Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost • Year C

Historical Collect

Care for your Church, O Lord, with perpetual mercy. Since we totter and are sure to fall without your grace, remove what will harm us and arrange what will make us whole. Grant this, we pray, through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. (Gelasian Sacramentary, 7th Century)

Thematic Collect

Mighty God, your Son, Jesus, is the way, the truth, and the life. Sanctify us by your Holy Spirit that our lives may be pleasing to you and we may enter through the narrow door. Grant us the joy of your salvation; through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever. Amen.

The Common Thread

The sign of God is Christ in our midst. He is the “perfection of beauty,” shining in transfigured glory. He is our deliverance in the day of trouble. That day is, ultimately, the day of judgment, though he delivers us from trouble in this life as well. As we struggle against sin, and find we are troubled that cannot overcome it. We must agree with the liturgy, that we are captive to sin and cannot liberate ourselves. So, we must enter into salvation through the narrowest of openings, Christ, who is the sign of God’s love for sinners. He is the only way to the Father (John 14:6).

First Reading • Isaiah 66:18-23

God scatters his one-nation-, one-language-people so that people from all nations and tongues might behold his glory. One goes into the promised land as a child to learn, to be disciplined, to mature so that he may declare God’s glory to other lands. Missionaries and pastors who were quite content in the church where they grew up, were sent out to declare the excellencies of God in new lands. He may do the same with you.

Psalm • Psalm 50:1-15

What does God require of us? Sacrifice? Offerings? Attendance? These should be expressions of thankful hearts. That is what God glories in: your faithful thanks.

Second Reading • Hebrews 12:4-24 (25-29)

An insidious teaching of the popular pulpit is that real believers—people with true faith—will not suffer and will have plenty. The false extension of this is that whatever one asks of Jesus will be granted. The writer of Hebrews disagrees.

The author asserts that there will be troubles for the Christian. His assertion seems to rest upon what the Christians’ own Lord experienced. “Looking to Jesus…” (Heb 12:2) “you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood” in your struggle. (v4) With this assumption of difficulties, the writer lends some advice: endure your suffering for the sake of growing up in the Lord. Discipline is the word employed but the point of such discipline is that believers mature in righteousness. This is the faith that perseveres despite the experience. This is the unshaken kingdom of unshakable citizens who come and worship the God who is consuming them with the holy fire of his righteous discipline.

Gospel • Luke 13:22-30

The text is set in the form of a journey. It continues this theme with words like “enter," “come," “streets," “depart," “from east and west, and from north and south," and “some are first who will be last.” 

The journey is not just where one is headed (eg: heaven or hell). Eventually, it relates to where one comes from (v27). Did you seek entrance through the “narrow door” or did you climb the wall? Some would storm the door of heaven by their own reason, by their incessant knocking. If one enters through the Door who is the Christ, he will know you and you will be admitted. If one strives to enter through any other way, he will be turned away.