Forgiveness Sunday (Cheesefare 2003)

Sermon Notes for Forgiveness Sunday (Cheesefare) 2003

“The person who is weak in faith eats only vegetables, the strong in faith can eat anything.”  ( Romans 14:1-4)

Some of you might be sitting here on the edge of Great Lent thinking, “Good, I’m strong in faith, so I can eat anything this Lent, and not just vegetarian foods like those who are weak!”

But Paul’s message is:   Fasting is not about you!

Fasting is not a self-centered activity! Fasting makes us more aware of others and their needs. Fasting is not a self-love activity, but an activity to increase love for the other, for the neighbor, for the poor and needy, for those who are weak in faith.

So if you fast in order to say “Look at me I’m not eating meat or cheese or eggs for 40 days, I’m a superior Christian!” Then, you have failed in the basic meaning of the fast and are no different than the Pharisee in the parable of the Publican and Pharisee. “If you look around and say, I and my family are fasting, but the Smith family and their children hardly keep the fast at all.” Then again you have missed the point of the fast.

We are fasting to increase our love for others by paying less attention to our selves, to our wants to our needs. Use Great Lent as a time to put aside your self-centered self-love, and look to the needs of others. Find someone who is hungry for food and feed them, or someone who is spiritually hungry and nourish help them. To do that you have to be able to see and pay attention to the needs of another. And you can’t do that if you are constantly focused on yourself.

“I don’t know if I can live 40 days without meat. I can’t survive Lent without cheese. I’ll go nuts if I turn the television off for 40 days.” What’s wrong with that picture?

It’s all “I” focused. It’s all about “me”, “myself”, “I”.

A story:

The philosopher Diogenes was quite famous but very poor. One day he was sitting eating his usual meal of bread and cooked lentils, all that he could afford. Another philosopher walked by Diogeneses. This man was Aristippus who was not nearly as well known as Diogenes but he lived a prosperous and comfortable life by constantly flattering the king.

Aristippus said, “If you would learn to be subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils.”

Said Diogenes: “Learn to live on lentils and you won’t have to be subservient to the king.”

Think about that story. Who are you subservient to: God or your self? Which one is really your God?

Today is forgiveneness Sunday:   What remakes community when community has been lost?

Forgiveness and reconciliation.

What do the forgiven need to ask forgiveness about?

For the way we don’t live community.

We sin against the community of the redeemed when we don’t care about that community or the others in it.

We come to forgiveness Sunday and many will want to go home without forgiving or being forgiven.

Some here will say, I hardly know these people, no one here has sinned against me and I’ve not sinned against them.

It is my friends a sin that we haven’t cared enough to come to know one another, that we haven’t interacted enough to offend someone, that we feel no need to ask forgiveness of others for our failure to be community, to love and care.

Aren’t I free to do as I please?

Yes.

Too bad for the others then!

NO! The others are our concern. That’s what it means to love rather than be self centered!

In community, in the Church of Christ, we are to build one another up. If we aren’t building one another up, if we don’t really care about the others, then we are sinning against them.

If we have sinned against one another, we need to seek forgiveness from one another.

What do the forgiven always need to remember?

That we are forgiven gratuitously. We are forgiven by love, not because we deserve to be forgiven.

And for that we need to take the time to thank one another.

Metropolitan Council Meeting Postponed

As the OCA continues to work through its current situation with the Metropolitan on Leave of Absence, the Synod of Bishops has decided reluctantly to postpone the March meeting of the Metropolitan Council.  No date was set for rescheduling the meeting.  The Synod of Bishops apparently feels the canonically correct path is to postpone the meeting as the Metropolitan decided. 

What are we to make of these recent events?   Bishop Benjamin  wrote in a pastoral letter to his Diocese of the West:  “Our polity that rests upon the critical relationship between the primate and his synod is, I believe, what is being challenged but remains unchanged.”

Conciliarity, is part of the spiritual warfare and is a contact sport; passive spectators get in the way of the goal – the upward call of Jesus Christ. 

My reading of his words is that the real struggle which is taking place is between the metropolitan and the Synod of Bishops of which he is one member.    It is on the level of the hierarchs that the battle is to be engaged.   Since Bishop Benjamin especially, but the Synod in general, likes to keep their discussions and disagreements and debates among themselves and away from the ears of the faithful, we may never know exactly what gargantuan struggle, or passive agreement,  takes place.  We may eventually see some results announced to us, but the Synod is often silent not only about their discussions but also about their decisions.   While the Synod did release the Public Minutes of their recent Winter Retreat – and for good reason – I don’t think they ever released any minutes or decisions from their Fall meeting back in September.

Bishop Benjamin did offer a Lenten mea culpa for the goings on in the Synod:  “I ask your prayers for both the Metropolitan and the Holy Synod and I ask your forgiveness for the disturbance that has occurred in the peace of the Church.”

So we are left to consider whether our exclusion as members of the Body of Christ from the deliberations of the Synod is for our benefit or theirs, for our salvation and so they can do the work entrusted to them and which only they as bishops can do or because we are not worthy of engaging in serious discussion about the life and vitality of the Church.  It is of course sometimes difficult to pray for the bishops when we don’t know exactly what we are praying for or how we can be of help to them.  We also have our work to do as members of the Body of Christ, upon whom God has distributed His many gifts of the Holy Spirit.  We can tend to those tasks which only we can do in our parishes and localities.   We do incarnate the Body of Christ wherever we assemble for the Eucharist, and whenever we do the work of Christ in the world.  We must not neglect our responsibilities and ministries because the bishops are wrestling with theirs.

One unintended side effect of postponing the Metropolitan Council Meeting is that Bishop-elect Matthias has announced he will be visiting our parish of St. Paul the Apostle in Dayton, OH, for the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts on Wednesday evening, March 16, 6:30pm.