In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, Amen.
I walk in and out, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, of the City of God, which is to say the Church. I walk in and out because I have been made whole. I have heard the Gospel of the Kingdom—that Christ has defeated all his enemies, idolatry, sin and even death and calls all to Life in him—and I am blessed by God, sanctified by God and called to union with God. And on the Great and Last Day, when all shall be judged by the Judge, the Lord will say to me, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matthew 25:41)
I walk in and out of the City of God and I see outside the wall lepers. And I might stop and talk with them, I might feed them, I might give them money—all these are good things, virtuous things, godly things, and we must do them all—but I withhold from them what they need. I care about them but only on the terms that they remain outside the City, outside the Church, and not bring about change to my possession. Yet what they are truly in need of is not the food which will feed them today and leave them hungry tomorrow, as important and vital as that is, but of the Food which comes down from Heaven. “Do not labour,” says the Lord,
for the food which perishes, but for the Food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you, because God the Father has set his seal on him.
John 6:27
For what the lepers outside the City wall need from me is an invitation, “Go and show yourselves to the Priest.” And the Priest is Christ. What I need to be saying is,
Come, and encounter Christ. Come, and encounter God. Come, and meet him who has defeated all the spirits which afflict you. Come, and rejoice in him who is Victor over death and offers you eternal Life. Come and see!
And this is dangerous, this is challenging. This opens up the possibility that I might find in the City, find in the Church, those whom I do not like, those who are different from me, those who act in different ways, those who have different opinions than I do. And yet this is the will of God. The Apostle tells us God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (First Timothy 2:4)
My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, if I want to be accepted by the Lord on the Last Day I must never be satisfied that there are those outside the wall of the Church. And this can be achieve in manifold ways, by some through going out and giving the invitation, by some through serving, by some through cleaning, by some through cooking, by some through giving—all of us by praying!—that those outside the Church have the opportunity to enter and encounter the living God. If we are to be the faithful, if we are to be Christians, we must offer what we have that the Lord be manifest here among us that others may receive what we have. Let us work together, sacrificially offering our time, our talents, our energy and our money, that our invitation to encounter the Lord may bear fruit and we may say to those outside, “Go and show yourselves to the Priest.”
That all glory, honour and praise be offered to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, together with his unoriginate Father and the All-holy, Good and Life-giving Spirit. Amen.
Brethren, when Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience. In these you once walked, when you lived in them. But now put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.
— Colossians 3:4–11
At that time, as Jesus entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices and said: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When he saw them he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’s feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then said Jesus: “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And he said to him: “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”
— Luke 17:12–19