Completely God and Completely Man? I can’t really accept that.

These are everyday sermons, usually not the same sermons Deacon Michael delivered on Sundays.  He takes the liberty of personally addressing the people who came to the 6:30 communion service, whom he loved so much, and who loved him.

Deacon Michael was a history major. His home was filled with many history books. This is one of the sermons where his love of history shows in his analysis.

Be patient. Like many of Michael’s sermons, it comes together in the end.

IF YOU LIKE, READ ALONG WHILE YOU ARE LISTENING:

This morning I opened up the closet.  Have you ever looked at the closet in the sacristy?  Total chaos if you don't know what's there.  The deacons and the priests look at it and go, "Yep, everything is where it is supposed to be."

Well, someone either took upon themselves or had the assignment, they looked at the closet and said, "What a mess!"  And, from the perspective of someone that doesn't live in that closet all the time, that is exactly true.

So that person decided that they were going to take the vestments, the dalmatics and the chasubles, and organize them.  Now it's very logical.

The first question you have is, "Okay, if I'm going to organize it, how am I going to organize it?  Well, we have seasons.  We have green, white, red, purple.  Why don't we organize them by color?

Now, priests and deacons first thing will go, "No.  You organize them whether they are a chasuble and a dalmatic, and then you organize them by color."

They just organized them by color.

So you have chaos in there.  I looked at it and go, "Wait a minute, where'd my vestments go?"  To me it was...

You did that? 

"No. They took them all to the cleaners." 

Okay, there it is.  It was the cleaners.  They didn't know.

But,the important thing we have that has occurred: You have to know the structure.

Welcome back!  My baby's back! Yay!  Sorry.  Um.

You have to understand the structure to understand what Paul is saying in the first letter to the Corinthians today.

"Brothers and sisters, I could not talk to you as spiritual people, but as fleshly people.  As infants in Christ."  This section, I am sure many times, [is] in many of the heresies where we see the bifurcation between the spiritual and the physical natures of Christ.  The priority of the spiritual over the physical.  This is something they would be citing and saying, "Look!  Look, St. Paul is saying that!"  This is behind the issues behind the divinity and the humanity of Christ.  There is Gnosticism involved in this.  There is the Manicheanism involved in it.  All sorts of heresies.  We'd go, "St. Paul says that!"  and Betty this is the last time I will comment on this. 

It is one of the great problems behind the Protestant Church.  What do you believe? They don't know.  Whatever you want to believe.  Because there is no authority that is behind it.  There is no structure.  What Paul is saying, in the context of the structure of the Catholic Church, makes perfect sense.  But if you do not have the structure, it leads you astray. 

He ends up: "There is neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who causes the growth.  He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive the wages in proportion to his labor."  God is the only important thing!  In that context Paul's reading makes sense.  But if you are looking at and questioning the nature of God, and questioning the nature of Christ, that reading leads you astray.  It could very easily lead you astray.

So the important thing is that when you look at, and as I said, if you allow me to define the argument I will win every time.  And which is one of the reasons I love the Catholic Church.  As you have known over the ages... ages?... it seems like ages... over the time I tend to have flights of fancy.  I will go off on an issue.  You've heard me when I get going on a history issue.  I will just go off on what a total seeming tangent, that makes sense to me.

But I and we need the anchor.  Because when I'm thinking about things, if I know that the truth is there, whatever I think, I can evaluate it in the context of the truth. 

And the truth will make me better understand what is being said, to have a greater significance.  But it isn't the truth that I provide.  Proof text me, Betty.  It comes from the authority of the Holy Catholic Church and that is a crucial thing.  That is why, for example, I constantly talk about, "You can't pull that thread!"  Because the thread is what is holding the union together.

You pull the thread; it starts falling apart because the integrity of the thought processes of Christ are such that if this is appropriate in this circumstance, then the logic imposed upon us by God leads you to other conclusions.

And that's one of the great things that you will see in the confirmation hearings [for a new Supreme Court Justice].  It is a struggle over that exact issue. Of what is the truth that binds the concepts that will bind and lead a Justice of the Supreme Court.  Is it the issue of the priority of womanhood?... she just doesn't fit that role [speaking to a woman in the congregation]...the priority of womanhood over everything else so that the priority of womanhood defines how the law is construed because any time that you have a law that restricts the power of womanhood, to do whatever she pleases with her body, then it, by definition, is not valid.

And that logic extends to issues of sexuality.  Which is why I was saying that sexuality is such a central issue.  It is the defining of the issue.  If you argue and say, as Kavanaugh at least impliably talked about, the Constitution writers wrote what the Constitution meant to write and it means what it means; you don't expand the concepts.  So that's the issue.

But in our lives, it is a very important issue, because you can see it has a profound effect, if... I'll pick on Robert because he is such a pushover... if Robert's children come to him and say, "Dad, I'm doing such and such," and Robert goes, "Ooo...that's a sin, but don't worry about it, that's all right."  He is causing a damage to the structure that brings us to the truth.  Because once you make that change, it leads you all over the place. 

Paul comes and preaches Christ crucified.  Ah, the wonder of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross!  And then he takes, on a practical level, what it means to be a follower of Christ.  And he talks about how it is good and beneficial, and in fact it is sanctifying, to be a follower of Christ, because by being a follower of Christ you become spiritual.  And I haven't looked into the translations of the words, and I think that there is some subtlety here, because it becomes spiritual and you leave the physical behind.

He isn't saying, and the Church does not say, that the priority comes over the spiritual.  The end is the spiritual for which we attain and we are coming closer to Christ as we become more spiritual, but it does not mean that the physical is bad and that is the basic thing that we see in John Paul's theology of the body.  The recognition of the reality of the physical in the context of the spiritual goal of spending eternity with God in Heaven cannot be denigrated.

Because if you do that, ultimately if you say the spiritual is the priority, and the physical is the bad, then you end up in a situation where, as in the heresies, we see a challenging of the humanity of Christ.  And the exaltation of the spiritual of Christ, denying at least in part, His physical nature and exalting His divine nature, and it eliminates the preaching on the Crucifixion.

Christ crucified.  If Christ is spiritual, primarily or 100% spiritual, Paul cannot preach Christ crucified.  So it's very important, again, I am picking on Betty today, one of the problems that the Protestant, mainline Protestant churches have, is they looked at the Bible, Martin Luther did this, they looked at the Bible, they looked at the priests, and went, "Ooo, there are a whole bunch of bad priests, just like today, and therefore they, being human, are imperfect.

And the person who studies the Bible and comes to a closer understanding of God can come to the same, not the same recognition of the truth, but a recognition of the truth that is deserving of the same respect as the findings of the Church.  Therefore each person becomes the prophet king.  And I don't remember the other one... priest!  It becomes, but it also opens up for, because I will guarantee you, you give Margene, Robert and Mayve the same reading out of the Bible, they will come up with three different meanings.  Within the context of the teachings of the Church, the teachings will be, the readings and and their understandings will be correct. 

Once one of them strays from the teachings of the Church, then you get into error.  And that's where, that IS the situation that St. Paul is talking about.  So it isn't a rejection of the physical and an exaltation of the spiritual, it is a recognition of the need to preach Christ crucified.

September 5, 2018