THE PROFITABLE WAY
A Homily for the 8th Sunday After Trinity
The Rev. Michael Vinson+ Rector
O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth: We humbly beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which are profitable for us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
“Put away from us all hurtful things and give us those things which are profitable for us.” Such a seemingly simple and small prayer. We’re not asking for a great vision from God, no deliverance from some dramatic and great evil, not even for a miracle. We’re merely asking that God would take away those things which harm us and give us what is good for us. In fact, I would wager that we are more than prepared to help God identify which profitable things to give and which evils to keep at bay. “God, keep me from getting the flu again this year.” Or “God, please, if it be in your will, have HR remove that toxic manager from our department! Dear God, let me land that promotion; the extra income would be such a blessing! Or, let me win that contract so I can finish number one this year!”
But the stakes are far higher in our collective prayer today, bigger than the natural realm, bigger than our bodies and earthly needs. We are asking to receive whatever good things will profit our spiritual walk with the Lord, compel us to love him, and to walk in his ways. We're also asking God to put away any and all things that hurt and harm the spiritual life, divert our love from God; the end of these things is death. We like to think that we know the difference between what's profitable and what's hurtful- and often we do.
Yet, the Collect doesn't share our confidence. In fact, we immediately run past our own judgment to God's “never-failing providence” — appealing to the God whose ordering of heaven and earth does not depend on our being able to tell one from the other. We ask Him to put away what is hurtful and to give what is profitable, because left to ourselves we would very often keep the wrong one and refuse the right one, mistaking each for its opposite, yielding our members to iniquity instead of righteousness. And because of the infirmity of our flesh, we struggle to choose rightly.
This is not a new problem. From the very beginning, Hebrew spirituality set two roads before the people of God, and no others. Moses says it to Israel before they cross the Jordan: “I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil… therefore choose life.” Jeremiah says it again to a people about to go into exile: “Behold, I set before you the way of life, and the way of death.” The earliest Christians received this same teaching directly from the lips of our Lord and handed it on as the very first line of their catechism.
The Didache, that ancient manual of Christian instruction from the apostolic age, opens with these words: “There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between the two ways.” Not three ways, not a spectrum of ways, not a matter of taste or temperament — two. And the whole of what our Collect calls hurtful and profitable is simply this old, sober distinction applied to the traffic of an ordinary week: some things belong to the way of death, and some to the way of life, and we need God Himself to sort them rightly, because we so easily confuse the two.
Our Lord addresses this same confusion in the Gospel appointed for today, and He begins exactly where the way of death is most dangerous: not where it is obvious, but where it is disguised. "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." Notice: the danger is not that the wolf looks like a wolf. If it did, no one would need warning. The danger is precisely that it does not. The way of death rarely comes with a warning posted at its gate. It comes recommended. It comes reasonable. It comes, more often than not, wearing the very vestments of religion — for our Lord is not describing pagans here, but prophets, men who speak in His name.
So how then are we to tell the wolf from the sheep, when the clothing is identical? He sends us forward, past the whole question of appearance, to the fruit — and gives us the Bible's oldest image for the two ways: a tree. "Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit." And then He tells us where each tree ends up: the good tree's fruit is gathered in; but "every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire."
Here, in miniature, is the whole of the two ways. A tree standing in one of two conditions. Fruit that reveals, over a season, which condition it stands in. And an ending — gathering, or the axe and the fire — that simply makes visible what the fruit had already shown all along. The way of life and the way of death are not two abstract philosophies. They are two kinds of trees, growing in the same field, and only their fruit tells us which is which.
The way of death promises life but delivers death; the way of life demands death and delivers life. St. Paul names the same two ways in the sharpest terms he can find, and he locates the proverbial fork in the road not out there in the world but inside each one of us. “We are debtors,” he writes to the Romans, “not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.”
Notice how exactly this matches the two ways of Moses and the Didache: to live after the flesh is death; to walk after the Spirit is life. There is no third path. The flesh — our nature bent in on itself, yielded to uncleanness and iniquity unto iniquity — is the way of death dressed up as personal liberation, exercising my “freedom in Christ,” cutting myself some slack, and at the end of the day doing whatever I want whenever I want. Its fruit, St. Paul says plainly, is death, regardless of whatever you call it along the way. Listen, I have walked that way myself and called it profitable while it was already killing me.
Against this, Paul sets the way of life, and shows us where it leads: “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God… and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.” This is what is profitable for us, named at last. Not merely the avoidance of harm, but sonship. To walk the way of life is to walk toward the Father, crying Abba, and to walk the way of death is to walk toward the fire that consumes the fruitless tree. When our Collect asks God to put away from us all hurtful things and to give us those things which are profitable, it is asking Him to turn us off the one way and to establish our feet upon the other — and to keep us there, for a way must be walked continually, not chosen once and then forgotten.
But we are still owed an answer to the practical question: by what means does God actually do this turning, this establishing? He does not ordinarily do it by sudden lightning. He does it, as the Psalmist shows us at length in the appointed portion of the 119th Psalm, through the patient discipline of His own Word working in us over time, step by step along the way. Look at the verbs the Psalmist uses, one after another (492):
“Teach me, O Lord, the way of thy statutes… Give me understanding… Make me to go in the path of thy commandments… Incline my heart unto thy testimonies, and not to covetousness… O turn away mine eyes, lest they behold vanity… O stablish thy word in thy servant… Take away the rebuke that I am afraid of.” Every one of these is a verb of walking or of the walker being reshaped for the walk — a way, a path, a going, a turning. This is the way of life lived in the law of God, planted in His statutes.
The son of Sirach tells us where such walking begins, and he too reaches for the tree: “The fear of the Lord is a crown of wisdom… The root of wisdom is to fear the Lord, and the branches thereof are long life.” Root, and branches, and long life — the way of life pictured once more as a tree, planted rightly, bearing what such a tree bears. And Sirach shows us the two ways at work even in our tempers: “A patient man will bear for a time, and afterward joy shall spring up unto him… A furious man cannot be justified; for the sway of his fury shall be his destruction.” One temper ends in joy; the other in destruction. The two ways are not only chosen in the great decisions of a life. They run through Tuesday afternoon — through how we absorb an insult, a delay, a disappointment — long before they show up in anything so dramatic as a fire.
The second half of our psalm shows that this prayer, rightly prayed, issues in resolve rather than resignation — the walker's own feet must move. “So shall I alway keep thy law; yea, for ever and ever. And I will walk at liberty; for I seek thy commandments.” Here is the great surprise of the way of life: liberty is not found by refusing the royal road, as the flesh always insists, but by walking it. The commandments that look like chains of death become, upon the way of life, the very liberty we were seeking all along. The good tree is not a tree straining against its own nature, for by faith through grace, it has a new nature; it is a tree rooted where it ought to be, indwelling Christ, and doing simply and freely what such a tree does — bringeth forth good fruit.
Beloved, there is a great difference between the two ways, and we are on one of them even now, this morning, whether we have noticed it or not. We are either moving towards life or death. But we are not left to navigate the profitable way by our own instincts alone. We have a Father whose providence never fails, who teaches, who gives understanding, who turns our eyes from vanity, who mercifully takes away the rebuke we have earned, and who is, even now, at work in us — root and branch, step by step — planting us on the way of life and drawing the fruit of that life out of us in His good time. Beloved, when next you pray this prayer, trust the hand that orders heaven and earth to put away from you the way of death, and to set your feet, and keep them, upon the way that is profitable — the way of life everlasting. For “If ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” Amen.
