The following was written and preached by Mr. Richard Tarsitano at St. Michael and All Angels Anglican Catholic Church in Jacksonville Florida. Mr. Tarsitano (son of the late Rev. Dr. Louis Tarsitano) is currently studying for holy orders.
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“And
the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and
minds through Christ Jesus” (Philippians
4:7).
The Epistle and Gospel appointed for
this Fourth Sunday in Advent compare two important time periods in which the
God of Time and Space reaches through his creation to make all things new. The incarnation and return of our Lord Jesus
Christ reveal a surprising and magnanimous saving effort by which the three
persons of the Blessed Trinity confound our wants and assumptions for the good
of the beautiful creation we mar through sin.
The propers for today really reveal two advents in which the people of
God prepare for their great king to die and to reign, to rise and to return, to
ascend and to descend. These two
advents, these great comings, should be times of humbleness and thanksgiving,
but then and now, we push the mysterious, distant past and future reality away
to focus on the jarring spectacle produced by the burdens we inherit and
create. Exploring the two advents
through God’s revealed word we see a different
path.
St. Paul in today’s Epistle
is writing to his beloved church in Philippi which has its struggles but
certainly give the Apostle much less grief than say the church in Corinth. Throughout the letter he rejoices in their
faith and thanks them for their “partnership in the gospel from the
first day until now” (1:5). High praise from a man who is writing this
correspondence from the dusky light of a 1st Century prison cell. But, being a
partner with Paul attracted attention from forces both natural and supernatural
which were persecuting the kind and generous congregation in Philippi. Over and above that overt resistance, we hear
the familiar refrain of a people attempting to live in light of the gospel. We
hear the echoing heartache and struggle of souls besieged by their inner
temptations and constantly threatened by the outward malice of a world that
must kill the idea of a savior-God to protect its grip on the hearts of
men.
Then and now, to safeguard that
circular justification of ungodliness, whereby man is god and man makes the
rules, it is not enough to simply disagree with Christianity. In this way, I really do understand the
vitriol that flows from the mouths and pens of Anti-Christians; for, these men
and women oftentimes understand the ramifications of Christ’s message
better than many who claim him as their Lord. Distressingly, many in the
Western Christian world seek to accommodate and assimilate into a human spirit
poisoned by greed and lust and murder in an abortive attempt to “trick
people” into
believing as much of the gospel as we can to occasionally get them to sit in a
pew. Thankfully, this path of least
resistance, this perilous bridge leading back to the spiritual ghetto we all
come from, has been burned by our Lord and our only way back to that place is to
jump into a never-ending chasm.
In the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus
states these hard words, “Do not think that I have come to bring
peace to the earth. I have not come to
bring peace, but a sword. For I have
come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves
father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or
daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross
and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and
whoever loses his life for my sake will find it”
(Matthew 10:34-39). Jesus’ description
of the effect of the Gospel on families does not sound like the kind of message
one hears from TV commercials and newspaper ads. We are familiar with church advertisements
that basically boil down to one of two ideas: 1. Come to church and your son or
daughter will do what you say more often or 2. Come to church to fulfill a
vague sense that your family is missing something it needs to get along
better. These two ideas completely miss
the point and serve as a pitiable distraction from the glorious good news of
the Gospel. Jesus has not come to bring
peace to the world. He has not come to
bring peace to your family or your job or your lodge or your political party.
He has come to bring peace to his people, our brothers and sisters he fashions
from the dust of the earth. A peace that flows from the new creation begun in
Christ, a peace that calms the martyr’s heart as he walks to the cross, a
peace that raises dead men and women from the cold grave, a peace that passes
all understanding.
The conceptions of peace in our
culture are intimately linked with ideas we have inherited from the 1960’s
peace movements and the work of non-violent protesters such as Henry David
Thoreau and Mohandas Ghandi. From these
modern movements and thinkers we tend to picture peace as a very human-centered
idea. In this conception of peace,
mankind–either through enlightenment or horror–chooses
to stop killing ourselves and one another.
We are exhorted to “give peace a chance” as it
were, but St. Paul presents a very different picture of peace. This is not a peace accessed by people in
pursuit of fashioning a perfect world from the ashes of the human experience: a
peace too often willing to scheme and compromise with evil in order to secure a
momentary absence of conflict. That is
the type of peace Jeremiah rebukes in chapter 8 of his prophetic work, “They
have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace,
peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah
8:10).
True peace can only come from a
personal God who guards our hearts and our minds from fear, despair, and
sin. Sin scuttles all human developed
projects for world peace even as it subverts our own personal peace keeping
missions. From Thucydides to Henry
Kissinger, great minds have tried to crack the puzzle that is world peace, and
from Buddha to Deepak Chopra men and women have attempted to conjure a personal
peace that is lasting and real. These
attempts fail because they are like lost souls trying to bail out a leaking
boat without patching the holes. In
truth, our situation is even more dire than that as there are too many holes
for us possibly to fill with our own effort.
Humanity is on the Titanic, and our sin and hubris has prevented us from
bringing life-boats.
I would ask you to be cautious in
interpreting this metaphor I have just presented because I do not want you to
take away the wrong idea. An idea I have
heard preached on more than a few occasions: Jesus is not our life-boat; He is
our King. Jesus Christ, the Lord and
Savior of the world, is not a product we desire or a last-ditch “break-glass-when-needed” eternal
life insurance policy. The peace that
St. Paul promises to us springs from the grace of God and our participation in
a life focused on God through prayer, supplication, and thanksgiving. This connection to God and his bountiful
fount of grace through these seemingly ordinary means is discounted and ignored
at humanity’s everlasting peril. Psalm 145 tells us, “The
LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him; yea, all such as call upon him
faithfully. He will fulfill the desire
of them that fear him; he also will hear their cry, and will help them” (145:18-19). St. Paul comforts the church in Philippi and
the church on Fleming Island by assuring them of Christ’s
return in the final judgment, but he is also writing a referral to physically
and spiritually correspond with the God of the universe. That peace that passes all understanding is
the God of Peace, the creator of heaven and earth, holding us up as we face the
hourly challenges of being one of His people in a land of rebellion and
strife. The reality of our heavenly
companionship is how St. Paul can say, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I
will say, Rejoice” (Philippians
4:4).
We are in the last Sunday of this year’s
Advent season, but this yearly observance should remind us that we live in a
perpetual Advent as we await the second coming of our King. We do not await that great and glorious day
alone, trapped in the loneliness and squalor of an unredeemed mind, we count
the days to his return with the communion of saints, but even more amazingly,
we commune with God himself–for Christ has given us confident
access to the heavenly throne of grace.
The world hates prayer (it says: “shouldn’t we
be doing something instead of wasting our time praying”), the
flesh hates prayer (it says, “I’m so busy, who has time to pray”), the
devil hates prayer (in the same way a murderer prefers if you don’t dial
911). These powerful forces have so
twisted our culture and society that we fail to see that our moments on bended
knee, in communication with God Almighty, are the most important thing we do in
our day.
More important than reading the newspaper,
more important than doing our job, more important than kissing our loved ones
goodnight. None of those other
relationships matter if we do not have a right relation with our God and our
King, and we can never hope to be in a right relation if we ignore this most generous
invitation to address Him in His heavenly court.
Finally, as Advent comes to a close, I
would ask you to meditate carefully on the familiar words we sing in our
beloved Christmas carols. For, a Christian cannot sing a Christmas carol in the
same way a non-Christian can. We are not
absent-mindedly singing about peace and good-will. We are beseeching the King of creation to
return and make the world whole, to bring a peace that passes all
understanding.
He hears our prayers, and He will
come.
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