On most Mondays, The Daily Star, published in Oneonta, has an article on page 3 entitled “Street Talk”.  It’s one of those “person in the street” interviews where a random selection of individuals are asked to give their views on some question the newspaper staff has come up with, or some topic that may be enjoying public attention at the moment.  . . . This week The Daily Star wanted to know if the Judeo-Christian “religion is good or bad for America”.  And so, on Monday in Holy Week (April 6th; the day after the Procession of the Palms and the reading of The Passion); . . . on Monday in Holy Week, . . . six brave souls made a stab at evaluating the worth of the Judeo-Christian religion in the United States of America.  . . . To my relief, everyone supposed that religion in America “can be a positive thing”.  . . . To my sorrow, four of the six (a full two thirds) felt that the benefit of religion is that it can teach values and train individuals in the practice of morals.  . . . I say “to my sorrow” because if the Lord God Almighty simply wanted us to have a code of ethics and to practice virtue for the sake of society, He would not have sent His Son to suffer the agonies and death you have just heard Saint John recount for you.  . . . But then again, those four individuals represent the majority view of the Jewish culture and of the Christian Faith, . . . because, you see, I have a long history of hearing good hearted people tell me they expect their faith to be good for the Community.  Parents, especially, say that sort of thing all the time when I ask them why they want their child baptized.  . . . But virtue is not the object of our being religious people in America; . . . there’s more to our Faith than that.

    And so, when an ancient Jewish scholar gives his account, in the Book of Wisdom, of how wicked individuals despise the person of faith, . . . he points out that the chief cause of the jealousy and contempt which wicked persons display arises from the fact that they are incapable of understanding that “God created man for incorruption, and made him in the image of His own eternity . . .”.  In other words, as one commentator puts it,

The author of Wisdom [makes] it quite clear that . . . the cause of . . . wickedness was the inability of the ungodly to accept that he was created for a fellowship with God (Ernest G. Clarke, The Cambridge Bible Commentary, “The Wisdom of Solomon”, p.27)

. . . “Created for a fellowship with God”; . . . that’s the object of the Judeo-Christian Faith(!); . . . so that we might be intimate with our Creator; . . . so that we might sit down together at a meal with Him and be nourished by God with sacred bread and life-imbuing wine; . . . so that we might speak peaceably with God and express our solicitude and concern for His beloved who people our lives; . . . so that we might listen for God’s encouragement and await His empowerment; . . . so that Father and child might contrive to effect a miracle or two in the course of things.

    High values and sound moral practices such as the keeping of the Ten Commandments with simplicity, chastity, and obedience are not the goal of the life of an Episcopalian; . . . they are the means by which we keep our souls fit to accomplish the thing we were created for:  . . . to be in fellowship with God.  . . . Oh, certainly, if everyone had keeping the Commandments as a life goal, there would be less robberies, murders, sexual abuse, and wars along the way, but the disappearance of hostilities are a mere “shadow of the good things”, the Apostle says in his letter to the Hebrews:

the law has but a shadow of the good things . . . instead of the true form of these realities . . . Consequently [the Apostle continues], when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings thou hast not desired,” . . .  When he said above, “Thou hast neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings” . . . then he added, “Lo, I have come to do thy will.”  He abolishes the first in order to establish the second.  And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

The reality of human life is that we are intended for fellowship with God, as it says in the Book of Wisdom; . . . the reality of the Christian Life is that each of the Baptized have been sanctified; . . . have been made suitable and fit to be a companion of God; . . . each of the Baptized have been made suitable to interact with God the Father Almighty in all the things I have already mentioned.

    Jesus specifically tells Pilate that His (that is to say, Christ’s) “kingship is not of this world”.  Jesus tells Pilate that He is not a king whose intent is to overthrow Roman rule and establish a new world order; . . . rather, Jesus is King of a heavenly order; . . . Jesus is the King Whose voice beckons men and women into a truthful relationship; . . . a relationship that the Apostle describes as being grounded in faith in the Lord God Almighty, . . . a relationship that hopes in the goodness that flows from the forgiveness, mercy, and grace of the Lord God Almighty, . . . and a relationship that has the love of God the Father Almighty as revealed to us in Christ Jesus as the model for an answering love toward God and a sacred love toward one another, . . . a love that has the Father as its source and focus.

    When I baptize someone, . . . I don’t intend for him (or her) to be a good United States citizen.  . . . I intend that she (or he) be imbued with the faith, hope, and love of Jesus . . . so as to become a child and a friend of God.  . . . It’s plain from the talk in the street that no one understands this.  So, you’ve got your work cut out for you.  You’ve got your work cut out for you to live and explain that Christ’s death upon the Cross doesn’t make good citizens; . . . it makes the truth about ourselves . . . accessible to us.  And that’s why we call today “Good”.