Sermon, Easter VIII, Year A, 2011 - Fidelity, Chastity, and Innocence

Sermon in which the Very Rev. Daniel P. Richards asks us to look at the Virtues of Purity: Fidelity, Chastity, and Innocence. These are held in tension with a Reverence for Christ at work within ourselves, others, and the world. We have to also protect ourselves from our own sin, others sins, and the world.

It is a tension that we don't like to admit, because we like to fall to either the side of fundamentalism that denies God's work outside of our selves and the church or the side of naive libertinism that denies that there is real evil in here or out there.

The balance is the Christian view that God is at work in Christ saving ourselves, others, and the whole Cosmos, as John says, but all of them sometimes rejects God and the work of Christ and does great evil. Only from here can we be both loving and safe, and we must be loving and safe in order to continue the work of Saving the World in Christ's name.

Thank God that Christ sends the Spirit to do that work in us and around us.

This little light of mine, I am going to let it shine.