Sermon: Becoming Saints (Proper 10, 2025)

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

The Heidelberg Catechism was first published in 1563 as a guide for teaching the Christian faith to both children and those who were seeking to be baptized.

And it opens with this question and answer sequence.

Question, what is your only comfort in life and in death?

Answer, that I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

It’s hard to overstate how utterly lost the people of God were in the time when the words from the Deuteronomy passage we just heard were first spoken to them.

A once affluent ancient tribe had settled at the invitation of Pharaoh himself in the suburbs of Egypt, and there they experienced a life of security and plenty.

Mere generations later, the descendants of this tribe found themselves enslaved by the very government that once welcomed them in with open arms.

Four centuries.

This is how long the family of Israel spent as slaves in a foreign land.

If you find it difficult today to pass on your family’s culture, values, priorities, and rhythms to one generation, imagine what was lost over the course of 400 years.

Aside from sharing some genetic traits in a familiar tongue, the lives of the Hebrew people we read about in the end of Deuteronomy were far more shaped by Egyptian norms and culture than they were by the sort of life we saw in their ancestors in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Our Old Testament reading comes at the end of a section of five books whose entire purpose is to remake the Hebrew people into who they were originally meant to be.

As a small aside, this is a really healthy way to think about what happens when you sit down throughout the week to read the scriptures.

You may not have light bulb moments every day or most days.

You may not very often feel as though you’re floating on a cloud of enlightenment every time you open the scriptures, but you are, small moment by small moment, being remade into who you were meant to be.

That was just a free aside.

Now back to Deuteronomy.

The Ten Commandments, which appear twice throughout this section of five books, list a lot of commandments, ten big ones, and then a lot more after that, but they open with these words.

I am the Lord your God who rescued you out of Egypt, who delivered you from slavery.

Our Deuteronomy passage echoes these words in its opening lines.

The commandments we read in this Deuteronomy passage are coming from the one who Moses describes as the Lord your God.

Before telling the Hebrew people what they are to do, God insisted time and time again on first telling them who they are.

You are mine is what God says to his people before he tells them how they ought to live.

Nothing God says about what they are to do will make sense apart from what he has already said about who they are.

Now fast forward to our gospel reading, perhaps the most famous of the parables of Jesus.

You have heard a dozen sermons on this parable, so I will spare you, but I’m going to draw your attention to one thing this morning.

The lawyer asked Jesus, what must I do?

And as soon as it became clear to Jesus that the lawyer did not get at all Jesus’s initial answer, he changed modes and told him instead a parable.

A parable that intentionally goes deeper than the lawyer’s question.

It goes deeper than the question of what must I do.

Jesus’s final answer to the lawyer through the parable is not an answer to what must I do.

Jesus answers the question, who must I become?

Which of these, Jesus asks, was a neighbor?

The question about doing, what do I do, is answered with a question about being.

Who is it I am called to become?

Fast forward one more time to our epistle reading.

All of this is there too.

After greeting the Christians in Colossae as saints, Paul prays that they might lead lives worthy of this calling.

You could summarize the book of Colossians as Paul saying, be saints because you have already been made saints.

In our opening collect this morning, we ask God that we may know and understand what things we ought to do and also that we may have this grace and power to actually do those things.

And the shared witness of our scripture readings today is this, the grace and power for you to faithfully accomplish all that God has called you to do is rooted in who you are.

To do what you are called to do, you must first understand who you are called to be.

You are a child, a child of a God who saves you and a God who says to you in a thousand ways through the scriptures, through your neighbors, and through this world that you belong to me.

Your primary calling in life is to live out that reality wherever it is God has placed you in whatever tasks he has given you to do.

Now up to this point, that sermon could have been preached in any culture and in any context.

But there’s a specific flavor of this message that is important for you and I to be reminded of in our culture and in our context.

The communities that we read of in our scripture readings today are separated by well over a thousand years, which means that the question of who am I is one that has permeated every human culture.

This question of identity, however, tends to be answered in different ways in different cultures.

Some, to be frank, do a better job answering it than others.

For example, throughout history, sometimes the question of who am I was answered by answering the question, who are my ancestors?

Who are my parents?

Who are my relatives?

For others, the question of identity is very much rooted in the where.

Where are you from?

Where do you call home?

To what land do you belong?

For still others throughout history, this question of identity could have been answered by answering the question, who is it that you hold dear?

What is it that you believe to be true?

Humans have defined themselves by their family of origin, by their land, by what they value, by who they love, by their professions, by their hobbies.

The list is endless.

But in our culture, and this is an observation that’s very hard for any of us to spot, but when folks visit this country, when they move to this country, there’s a great witness to what I’m about to say.

They say in our culture, we hear the question, who are you?

And we answer with what we are paid to do for a living.

Who are you in our culture is heard as, what do you do?

What can you perform well enough for somebody else to pay you?

We spend an inordinate amount of time thinking, planning, and caring about performance and achievement, especially performance relative to our peers and achievement relative to our peers.

This is a side number two of the sermon, but I also spend my time in addition to my work as a priest, as a teacher, and a headmaster.

Let me just say this for any of you who have young people in your life.

This approach to life, placing achievement and placing performance as the center of what we do is absolutely detrimental to any young person you’ve ever met.

Second aside over.

So our scriptures today are a much needed challenge to our own culture’s overemphasis on doing.

And they call us back to see our ultimate concern ought to be with being, being who we are called to be, not just accomplishing things.

Resting firmly in who you are in God is the first step in doing the sort of thing that you actually ought to do.

Now I want to close with an image.

It’s an actual drawing.

It’s a drawing that has really captured my attention lately.

Now this is a risk because I can’t show you the drawing.

So I’m going to describe it to you and it might work, but it might not.

So if you need to close your eyes while I describe this drawing so that you can see what I’m saying in your mind’s eye, please feel free to do so.

And if your eyes have been closed all along, I’ll go ahead and speak softly so you can enjoy the rest of your nap.

I hate to disturb that.

I won’t say any names.

In the first panel, we see a man kneeling at what we can only assume is morning prayer.

A dog enters his room and really begins to distract him.

So he rises from his prayers, grabs the dog, throws it out the door, and goes on with his day.

The next panel shows the man later in the day, this time kneeling for noonday prayer.

Again, the dog enters the room, begins to distract him, and again, he stands up and chases the dog away and continues on with his work that day.

In the next panel, the man is kneeling yet again.

It’s clear that it’s now evening.

Once again, the dog enters the room and tries to distract him, but this time the man remains in prayer despite the distraction.

The dog sits and watches and waits.

The next panel shows the very same thing, a man kneeling in prayer and his dog sitting next to him, waiting, watching.

In the final panel, everything remains the same except now the man has a halo above his head, and strangely enough, so does the dog who’s waiting and watching.

Now, I love dogs.

I love our dog, Bandit, but I don’t share this as an illustration of what does or does not happen to our pets in the life of the world to come.

That’s another conversation for another day.

But I share this illustration because it shows a man who knows who he is, that he is a child of God who depends on God for everything, who cannot imagine a life where that dependence is not displayed through prayer.

And it shows us what happens not just to us, but to those who are around us sitting and watching and waiting when we live out who we are regardless of what may come