Introduction
This morning, I’d like us to think about what matters most to us as Christians. In other words, what does it mean, at the most fundamental level, to be a Christian? I have said many times before that one of the many things that I adore about the Anglican tradition is that (at its best) Anglicanism majors on the majors and minors on the minors. Not every Christian tradition does this, and I can’t even stand here and say that the ACNA does this, but at its best, Anglicanism focuses on what truly matters.
This is one reason Anglicans practice open communion: we don't believe that we need agreement on theological minutiae to share in the body and blood of Christ.
But, of course, saying we major on the majors begs the question: what exactly are the majors of the Christian faith? What are the non-negotiables of the Christian tradition? I’m confident many people, even within the Anglican tradition, would answer this question differently, but there are essentially three non-negotiables for all Christians, and two of them appear in our reading this morning.
First, there is what we are supposed to believe. Jesus asks the Pharisees:
“What do you think about the Messiah?” (Matt 22:42 ESV).
Answering that question correctly is the first non-negotiable of the Christian faith. To be a Christian, you must believe certain things about the God revealed in Jesus the Messiah.
Second, there is what we are supposed to do. Jesus summarizes the entire responsibility of human beings toward God and toward other humans with two commandments, saying:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt 22:37–40).
To be a Christian is to live a certain way toward God and toward those created in his image.
Third, knowing what we are supposed to believe and what we are supposed to do, there is the necessary recognition that we cannot do any of this on our own. Left to our own devices, we will always fall short, and so we must learn to call on the Lord’s grace through prayer.
These three things (what we believe, what we do, and our recognition of our need for God’s grace through prayer) are the essentials of what it means to be a Christian, and so we practice these three things every Sunday. We say the Creed together, we respond to our Lord’s summary of the Law by recognizing our need for mercy and confessing our sins, and we pray the Lord’s Prayer together. We spend at least one day a week practicing corporately the habits of what it means to be a Christian.
What We Believe
Jesus asks the Pharisees:
“What do you think about the Messiah?” (Matt 22:42).
This is the essential theological question of the Christian faith. We answer this question not just by focusing on Christology but by understanding what it means that Jesus is the Messiah within the larger question of God’s self-revelation to the world. And so our answer is inherently Trinitarian because the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth has revealed himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
We see all three members of the Trinity referenced in Jesus’s next question to the Pharisees. They say simply that the Messiah is the Son of David, and so Jesus asks:
“How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying, “‘The LORD said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”’?” (Matt 22:43–44).
I put the first “Lord” in all capitals because that is how it would be printed if you turned back to Psalm 110:1, the verse Jesus is quoting here. This psalm is the Old Testament passage most quoted or alluded to by New Testament authors. The early church returned to this psalm again and again to try to wrap their heads around what they had experienced in the person of Jesus, and that impulse starts with Jesus himself.
In the Spirit, David sings of the Messiah, and the opening words envision Yahweh, the first Lord in all capitals, calling someone else “Lord” and inviting him to sit at his right hand.
Jesus quotes this passage and rightly asks:
“If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?” (Matt 22:45).
The Christian faith begins with recognizing that Jesus of Nazareth is much more than a mere human being, even more than merely a human son of David. He is the one human being whom the Lord himself addresses as Lord, and he is not decaying lifeless in a tomb, but sitting alive and embodied at the right hand of God, ruling as the world’s true Lord and King. To this Lord and King, the whole world owes its true allegiance, and that is especially true of the people of God.
What We Do
And what does this Lord and King ask of us? He asks that we love God, now revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with all that we are, with our heart, our soul, our mind, and our strength. This, he says, is the first and great commandment, but the second is like it. Loving our neighbors as ourselves is like the command to love God with all that we are, not because they both involve the same thing, but because the way in which God’s people most clearly demonstrate their love for God is not first and foremost proper worship or emotional response, but by selflessly loving the other people that God has made. To show our love for God, we are called to love other people God has created at least as much as we love ourselves, and by nature, we are fundamentally incapable of this.
We’re also incapable, if belief means knowing something with absolute certainty, of believing what we are supposed to believe. We do not know, as we do about US history or who won the ALCS, that the Father created the world, that Jesus was his only begotten Son, or that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
Belief and knowledge are not the same thing, even if we can know what we are supposed to believe.
So if we are incapable (on our own) of doing the things that we are supposed to do because they are against our very nature, and if we are incapable (on our own) of believing the things that we are supposed to believe since we can’t know them the way we know other facts, then what are we supposed to do?
Grace through Prayer
The answer to that question is the place where I really want this sermon to land this morning because we could talk all day about the Nicene Creed and what it is that all Christians are supposed to believe, and we could talk all day about loving God with all that you are and loving others at least as much as you love yourself, but to do both of those things you need the grace and mercy of God, which means you must pray. Faith is a gift. The strength to do what God has called us to do by the power of the Holy Spirit is a gift. And we ask for those gifts through prayer.
I don’t know what it means to be a Christian and not to have an active, daily prayer life. When people say to me that they’re struggling with faith or they’re struggling with sin, what I will always ask them first is “How’s your prayer life?”, and the answer is almost always that it’s non-existent.
To be a Christian involves both what you believe and what you do, but at the root of both is prayer.
So that’s what I want for all of you for the rest of this calendar year, for Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, and Lent. I want you spending the rest of this year and the beginning of next year either starting or expanding your prayer life. If you need help, let me know, or seek out one of the many prayer warriors in this church. But let me be perfectly clear: you can’t be a Christian in any active sense without a regular (and probably daily) prayer life.
If you don’t pray every day, then start. If you pray some days but wish you did it more regularly, then set a specific time each day and commit to spending that time in prayer. If you pray every day, keep it up, and find others who are struggling and encourage them to pray with you. Because living the Christian life isn’t our work. It’s God’s work through us by the power of his Holy Spirit, and your prayer life is the channel through which he works.
So if you’re struggling in faith, or struggling to be the person you know God has created and called you to be, go home and pray. And if you don’t feel anything right away, like a special tingle, or you don’t feel like you hear God speaking back to you immediately, that’s okay. Each of us experiences God differently, and God gives to each of his people different gifts. The trick is to keep praying because prayer, at its core, is a habit. It’s a habit God’s people build into their lives so God’s grace, mercy, and power can flow through us and work in us to make us who he has called us to be and to believe what he has called his people to believe.
Amen.