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"Life is tough, and you're lucky if you live through it." So Woodie Guthrie used to say. And we need only recent news, if we need anything at all, to remind us of the truth of Guthrie's observation: airplanes full of people flown into buildings three years ago, the fear ever since that it could happen again and the stock market in seemingly permanent exile in the south, a war raging in Iraq no one knows how to end and famine and death in Sudan no one seems to have the will to end, and so the dangers and risks of what Isaiah calls our covenant with death remain the staple of the evening news. And one wonders, with the man in the Gospel this morning, "Who will be saved?" The world is a risky place. Life is risky business because, even without terrorists, the fact of death itself always stands ahead of us, even if we we like to think it's way up ahead of us in something called old age. All of us can do the arithmetic of three score and ten years, so the question is always before us: "Lord, are only a few going to be saved?" During the 1948 Presidential campaign, Democrats used to encourage President Truman and needle Republicans with, "Give 'em hell, Harry!" And Truman would reply, "I don't give 'em hell. I just tell 'em the truth, and they think it's hell." And when Jesus is asked how many will be saved, how many will enter the kingdom of heaven, he tells us the truth: "Make every effort to enter through the narrow door," he says, and it sounds like hell "because many will try to enter," he adds, "and will not be able. Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, 'Sir, open the door for us.' But he will answer, 'I don't know you, or where you come from.'" "Then you will say, 'But Lord, surely you know us! We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets!' But he will reply, 'I don't know you, or where you come from. Away from me all you evildoers!' There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth," Jesus adds, "when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out.'" And that's the truth. And it sounds like hell. Parish priests, you know, are often approached by people who want to arrange a wedding for a son or daughter or a baptism for a child or grandchild, and when you ask them why they want to have the wedding or baptism here - since you've never seem them before - they say, "Oh, we're "life-long" Episcopalians, baptized by Father So-and-So in 1974 (though they haven't been in a church since then), and Jesus asks, "Do you think that's supposed to save you?" while the parish priest smiles and says, "Let's see what we can do." So where is the good news in today's Gospel reading? Well, first, Jesus does not say that only a few will be saved. This passage is not about numbers. It's about the way to salvation, the way to the kingdom of God. Jesus says that many will come from east and west and north and south and take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God. It's just a question of whether you and I will be with them, because, as Jesus says, many who are now last, many who perhaps have not even been to church in thirty years will, in that day, be first, and many who are now first, many who have been circumcised like Abraham or baptized as Episcopalians and have been in church every week, will find themselves last. The truth Jesus is telling, it seems, is that one can't expect just to saunter into the kingdom of heaven because he or she was baptized or circumcised fifty years ago, or because he's a "life-long" Episcopalian or even a "life-long" Jew or Christian. Jesus confirms Woody Guthrie's observation - that life is tough, and that the kingdom of God, while it's a gift free and clear, requires something of us if we are to experience it. And that's the truth. But, unlike Guthrie, Jesus knows that living through life and into the kingdom is more than luck. There is something we can do, but it amounts to more than being circumcised or baptized. We can strive, - agonizesthe is what he says in the Greek - we can agonize, try very hard, make every effort, to enter through the narrow door. So what is this narrow door that we are to strive, to make every effort, to agonize to get through? The kingdom of heaven, as Thomas Merton says, is like a man riding an ox, looking for an ox. Like the ox, the kingdom is right under our noses. We are riding it all the time, even right this minute in the midst of all the risks of life, but we do not see it. People sometimes tell me that they like down-to-earth sermons with clear "points" that suggest specific steps one might take to improve his spiritual life. And someone, probably a homiletics student, once asked the great Baptist preacher Gardiner Taylor how many "points" a sermon ought to have. And Taylor thought for a moment, and then said, "At least one." Well this is a practical three-point sermon that offers three specific things we can do to enter and live in the kingdom that is right under our noses. That's the good news. The bad news is that all three steps require some effort on our parts. The first thing we can strive to do is the hardest of all and is the prerequisite for the others. We can strive to believe the good news of the Gospel - that you are saved by grace solely because God loves you and that God accepts you as you are. Such good news is truly hard for us. It is agony, it is agonizing, for us pull-ourselves-up-by-our-own-bootstraps types to accept the truth, to accept the fact that we are accepted by God. It is difficult for us to believe that there is nothing we have to do, hard for us to believe that God loves us, and that's that. It's hard for us to accept grace, hard for us to accept the fact that there is not a damned thing we have to do to claim the love of God, or a blessed thing either, because God's love for us - God's love for you - is just a fact, right this moment, with no strings attached. You are accepted, Paul Tillich reminds us. You are loved. Accept the love. That's what Jesus tells us by dying on the Cross for us. There's nothing, not one thing, that you have to do about it. In fact, there's nothing you can do about it, because God loves you just because he created you so he would have you to love, because you are you. And that love is unshakeable, thoroughly reliable. It is the Church's one foundation, our mighty fortress, and all the risk and terror or the world, either physical or moral, cannot change that. It is God's unshakeable kingdom, his dependable gift to us, which we are riding around on right this moment while looking for it somewhere up ahead. But, because we are right on top of it, we do not see it. So the hardest thing about inheriting God's kingdom, the hardest thing about experiencing the kingdom ourselves, we find, is its easiness. How can it be that I cannot fall from God's love and grace? How can it be that my own worth does not depend upon what I do? Because I was taught to earn my way, and I suspect many of your were as well, taught that we must deserve our acceptance. So when we hear that God's love is ours for the accepting, unconditionally, we find it hard to believe. It takes a lot of effort for us to believe it. And we find it a narrow door indeed, so narrow, in fact, that some of us find it impossible to walk through. And many of us who walk easily through the wider doors of the world, the doors of achievement and power and moral righteousness and right religion, many who are the first at these doors, when we stand at the wide open but narrow door of faith, we find ourselves dead last. Not because the door is not open to us, but because we find that we just cannot enter. It's so hard, because we don't trust it. It is, literally, agony, spiritual agony, which is what Jesus said it would be when he urged us to strive, to try hard, to agonize to enter the kingdom by the narrow door, which will not be easy to enter. But if we trust it, if we believe it, if somehow by the grace of God we are able to enter the door of grace, there is a second thing we can do to experience the kingdom of heaven, to experience the kingdom that is right here, now. We can make every effort to confirm the truth of what we strive to believe through the experience of others, both in the Scriptures, through the experience of those who have lived it in the past, and in the community of faith today. We can, in other words, read the Bible. Fundamental to the religion we profess is the assurance that God reveals himself to us through his Word, through the prophets and apostles, and especially through Jesus, all of whom we come to know through the Scriptures, through the received record of how the kingdom of God has been experienced by others. John Keble, in a sermon preached on today's Gospel reading about a hundred and fifty years ago, expressed his astonishment at the number of people who say they desire the kingdom of God, but who are unwilling to do much about finding it. A person who truly wants the kingdom, Keble says, "must strive in prayer, really endeavoring, really making every effort, to mean what he says when he prays to God. He must strive in resisting temptation, inward and outward, forcing his eyes away from what they ought not to look upon, never willingly praising himself in his heart...." Further, for a person who truly wants the kingdom, Keble says, "his Bible must not be to him as a dead letter; it will not lie useless on a shelf. He will strive, make every effort, to make time for reading a little of it every day, and to fix his attention always on that holy reading,...and he will strive, make every effort, to think of God as present," and to be a regular and worthy communicant of Christ's Church. The truth that Keble speaks is the truth that Jesus speaks - that the kingdom is not experienced by us without our active cooperation. The kingdom of God is a gift the way life itself is a gift, the way everything that is important in life is a gift. We are born and given life without our having turned a hand. But if we do not nourish the life we have been given, we will die. We are given the gift of teeth, but if we do not floss we will lose them. We are given the gift of speech, but if we do not practice speaking we will never be very good at it. We are given the gift of music or of languages, but if we do not work at them, if we do not practice, we will never play a melody on any instrument or make our way without an interpreter in any foreign land. That's simply the way life is. The need to practice is part of the gift. But how often we are like the child who wants everything without effort, like the pupil who will not learn his vocabulary. "Just give me the ability to speak," he says, and we know he speaks only foolishness, foolishness like the foolishness of him who says, "Just give me the kingdom of God without my having to do my part." The grace and gift of human life is even more fragile than that of other life forms. With human beings, an infant or a child or an adolescent cannot provide the necessary nourishment and practice on his own, without help from their elders. Unlike puppies and kittens, human children require years of assistance and modeling by their parents and others in the community of faith. That's why your children need you, not only at home, but also in their Sunday Schools, in their nurseries, and in their youth groups. If parents truly seek the kingdom of heaven for themselves and their children, not just in word but also in fact, then, as Keble says, it follows that certain things that nourish spiritual growth must be striven for by parents as well as by children, or they will not be realized. The third thing we can do to experience the kingdom of God follows from the first and the second. We can strive, make every effort, to live in our own lives the life of the kingdom that Christ died to make possible for us, not because we "have to," but because we want to respond to God in kind, love to love, just as the prophets and apostles we read about in the Bible strove. Just as Jesus strove. "It is for freedom," St. Paul reminds us, "that Christ has set us free." In Jesus, he says, your pedigree means nothing. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither Protestant nor Catholic. "Life-long" Episcopalian, like all other groups you have been baptized into, means nothing. "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love; live by the Spirit of this love." To live by your sinful nature, Paul says, is to be enslaved to the acts of the flesh, enslaved to a life of immorality, hatred, discord, jealousy, rage, selfish ambition, dissension, faction, and envy. "I warn you," he adds, "that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit, the life of the kingdom, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control," and this kingdom is yours for the living, right now, regardless of circumstance. "But how do you do it?" we ask. "How do you learn to love?" someone once asked St. Francis de Sales. "You learn to love by loving," he replied, and by continuing to love. You just do it." And not by loving just those you like, but by loving those other difficult people God has given you to practice loving as brother and sister, even, believe it or not, those in your own parish church, even those in your own family. And what is true of love is also true of joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We learn to live such lives by doing joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. By making a decision to practice them. By being patient and gentle with those we do not particularly want to be patient or gentle with. By offering goodness to others the way we would want them to offer goodness to us. By loving those who do not always offer love in return, by loving the way Jesus loves us. We are born and given life without our having turned a hand. But if we do not nourish that life, we will die. If we do not floss our teeth, we will lose them. If we do not practice the piano, we will never play it very well. If we do not practice speaking Spanish, we will never make our way in Mexico without an interpreter. If we do not practice loving, we will never be very good at it. That's simply the way life is. Several years ago, in a sermon preached to us here in this parish church, Father Dunn said, "Jesus died for you. Now what are you going to do about it?" And that's the truth. That, I think, is the truth of today's Gospel reading. The door to the kingdom is the narrow door of faith, the narrow door of trust in the grace of a God who loves you just "because" and who seeks nothing from you but that you return his love, not only to him but also to the brothers and sisters he has given you with whom to practice loving. Not because you have to, but because, knowing the truth of God's grace and love, you want to, and because the practice is part of the the kingdom. The door of the kingdom is the narrow door of faith and hope and love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and self-control, practiced and worked at. And that's the truth. And here's the good news: It's the absolute truth. It is truth regardless of circumstance, truth in bad times and in good, truth in times of grief as well as in times of joy, truth in times of disaster as well as in times of peace. It is ours for the having. And for the striving. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |