One of the surprises Father Jay Smith and I have shared since we began our live-stream ministry has been taking the time to write out our weekday homilies. EBSCO is an Alabama corporation that, among other things, is involved with digital media. Among its businesses is a website called the “Atlas Religious Database®.” My seminary, along with many others, makes it possible for its alumni to access the collection of articles from theological journals. This morning I went to the website and typed in “Saint James the Apostle.” An article that caught my attention was “Luke and the Foundations of the Church.”[1] It’s by Peter Scaer, professor of exegetical theology at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Concordia is a seminary of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Rabbi Edwin Friedman, a Bowen Family Systems therapist, when he died in October 1996, had what would be his book almost ready for publication. It was published three years later. The title was Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix.[1] Many Episcopal priests and bishops had studied under Ed. Church Publishing put out a polished, professional edition in 2007. For those of us who studied with Ed, we had heard his first chapter as a lecture.

Today’s gospel lesson from Matthew is only heard at this daily Eucharist, every other year, when a commemoration doesn’t take precedence. The parallel passages from Mark and Luke are also heard at daily Eucharists. Of course, all of these lessons are read one way or another at Daily Morning and Evening Prayer. That said, one might say concerning the narratives of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, this is the moment when the Pharisees in Mark and Matthew decide to destroy Jesus and in Luke “[the Pharisees] were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.”[1]

Beginning today, and continuing for two more Sundays, our gospel lessons are from the third of five sermons given in Matthew by Jesus. The first was the Sermon on the Mount, the second the Mission Sermon. It happens because there is so much to be done. So, he commissions the twelve and gives them the authority to preach, to teach and to heal as he preached, taught and healed.[1] This third sermon is generally called the Sermon in Parables[2] or the Parables Discourse.[3] What is a parable is a question that has engaged Christian writers since the earliest days of the Church. Another issue of great importance is how to understand today’s lesson in its own time. It’s hard for me, and most people, not to hear anti-Judaism in Matthew, especially in light of the history through the millennia, including the anti-Judaism in our own time.

Today we hear the conclusion of the second sermon preached by Jesus in Matthew. It’s called the Mission Sermon[1] or the Disciples Discourse.[2] Professor Ulrich Luz writes that the discourse is “almost exclusively about the disciples’ behavior and fate.”[3]

During Lent in 1981, when I was in the second semester of my first year in seminary, a group of us from the diocese of Chicago visited Saint Gregory’s Abbey in Three Rivers, Michigan. Saint Gregory’s House, later Saint Gregory’s Priory, was established by three Americans who went to Nashdom Abbey in England. Upon their return in 1939, they were invited by the bishop of Northern Indiana to take charge of a parish in Gary. In 1946, they moved to a rural area in southwest Michigan. It became an independent abbey in 1969.

I’m reading an eBook version of Englishman Andrew Wilson’s After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World. [1] Born in 1950, he is a significant British writer of his generation. That said, no one ever gets it all right. The name Geoffrey Bell comes up in Wilson’s account of the 1930s. I know his reputation as the English bishop whom Winston Churchill disliked and blocked from becoming archbishop of Canterbury. As a member of the House of Lords, Bell openly and loudly condemned the bombing of civilian population centers in Nazi Germany. I didn’t know until I read Wilson that Bell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor and theologian, who was executed on Hitler’s direct order, three weeks before Hitler shot himself, were friends.

The commemoration of the early fifteenth century Czech priest and martyr Jan Hus on Monday this week meant that we did not hear the beginning of the second of the five sermons that Jesus gives in Matthew, the Sermon on Mission. We will be reading this sermon through Monday of next week. I’d like to begin today by reading yesterday’s gospel. It’s short, and it sets the stage for what we heard today:

Each of us has many surprises along the way in the work that we take up across the years of our lives. Looking back on my own journey, I would not have predicted how jealous I would become about having time to read and study for my work as parish priest, my life as believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Lesser Feasts and Fasts’ introduction to today’s feast begins with these words, “Peter and Paul, the two greatest leaders of the early Church . . . are commemorated together on June 29 in observance of the tradition of the Church that they both died as martyrs in Rome during the persecution under Nero, in 64.”[1] For many years I haven’t paid any real attention to the quotation on the same page from the document we know as the First Letter of Clement, written to the Church in Corinth—“usually dated from around [the year] 96 [of the Christian Era].”[2]

The first of five sermons Jesus gives in Matthew is the Sermon on the Mount. Today’s gospel lesson is the conclusion of the second, the Mission Sermon. It begins with these words, “And [Jesus] called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every infirmity.”[1] He named the twelve “apostles”—“messengers”—and charged them to take up his mission, “proclaim ‘that the kingdom of heaven has drawn near.’ ”[2] They are to heal as heals, to raise the dead as he raises the dead, to cleanse lepers as he cleanses lepers, and to cast out demons, as he casts out demons.

Yesterday’s gospel lesson were the last verses of the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew’s gospel continues with today’s lesson, Jesus coming down from the mountain, followed by the crowds and his disciples. His teaching has captured the hearts of those who have heard him. He now turns to another sign of his sovereign power, the power of heaven, that is, the power to heal. It begins with the most outcast of outcasts, a leper.

I can usually tell when I’ve read a passage in a commentary by the pencil marks I tend to make as I read. Last Thursday, when the appointed gospel from the Sermon on the Mount included the Lord’s Prayer, words by Professor Ulrich Luz about this prayer have been on mind. He wrote, “It is the openness of the Lord’s Prayer that is its real strength. Countless human beings have been able to find a home in the Lord’s Prayer for their own hopes and petitions and to enter into that home.”[1]

This morning I typed “Athaliah” into the religious academic periodical search engine, that being a seminary graduate gives me, just to see what might come up. I discovered that one significant unresolved question is who was Athaliah’s father. She is identified as the daughter of Omri, king of Israel,[1] the northern kingdom that refused to submit to Solomon’s son Rehoboam when Solomon died.[2] Athaliah is also identified as the daughter of Omri’s son and successor, Ahab[3]—the Ahab, whose wife was Jezebel. I think it’s fair to say that issue is unresolvable.[4]

When I was preparing my sermon for Corpus Christi, I came across two articles on ecumenism, that is, the restoration of unity among Christians, by Maxwell Johnson, professor of liturgy at Notre Dame and an ELCA pastor. One appeared in the journal Worship in 2006, the second in the journal Liturgical Ministry in 2011.[1] If I may, one subtext of Professor Johnson’s approach might be said to be words from John, “Jesus then said to the Jude'ans who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’ ”[2]

When I was a student at Nashotah House, students and faculty were required to be in their assigned seats in the chapel for Morning Prayer, Mass, and Evensong from Solemn Evensong on Sunday through Evensong on Friday night. Saturdays were optional. Sunday mornings, most of us were elsewhere. After Sunday Evensong, Benediction was offered at the altar where the Sacrament was reserved for those who wished to stay for the service.

Yesterday, I introduced my thoughts about the appointed passage in the First Book of the Kings by telling the story that we didn’t hear this week because of the appointed commemorations. Today I want to do something of the same thing. On Monday, our gospel was the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. It’s the longest of five sermons Jesus gives in Matthew. Except on days when we have commemorations, our gospel lessons will be from this sermon for most of the next two weeks.

This year, because of the commemorations for Ephrem of Edessa, Syria, on Wednesday, and the Feast of Saint Barnabas the Apostle yesterday, we did not hear the background story of today’s first lesson: the story of the contest at Mount Carmel between Elijah and the prophets of Baal.[1]