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Weekly sermons from the traditional and contemporary worship services at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas, Texas. Rooted in Scripture and the Anglican tradition, these messages explore how the gospel speaks to our faith, our everyday lives and the world around us.
When I started reading through the lessons to figure out what it was that I should say, my question to God is always, Lord, what would you have us here? That's different from Lord, what do you want them to hear? Because you see, we are of one body. And therefore that which we share together as believers, sisters and brothers in Christ Jesus binds us together into the kind of union that even the gates of hell would not prevail against. And so, it's always in that way a kind of us.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:But I I will confess to you that what I needed to hear out of that is that when Peter says, as it were in Caesarea Philippi, you are the Messiah, the Christ, the son of the living God. That somehow I have the sense of because we make the same confession that we too are a part of that. That a union there, even there in the confession was created in a way that allows us to be a part of what God is doing even here in 2026. The other thing that I needed to hear was in Paul's admonition to present your body as a living sacrifice that God would be kind enough to accept the difficulty that I have in being able to make that kind of unequivocal lay down your life commitment. And that at least in my life, release servanthood has been incremental.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:And I still have my own wrestling with me wanting to do what I wanna do rather than necessarily what God might ask of me. But more of that later. Right now, I wish to turn to someone who really does fit the one who has said you are the Christ, and that was written by CS Lewis in his book Surprised by Joy. As he began to wrestle with the possibility of faith, he who had left the church became an ardent atheist and then an ardent agnostic turning the corner to theism and finally beginning to admit Christianity. He said, wrote, for the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:And there I found what appalled me, a zoo of lusts. What a great phrase. A bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was Legion. And in the face of such turmoil, CS Lewis described his transition into Christianity as a blessed defeat.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:Quote, I was caught, God knows how, vanquished, put in a corner, and made to perceive. His conversion was not loud, but it was certainly final. Similarly, Peter's monumental confession that Jesus was the Messiah was also not loud. It happened within a conversation. It was near Caesarea Philippi, a royal city known for confession of Caesar as a god and not far away from the religious shrine known as Pan's Grotto.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:The location was not coincidental. The two alternatives to the Christian faith were at that time the deification of politics and the deification of nature. We are not far from And when Peter asked the said to the question, who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ. Something was in fact set in motion.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:It's a cataclysmic kind of event described, in fact, in the softest of terms. But there, what we have is nothing less the beginnings of this rudimentary organization that would eventually be the church, the continuing presence of God on earth through his devoted and very human servants. Here is the rudimentary beginnings of an organization that God would use and still uses to change the world. An astonishing mixture of human tragedy, profound courage in the face of persecution, sublime beauty in art, music, and literature, financial greed, political power, and also by God's surprise, unabashed miracles where the most normal of people are caught up in the love of God forever. Salvation, the exclusive property of Jesus, the son of God, is about catching people even in the face of human inconsistency and drawing them into that place where they too are wrapped in God's loving kindness, a love that will not let them go, an indissoluble union between humanity and divinity that releases for you and me, ordinary people that we are, the forgiveness of sin and the audacious promise of eternal life.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:It is for eternal life that we were chosen, not qualified, note, but chosen. Chosen by God, which at least for me is one of the great comforts of the Christian life. The relief of knowing that the outcome of my salvation is in fact in the hands of God. For reasons only known to God, God reached out from eternity through time and space to say to each one of us, without qualification, You are mine, and I will never let you go. Even now, the most precious moments in my life happen when I have the sense that through the ordinariness of circumstances, I'm being drawn to God, that my life is more than a series of chance circumstances, nor my faith built on mere feelings, though I feel his love very, very deeply.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:But there is a purpose in circumstances, opportunities strewn along my path like breadcrumbs where I'm invited to take up notice, see what God is doing, and participate in what he is doing in the world. Sometimes I recognize those breadcrumbs, and sometimes I do not. The tragedy of my life is that sometimes I am too caught up in my own designs to notice the glimmers of beauty hidden in the ordinary human beings in front of me. Sometimes I want what I want and I'm blinded by my wants to what God might want of me, particularly in the service of the people he sends our way, puts along our path. In the moments of such self centeredness, I forget that the currency of the kingdom of God is generosity.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:The willingness to give oneself to the inconvenient, not asked for or on the books, and yet there it is. The giving of time, thought, money, effort. Saint Francis guides us to pray, make me a channel of your peace. Meaning, I need God's efforts to turn me from the task of spending my time building monuments of my own making and to see the open door right in front of me to serve and to give. If I confess to Jesus that you are the Christ, I am also confessing by nature of who he is that you and others are my neighbor.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:In this kingdom, there is no such thing as a Christian with no neighbors to serve. As a captive to my own preoccupations, therefore, I need to hear again this call to the inconvenient, to the service, the call in Romans, to present myself as a living sacrifice, Paul writes. You see, if you Lewis can use the hyperbole of calling himself the most reluctant convert. Many of us would probably call ourselves the most reluctant of servants. It's not easy for any of us.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:Even Paul wrote, I die daily. And remember Jesus even prayed in the garden that the cup of sacrifice would pass from him. It is a daily challenge to choose Christ and his way over my own. Yet, that is at the heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Need we say the obvious?
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:The essence of sin is self centeredness. CS Lewis in his book, The Great Divorce, describes hell as that gray, dull, vapid place where people only want to be left alone to do what they want to do without the interference of others. That is a very accurate description of the attitude that would quickly take any of us to hell if God did not step in and have his own way. What was the line, no exit, hell is other people? Jesus says, no.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:That's not true at all. Hell is in your own selfish desires. By contrast, God's call in our lives is to present ourselves to him, to be drawn away from the kind of inner preoccupation that captures most of us. I don't know about you, but I don't need a phone to doom scroll to be taken away into all of the thoughts that are going around in my head. What Jesus is saying when we present ourselves to him is to step away from that because the call from Jesus is outward.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:It is not inward. It is outward. It is in the outward step that you discover things about the inner life. But if all you know and pay attention to is the inner life, you never know how to step out and make the step. It is going and doing that creates the path for self discovery that causes you to learn things about yourself and about God that you would never have known if you had just sat in your room with the door closed.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:The call to present oneself as a living sacrifice means to present oneself to God even with all of our inner contradictions. We're not dracing ourselves up. We are coming as we are. It is in the free knowledge and the wonderful knowledge that no inner contradiction disqualifies us from offering ourselves to him. When we yield to him, immediately what God begins to produce in us, if we're willing to relax into the yields yieldedness, is awe.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:Awe that I would never notice if all I thought about was what was inside me. Awe because God's world is a world filled with wonder, and to give myself to God frees me to see the beauty, to again, to recognize the breadcrumbs along the path, the people that God sends our way, as in fact his gifts, the opportunity to serve him as he continues to serve us. I won't see the diamonds if I just see you as somebody who's getting in the way of my own time when I just wanna be alone. Doesn't that sound familiar? The call is outward.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:And it's not just for awe, but also adoration. Because as that love begins to seep into my soul, I begin to understand and see in a new way the gift of God that we have received, which opens my eyes to his love in a way that causes me to rise and adore him. I have the sense that for many people, when they're trying to think about coming into the presence of God, it's actually very, very uncomfortable. It's like they're over in a corner and they're sort of sitting like this and Jesus comes into the room, but but what does he do? Look at what Jesus does.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:He gets down on one knee so that he can look the person in the eye, lift up their chin ever so slightly and say, hello. I love you. When we, at our worst, fear that what we will receive is not the I love you, but why haven't you invited me sooner? And all the other crazy stuff we make up out of our own perfectionism. The great promise inherent in these lessons is that God responds to our self giving in a yes that comes from him.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:He comes to us, takes what we offer him, and blesses it with his healing and overcoming presence. It does not have to be a perfect response. Peter did not know all that he was saying when he quietly acknowledged Jesus to be the Messiah, the son of the living God. It does not have to be loud and resolute. Quiet words spoken from the heart can feel like thunder even though we hear nothing.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:It is is it not in these moments when we're invited to draw near to him that even though we would want to resist the closeness, we might be hungry enough to yield to begin to say, yes, just for the next step. Will you be willing to yield? Perhaps you can say with me when the time comes later in the liturgy that monumental prayer. And here we offer and present unto thee, oh lord, ourselves, our souls, and bodies to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee. No vocabulary says it better.
Rt. Rev. Gregory Brewer:But more importantly, in those very strong words, may that be what is in fact being described as a child who is unsure unsure of what's on the other side of the door, but sees the light peeking underneath and wants more than anything to come out of the darkness. Beloved, he is saying yes to you even now. Yield to him and no relief. Amen.