Ceremonious [Trinity 19; St. Matthew 9:1-8]

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO HERE.

Jesus is speaking to you, from His own Gospel, saying,

“But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins—he then said to the paralytic—Rise, pick up your bed and go home.”

It is a fact that only 45% of our own earth has been explored. Granted, most of what is unexplored is out in the middle of the ocean, but this fact should still give us pause when we claim to know something scientifically about the earth and its climate and yet know only about 45% of it.

Perhaps to a similar percentage is the exploration of our own bodies. Now you’d think after how many people have lived in, experimented with, and experienced life in a body, that we would have it all figured out. Surprise! There are more things than you think that people can’t explain about our own bodies.

For example, no one knows why we have fingerprints. At one point it was thought that they allowed for better grip, but they actually make less of our skin come into contact with things and work against grip. We take them for granted, not needing an explanation for them, and simply adjust our lives around them, especially when it involves criminal behavior.

No one knows why we have appendixes, why we have dominant hands, or why we yawn. There is so much more about our bodies that is still mystery today, even to its owners, yet these don’t change life for us, much. We are still able to live a good and full life even though we are only 45% sure that our body is doing ok.

This means, that despite living within a mystery, quite literally, we seem to function just fine. We are able to be taught how to live out our lives, not knowing everything about it. Is this cognitive dissonance? Are we ignorant? Are there just some things that science is incapable of explaining??

According to the dictionary, a ceremony is “an act or series of acts performed according to a traditional or prescribed form”. Of course, this is exactly how Creation is designed just for us: that things work in a prescribed way again and again. There is also ceremony, that series of acts performed, to everything we do in order to interact with this world and survive. There is a certain way to eat, a certain way to drink, and a certain way to care for one’s body. 

You do not shove just any old thing into your mouth, much less any other place on your body. It must be food, it must be prepared, and it must go in through your mouth. Same with drinking and same with hygiene. You do not brush your hair with fire neither do you care for your hair by cutting your nails. We sit down and bow to many ceremonies all day long and they pass us right by without a second thought.

It is any wonder then, that God’s ceremonies are treated in the same way? Our Holy Scripture readings are full of ceremonies this morning. Jacob is in the middle of unceremoniously escaping his brother Esau and looking for a wife, in our Old Testament reading. Yet, he is the blessed son who, upon seeing the cross of Christ which he sees as a ladder, sets up a place of ceremony there at Bethel, meaning “house of God”. So of course Jacob would set up a church there and of course he would return and worship in chapter 35 and of course it would be one of the first places the Ark of the Covenant came to when Joshua and the Judges were leading Israel in Joshua 8 and Judges 20.

Thus all the ceremonies prescribed by God, given through Moses, were to be enacted at this place of worship. For hundreds of years, Bethel remained a place of ceremony and celebration, but was just a quickly turned to a place of anti-ceremony, being turned over to golden calves, and promptly condemned by the prophets saying, “On the day I punish Israel for its transgressions, I will punish the altars of Bethel, and the horns of the altar shall be cut off and fall to the ground” (Amos 3:14).

So it is that St. Paul, speaking over a millennium later, speaks of those same idolatrous ceremonies that should not be. Yet they persist, because the devil is tireless. The anti-ceremonies are described by St. Paul in our Ephesians reading. “Put away all falsehood...and clothe yourself with righteousness and holiness”. Which means, just as important as the ceremony is the heart and life that the ceremony is aiming to rescue.

Ceremonies teach. Jacob and Israel did not just imitate other religions and build Altars and Temples, they were taught by God Himself. And even though they did not understand how heaven could reach earth, nonetheless, they did as instructed and the Divine Service played out as God promised. 

Teaching and doing go hand in hand. The Lord told us to make disciples by baptizing and teaching, Matt. 28. And in that case, we typically*do* first (baptize) and *teach* (catechize) later. Similarly, we have children memorize prayers long before they know what they actually mean. Most children have chanted "ellemenopee" before being taught that these are actually five different pictographical representations of sounds used lingusitically for the purpose of representing vocables graphically. Imagine if we taught that complex thing first, and then and only then had the kids actually sing the ABC song.

No. In the Church, Jesus has set things up for you in such a way that you can both learn about His ceremonies beforehand and be thrown into them to learn them as you go. In fact, “doing” is the better teacher here. Thus, we do not keep our children separate from ceremony, but invite them to participate. We do not keep people away, even when practicing Closed Communion. That is simply inviting them to learn and participate more.

This is because in these ceremonies you encounter God, Whom you do not know even a tenth of. And yet we find Jesus, today, forgiving a paralytic of his sins. Because when you encounter God, the first part of the ceremony is always forgiveness. It is always the handing over of all the fruits purchased and won on the cross, by the Word made Flesh. It is always mercy, not sacrifice. It is always making whole what has been lost and destroyed. Thus, this paralytic that has been decimated by sin, must be revived into new life in Christ by hearing, believing, and receiving the forgiveness of sins in order that he be returned to the ceremony.

There must be ceremony. There must be an expression and a revelation of that which is spiritual into that which is physical. This was always God’s plan from the beginning and your own body teaches you this. The only way that your soul, your inner-being, that unexplainable-hidden-thing-that-makes-you-you, interacts with the world and expresses itself is through ceremony; the ceremony of acting through your body.

When Jesus encounters this paralyzed man, He encounters someone who is unable to perform the ceremony; unable to let his soul interact with the created world of his Lord. First step in the ceremony then becomes to proclaim the Gospel; the good news that the kingdom of heaven has come in the form of a man and that the forgiveness of sins is to be found above all else.

Second is to receive the heavenly gift of hearing and believing: faith, in order that faith would also receive healing. So, in these steps Jesus proves three things: one, that the kingdom has come, two, that it comes in the name of peace and forgiveness, and three, that it is accessible even to the most cripple among us.

Our entire universe can be 100% mystery to us and that would not keep the Kingdom from coming among us and giving and teaching His ceremonies. Our bodies could be 100% foreign to us and that would not prevent God’s will from being done among us also. God can be God; something completely other and almighty and different from us and yet, in ceremony and celebration within His Church, He can be heard, touched, smelled, seen, and tasted.

In the Incarnation, God is not “something else”, He is made man, just like us in every way, except without sin. Thus, God enters into His own prescribed ceremonies with us, in order to fulfill them and live with us, through them. Because Jesus was made man, these ceremonies bring faith down to earth, for us.

It is in this spirit that St. Peter declares to us that we don’t follow man-made myths or made-up legends (2 Pet. 1:16). In that same vein, neither do we follow fabricated or mythological ceremonies, when we gather around Word and Sacrament. We did not make this stuff up. The Roman Catholic church did not make this stuff up and use it to fleece wallets from everyone.

The ceremonies that we become a part of in the Divine Service are born from billions of baptized believers continuously encountering God in communion, which He created. In living out that life and standing in front of the God Who forgives and the God Who heals, the Service you inherit today is the sum of all believers’ actions. What you hold in your hymnals and the motions, prayers, and canticles you put your body through are so ancient, they cannot help connect you to the Ancient of Days, mentioned in Daniel 7, made flesh in Matthew 1.

Ceremonies not only reveal God to us, but allow us to come close to Him, close enough to believe He is both God and man and commune with Him. Of course, we have to admit that, to the outside, they look like any other religious rites that have been on this earth thousands of times before. And I would agree, except for the fact that God calls our ceremonies different. Just as baptism is plain water without the Word, so is ceremony without the Word.

But since we have the command and the promise of God, “Do this in remembrance of me”, and since Jesus has suffered, died, and risen from the dead, these words and promises of the Crucified Jesus make them different. Thus, in our sin, we say with Jacob, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it”, but in faith we cry out: “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!” (Gen. 28:16-17)