Reformed Evangelical Synod of America

Archive for the ‘Feasts and Commemorations’ Category

St. Gregory Palamas

St. Gregory Palamas was born in Constantinople in 1296 and was a monk at Mt. Athos. He later became Bishop of Thessaloniki. Gregory is most noted for his controversy with Barlaam of Calabria. Barlaam valued education and learning more than contemplative prayer and sought to import Scholasticism from the West  He questioned the form of contemplative prayer practiced by the monks at Mt. Athos (hesychasm), insisting that God was unknowable in the final analysis. Barlaam believed the monks were wasting their time in hesychastic practice and declared it a heretical error.

In response to Barlaam, Gregory insisted that God was, indeed, unknowable in his Essence, but knowable through his attributes which Gregory called God’s uncreated energies. These uncreated energies are directed towards the world and are perceived like the light on Mt. Tabor during Christ’s Transfiguration. Gregory’s formal rebuttal to Barlaam took the form of the Triads in defense of the Holy Hesychasts (c. 1338). Still, Barlaam persisted in his attacks against contemplative prayer. The matter was finally resolved in three councils collectively referred to as the Ninth Ecumenical Council where St. Gregory’s views were upheld and Barlaam’s rationalistic philosophy was condemned.

COLLECT

Heavenly Father, we thank you for your servant St. Gregory Palamas and his steadfast resolve that you are not a distant God, but One who is loving, approachable, and knowable. Help us to draw nearer to you through our prayer life. May we realize that the Christian Faith is not merely a matter of the mind and correct propositions, but a living relationship with you in our hearts as we grow more and more into the likeness of your Beloved Son. Grant us a pure heart through our daily spiritual exercises so that we may see and reflect your light to the world. Amen.

Matthew 5:8

Martin was born around 330 of pagan parents. His father was a soldier, who enlisted Martin in the army at the age of fifteen. One winter day he saw an ill-clad beggar at the gate of the city of Amiens. Martin had no money to give, but he cut his cloak in half and gave half to the beggar. In a dream that night, Martin saw Christ wearing the half-cloak. He had for some time considered becoming a Christian, and this ended his wavering. He was promptly baptized. He asked to be released from the army, saying: “Hitherto I have faithfully served Caesar. Let me now serve Christ.” He was accused of cowardice, and offered to stand unarmed between the contending armies. He was imprisoned, but released when peace was signed.

He became a disciple of Hilary of Poitiers, a chief opponent in the West of the Arians, who denied the full deity of Christ, and who had the favor of the emperor Constantius. Returning to his parents’ home in Illyricum, he opposed the Arians with such effectiveness that he was publicly scourged and exiled. He was subsequently driven from Milan, and eventually returned to Gaul, where he founded the first monastery in the region.

In 371 he was elected bishop of Tours. His was a mainly pagan diocese, but his instruction and personal manner of life prevailed. In 384, the heretic Priscillian and six companions (all Gnostics) had been condemned to death by the emperor Maximus. The bishops who had found them guilty in the ecclesiastical court pressed for their execution. Martin contended that the secular power had no authority to punish heresy, and that the excommunication by the bishops was an adequate sentence. In this he was upheld by Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. He secured a reprieve for them, but no sooner was his back turned than the bishops persuaded the emperor to break his promise. The Gnostics were executed, marking the first time that heresy was punished by death in the Christian experience.

Martin was furious, and excommunicated the bishops responsible. Afterwards, he took them back into communion in exchange for a pardon from Maximus for certain men condemned to death, and for the emperor’s promise to end the persecution of the remaining Priscillianists. He never felt easy in his mind about this concession, and thereafter avoided assemblies of bishops where he might encounter some of those concerned in this affair. He died on or about 11 November 397, and advocate for peace and justice until the end.

COLLECT
Lord God of hosts, you called the soldier Martin from service to the state, filled him with the spirit of sacrifice, and set him as a bishop in your Church to be a defender of the catholic faith. Give us grace to follow in his holy steps, that at the last we may be found clothed with righteousness in the dwellings of peace. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Willibrord was born in Northumbria in England about 658, and studied in France and Ireland. In 690 he set out with 12 companions to preach to the pagans of Frisia (a region roughly coextensive with the province of Friesland in the Netherlands, including some adjacent territories and the Frisian Islands in the North Sea). In 695 he was consecrated bishop at Rome. From there, he returned to the mission field, eventually establishing his see at Utrecht (in modern day Holland). Some of those he attempted to convert would later turn against him, destroying churches and killing missionaries. For a time, Willibrord preached to the Danes, but he returned to Frisia after the death of Radbod, and, with the help of Boniface, he rebuilt what had been destroyed. He died in 739.

COLLECT
O Lord our God, you call whom you will and send them where you choose. We thank you for sending your servant Willibrord to be an evangelist among the people of the Low Countries, to turn them from the worship of idols to serve you, the living God; and we entreat you to preserve us from the temptation to exchange the perfect freedom of your service for servitude to false gods and to idols of our own devising. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

All Saints’ Day was originally a commemoration of the martyrs of the ancient church — the men, women, and children who were persecuted and killed for their faith in Christ. It has since become a festival on which the church remembers all the Christian faithful, both known and unknown. Originally celebrated in the spring, it came to be celebrated on November 1 in the West during the ninth century, probably as a counter-balance to the Pagan festival Samhain.

COLLECT
Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son. Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

READINGS
Deuteronomy 33: 1-3 or Daniel 7: 1-3, 15-18
Psalm 34 or 149
1 John 3: 1-3 or Revelation 7: 2-17 or Ephesians 1: 11-23
Matthew 5: 1-12

As the sun set on this day in 1517, the unity of the Western Church shattered as the Ninety-five Theses of Martin Luther were nailed to the door of the Collegiate Church at Wittenberg, Germany. This was not, however, the first division within the Church.

Disregarding various heretical movements, the Church was first divided in the wake of the Council of Chalcedon, giving rise to the so-called Oriental Orthodox Churches. Political and theological forces divided the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches in the middle of the eleventh century, and the Church in the West has been torn asunder repeatedly, both before and after the Reformation, by many varying movements.

Nobody will deny that the Church, as an assembly of frail, fallible human beings, is imperfect, and today is a day set aside for prayer for the unity and renewal of the Church Catholic. By what means, however, is this unity and renewal to come?

If we surrender ourselves to strange doctrines which find no root in the Scriptures, then our unity is one in which we have given place to human desire instead of God’s precepts. The unity which God desires for his Church is based on the truth revealed in his Word and preserved by the Holy Spirit, who is faithful in every generation. We receive with great joy and with a deep-seeded sense of responsibility the witness, not only of the ancient Fathers, but also the leaders of the Reformation who sought to advocate for a return to the Biblical faith which, sadly, had become buried beneath the excesses of the Roman Church of the sixteenth century.

While this means that we must remain steadfast in our confession of the ‘Five Solas’ of the Reformation, we must also be vigilant against modernism which has, sadly, turned much of contemporary Christianity into a form of Humanism with an object of affection. Just as we cannot turn our backs on the doctrine of justification by faith through grace to achieve unity with the Churches of Rome or Constantinople, so too we cannot turn our backs on the moral and ethical teachings of God’s Word in order to find unity with those Protestant Christians who have elected to revise Scripture along humanistic lines.

Today, we find ourselves in the midst of a New Reformation. The Church is being called back to her roots, her God-breathed faith, by the power of the Spirit. The calling is one which is rooted in the absolute necessity of conforming ourselves as individuals and as the Body of Christ to the example of the one who died and shed his blood that we might be one, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

COLLECT
Gracious Father, we pray for your holy catholic Church. Fill it with all truth, in all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in anything it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; and where it is divided, reunite it in all truth. This we ask for the sake of him who died and rose again, and ever lives to make intercession for us, Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord. Amen.

READINGS
Jeremiah 31: 31-34
Psalm 46
Romans 3: 19-28 or Revelation 14: 6-7
John 8: 31-36 or Matthew 11: 12-19

On the various New Testament lists of the Twelve Apostles, the tenth and eleventh places are occupied by Simon the Zealot and by Judas of James, also called Thaddaeus or Lebbaeus. Some ancient Christian writers say that Simon and Jude went together as missionaries to Persia, and were martyred there. If this is true, it explains, to some extent, our lack of historical information on them and also why they are celebrated together.

COLLECT
O God, we thank you for the glorious company of the apostles, and especially on this day for Simon and Jude; and we pray that, as they were faithful and zealous in their mission, so we may with ardent devotion make known the love and mercy of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

READINGS
Jeremiah 16: 1-16
Psalm 11
1 John 4: 1-6
John 14: 21-27

This Lord’s Day we will Celebrate Reformation Sunday, though as you know Reformation Day is always October 31^st, the evening before All Saints Day.

On October 31^st, 1517 things came to a head in Europe. If you think the TV Evangelists and phoney faith healers are bad today, in Luther’s Day the Vatican was financing a building project by for all practical purposes selling salvation. Johann Tetzel had a saying with which he coaxed the money out of people’s purses – “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory and into heaven springs.”

Luther wrote against them (Thesis 21): “Therefore those preachers of indulgences are in error, who say that by the pope’s indulgences a man is freed from every penalty, and saved;”

Again in thesis 37: “Every true Christian, whether living or dead, has part in all the blessings of Christ and the Church; and this is granted him by God, even without letters of pardon.”

Thesis 52: “The assurance of salvation by letters of pardon is vain, even though the commissary, nay, even though the pope himself, were to stake his soul upon it.”

54: “Injury is done the Word of God when, in the same sermon, an equal or a longer time is spent on pardons than on this Word.”

62: “The true treasure of the Church is the Most Holy Gospel of the glory and the grace of God.”

79: “To say that the cross, emblazoned with the papal arms, which is set up [by the preachers of indulgences], is of equal worth with the Cross of Christ, is blasphemy.”

It’s evident that in posting these theses in Latin on the castle church door, Luther had hoped for serious discussion. But in light of the outrages of the day and a new communications tool called the “printing press”, Luther ended up seeing far more than a discussion… he got a REFORMATION.

Luther’s questions go straight to the heart of the matter – just WHO IS LORD ? What is the CHURCH about?

Luther was not a lone voice in the church… the Holy Spirit was making many restless for the Good News to be faithfully preached and lived.  They yearned for the masses for whom Christianity as simply a routine exercise in Church Attendance to be brought to new life.

There was a growing unrest in many throughout the West to say “it’s time to get back to the Biblical Faith with Jesus Christ at the center.”  It’s funny how many people craved that and yet how entrenched forces who wanted control of money and power fought that.

You see, if people can be kept blind and compliant like a herd of cattle or a flock of sheep, they can be milked or sheared at will to keep the people at the top rich and at ease. Luther in his 86^th thesis asked: “”Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?””

Luther began quoting the scriptures such as Romans 3:19-28 which we read today to remind the people and the Church that Jesus Christ is the one who saves – as sinners none of us may earn salvation and none of us may sell it!

Naturally he received a great deal of hatred for telling the “people in charge” that, well, they had the message of God wrong.  They had missed God’s Good News!

It reminds you about what happened to Our Lord in John 8:31-36…

So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never yet been enslaved to anyone; how is it that You say, ‘You will become free’?”

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who keeps on committing sin is the slave of sin.”The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever. “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.

Jesus started talking about being set free by the Truth, and what was their immediate reaction – and these were the people who believed in Him!?

Their reaction: “Wait a minute!  We’re the children of Abraham and have never been slaves!”

Never been slaves? Are you kidding? What about that 400 years in Egypt, those 70 years in Exile, and now when the Roman soldiers told them to jump, they asked “how high”? How easily they deceived themselves! How easily we deceive OURSELVES! Ha!

Jesus doesn’t let that one pass. He tells them “Whoever commits sin is the slave of sin” – I’m sure they knew that included them! Jesus was going to give His disciples something they had never known as the Sons of Adam – the gift of being In Christ and being able, through Him, to have a clean conscience and a NEW HEART (Jer 31:31-34)

There is no hope for slaves of sin to stay in God’s house. God’s Son will remain in the house, He is the Adopted One, the One who will never be cast out and forever be blessed by God – if we are made free by this Son, Jesus, then the problem of our slavery will never be an issue again.

If we will simply admit our need for Jesus Christ to be set free from the hold that sin and Satan wish to have upon us to dominate and destroy us, then we will find freedom, then we need never fear the abandonment of God, then we need never live as orphans in God’s World again… Jesus Christ, the Truth of God, the one who suffered as a sacrifice for sinners become for us the place where God Himself offers atonement. We don’t go to a Temple, we go to Jesus. He receives us, forgives us, and gives us new life through the Holy Spirit. He sets us free.

Though Reformation Day recalls people in the past who were in need of Reformation, and we read about the Jewish People of Jesus’ day who needed their own Reformation, the truth is that we in America are slaves… we are slaves to debt, we are slaves to materialism, we are slaves to our addictions, we are slaves to an out of control government,  and we are slaves to sin.

This message that Jesus can set people free in every generation is our only hope … don’t be fooled because you grew up American thinking you lived in the “land of the free” and the “home of the brave”. We are every bit as enslaved as these Jewish people who protested so loudly that they’d never been slaves.

It’s Reformation Day – it’s not a day to gloat over our illustrious past. Churches that celebrate Reformation Day in the US these days are, by and large, rapidly dying out and very ineffective at spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ! Sure, God gave us a great start.

But what are we doing with the Good News and the Word of God today?

If we are not taking the message of Jesus Christ to the streets, if we are not living out the Good News in Word and Deed, if we are not winning people to Christ and seeing Jesus Christ set them free, we are still in bondage ourselves!

This Reformation Day, we need to make sure we ourselves are not slaves.

This Reformation Day, we need to return in repentance and trust to Jesus Christ the one who died for sinners and who is able to, as Psalm 51 says, “Create in us a clean heart!”

This Reformation Day, our renewed love for Jesus Christ and the freedom He gives should drive us to our knees to pray for the ongoing Reformation of ourselves, our homes, our churches, our nation and for the Gospel to spread to the farthest part of the earth.

I bid you a blessed Reformation Day… but I likewise must remind one and all that we ourselves must daily be renewed by the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ and empowered by His Spirit, lest we too fail to live in the fullness of His blessing!

Sermon Audio is available here.

Scripture Readings:

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 46
Romans 3:19-28
John 8:31-36

Collect:

Gracious Father, we pray for your holy catholic Church. Fill it with all truth, in all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in anything it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; and where it is divided, reunite it in all truth. This we ask for the sake of him who died and rose again, and ever lives to make intercession for us, Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord. Amen.

Crispin and Crispinian were shoemakers and lived in the third century. They preached the Christian faith in Gaul whilst exercising their trade and so, like St Paul earning his living as a tent-maker, were no drain on the Christian community. They were put to death for their faith at the beginning of the Diocletian persecution and died in about the year 287 in Rome.

COLLECT
Almighty God, you called your servants Crispin and Crispinian to use their employ as a means of evangelism, and gave them the grace to witness to you even unto death. May we find in our own daily lives the means and the courage to witness to our faith in your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

James, the brother of our Lord, is generally regarded as the author of the Epistle of James, and as an early bishop of the Church at Jerusalem. James, who would eventually suffer death for the cause of Christ, did not believe in him during his earthly life, but was converted after the resurrection. It was James who formulated the agreement at the Jerusalem Council concerning the inclusion of Gentile Christians in the Church. Outside the New Testament, James is mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus, who calls him “the brother of Jesus the so-called Christ,” and reports that he was much respected even by the Pharisees for his piety and strict observance of the Law, but that his enemies took advantage of an interval between Roman governors in the year 62 to have him put to death.

COLLECT
Grant, O God, that, following the example of your servant James the Just, brother of our Lord, your Church may give itself continually to prayer and to the reconciliation of all who are at variance and enmity. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

READINGS
Acts 15: 12-22a
Psalm 1
1 Corinthians 15: 1-11 or James 1: 1-18
Matthew 13: 54-58

(Note: Normally celebrated on the 18th of October, St. Luke is transferred this year due to falling on a Sunday.)

Luke wrote one of the major portions of the New Testament, a two-volume work comprising the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. In the two books he shows the parallel between the life of Christ and that of the Church. He is the only Gentile Christian among the Gospel writers. Tradition holds him to be a native of Antioch, and Paul calls him “our beloved physician.”

Luke appears in Acts during Paul’s second journey, remains at Philippi for several years until Paul returns from his third journey, accompanies Paul to Jerusalem and remains near him when he is imprisoned in Caesarea. During these two years, Luke had time to seek information and interview persons who had known Jesus. He accompanied Paul on the dangerous journey to Rome where he was a faithful companion.

COLLECT
Almighty God, you inspired your servant Luke the physician to set forth in the Gospel the love and healing power of your Son. Graciously continue in your Church this love and power to heal, to the praise and glory of your Name. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

READINGS
Isaiah 43: 8-13 or Isaiah 35: 5-8
Psalm 124
2 Timothy 4: 5-11
Luke 10: 1-9 or Luke 1: 1-4; 24: 44-53