This morning we have a nature miracle. There are many jokes about nature miracles. One of them is the tale of three clergy members going out fishing. The Episcopal priest, when they’re out on the water, says, I’ve forgotten my lunch and he jumps out of the boat and runs across the water to the shore, gets his lunch and runs back. A little while goes by and the Catholic priest says, I’ve left my tackle box in the trunk, and he jumps out of the boat, walks across the water to the shore, gets his tackle box and walks back across the water to the boat. The Baptist minister has taken all of this in. He’s new to town and is amazed. He hasn’t forgotten anything in the car, but not willing to be outdone, he says that he’s forgotten his lucky hat, he jumps out of the boat and promptly sinks to the bottom. The Catholic turns to the Episcopalian and says “I guess he didn’t know where the rocks are.”

During the first four or five weeks of the shutdown, from the middle of March until Easter Week, while we were live-streaming daily, neither Father Smith nor I wanted to preach without a text. With the pressure of daily live-streaming off, I’ve discovered that I like taking the time to do enough study to have something to put down on paper. So, for most commemorations like today’s, I have never written a homily.

The only thing I can remember about music in my grandparents’ Roman Catholic Church is, at some point while visiting them and going to Mass with my grandmother, I found “A mighty fortress is our God” in a missalette. I confess I wish I had kept a copy. No credit was given to Martin Luther. Instead, it credited a cardinal with the arrangement.

Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, not Luke’s shorter version, becomes the universal prayer of Christians. Early this morning, I noticed that Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is the gospel lesson for Mass on Tuesday in the First Week of Lent and on Thursday of the week following the Sunday closest to June 15—but never on a Sunday.

The life and witness of Ignatius of Loyola, a Roman Catholic priest and founder of the Society of Jesus, is an optional commemoration in the Episcopal Church. He died on today’s date in the year 1556. Yet today’s date has not always belonged to him. Before the 1994 revision of Lesser Feasts and Fasts, today was the feast of Joseph of Arimathea.[1] When today’s commemoration was added to our calendar in 1994, Joseph of Arimathea was moved to the next free date, August 1. I confess, with respect, I would not have voted to make that change.

William Wilberforce was born on August 24, 1759. He died on July 29, 1833, at the age of 73. He was from a prosperous trading family in Hull, after London, the second seaport of the English east coast. He grew up in a family where, not unusual for the time and place, many died in childbirth and younger than older. His father died when he was nine, two of his sisters in childhood. His sister Sarah would predecease him in 1816. He was the only male in his generation of the larger family, and it made him a wealthy man.

Some years ago, I was invited to speak at Trinity-by-the-Cove Church in Naples, Florida, on the history of the four American Prayer Books. I already had commentaries on the 1928 book and the 1979 book. I bought copies of Marion Hatchett’s The Making of the First American Book of Common Prayer[1] and Lesley Northup’s The 1892 Book of Common Prayer.[2] I knew the name of William Reed Huntington that he had been rector of Grace Church, Broadway, here in the city. Building on the work of another rector in New York, William Augustus Muhlenberg. William Muhlenberg was the founding rector of the Church of the Holy Communion. He died in 1877.

Today’s gospel lesson is the conclusion of Jesus’ Sermon in Parables.[1] He has been teaching from a boat to crowds gathered by the sea. After telling the parable of the wheat and the weeds—the end of last week’s lesson, Jesus goes ashore and into a house. His disciples follow him and ask him to explain the parable of the weeds and wheat. The problem at this point in the narrative is that some believe and persist in their belief, and others do not believe and continue in their unbelief. This is the Jewish Christian community's situation for which the evangelist history came to call Matthew writes.

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.