fitting manner by refusing to indulge evil habits and by devoting ourselves to prayer with tears, to reading, to compunction of heart and self-denial. During these days, therefore, we will add to the usual measure of our service something by way of private prayer and abstinence from food or drink, so that each of us will have something with the assigned measure to offer God of his own will with the joy of the Holy Spirit. In other words, let each one deny himself some food, drink, sleep, needless talking and idle jesting, and look forward to holy Easter with joy and spiritual longing.” Benedict, rightly, recognizes that we are weak; we can, however, surprise ourselves with what we are capable of sustaining for a month’s time when we know there is an end in sight. Benedict thus exhorts us to both “give up” some measure of food or drink and “take up” increased habits of prayer and Bible reading. Benedict also reminds us of the purpose, the telos, of all this: an increase in joy, particularly joy that results from looking forward to Easter with “spiritual longing.” In other words, Lent without Easter is just a self-oriented time of self-improvement, while Easter without Lent is a hollow, fleeting celebration. But the cross always comes before the crown; the desert must come before the garden, the fast precedes the feast. Together, then, Lent and Easter give us, in miniature, the entire sweep of the Christian life.
Let us then, this Lenten season, not partake in the works of darkness, but rather be filled with the light of Christ, holding to our baptisms by living as “children of light.”As the Lord himself says at the close of our Gospel lesson, “Blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” Let us keep God’s Word, hide it in our hearts, and let it be a lamp unto our feet. Amen.