[A note from John Stonestreet: I was privileged last Sunday, July 10, to hear Canon Williams deliver this outstanding sermon in response to the horrific events of last week. I have asked and received permission from Canon Williams to reprint the following excerpts.]

It’s been a breathtaking, deeply disturbing, tragic, and sorrowful week for our nation. No sooner had we finished our annual celebration of Independence Day than we began to awaken daily to a barrage of assaults on life and liberty in our own age. . . .

My home state of Iowa made national news because freedom of religious speech for Christians has come under a frontal assault by the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, which has added public worship services to their list of “public accommodations” included in their governmental anti-discrimination law.

[Then we saw] the grievous tragedies of the sniper murders of five Dallas police officers and wounding of seven others — depriving wives and families of their husbands, fathers and providers — by a deeply disturbed, angry, and deranged man; coupled with the controversial shootings of two black men by police in Baton Rouge and Minnesota, threatening to further enflame the already volatile climate between African-American and law enforcement communities.

Our Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Felix Orji, responded on Facebook, “Violence will not solve the problem of racial hatred. Love, understanding, and forgiveness are the ways forward as we prayerfully see the Lord’s intervention and grace for our country.”

Our Collect of the Day takes us right where we need to focus:

“O Lord, we beseech thee mercifully to receive the prayers of thy people who call upon thee, and grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfill the same through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Would that every citizen of our nation were attending to the worship of Almighty God in a Christian church this morning and joining us in that particular prayer with devout conviction and determined intent of heart to “perceive and know what things they ought to do” and then go and do them; hearing the Gospel Parable of the Good Samaritan read from the midst of the congregation, and perceiving that in the economy and Kingdom of Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female (Gal 3:28); that God’s grace transcends race, nationality, and gender.

Our first and last order of business today in all these things is to pray for these grieving families, for these communities, for our own families, for our own community, and for our nation. And if, as we pray, there is something of the Lord’s righteousness He allows us to perceive and know that we should do, then we should do it.

What is behind these assaults upon our life, liberty, and the pursuit of a flourishing life for our families and communities? How are we to understand these things? And what can we do to contend with them?

In our Christian understanding, we know that these recent events are the result of sin and evil.

One could make the case that a significant lack of regard and respect for virtue has seeped into every branch of our government:

–for true justice, wisdom, temperance, fortitude;

–for Christian faith, hope, and love;

–for honor, integrity, and magnanimity–greatness of the soul;

–for responsibility and hard work;

–for the principles of our nation’s founders and our Constitution,

–for the dignity of every human being;

–and for the very people who elected and entrusted these people to the stewardship of their public offices;

Therefore, that such is the sinful spirit of the age now bearing the destructive fruit of a climate of permissive lawlessness, licentiousness, and lack of self-control; a profound national dysfunction that thinks itself wise, but in fact is breeding destructive chaos.

At another level one could make the case that this lack of appreciation and respect for virtue is because, in the absence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and a saving faith in Him, the hearts and minds of our citizens are being filled with nonsense, with the Gnostic sort of thinking, conviction, and egoistic self-absorption. . . . The lost are in bondage to deceptions and false gospels and seem to have lost all common sense and sound reason.

And the Apostle Paul reminds us also — in his letter to the Ephesians — of the profound and hidden reality that this all has to do with more than flesh color and blood; that rather, “we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Eph 6:12)

What then can we do? What can be brought to bear against such forces of darkness and deprived convictions?

The Apostle Paul, in our Epistle lesson for today, was writing to the Christians in Colossae from prison first and foremost to make the point that he and his local entourage had not ceased to pray for them, asking that they might be “filled with the knowledge of his [God the Father’s] will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.” (Col. 1)

And what is the knowledge of God the Father’s will but that the Christians in Colossae step up to do their part as good citizens of his Kingdom to heed Paul’s exhortations, to join him in fervent prayer, and to proclaim the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ — so that all who were blind to their state of alienation from God, just as Paul had been blind, might, by hearing the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ, be given eyes to see and, by God’s grace, become members of His kingdom, drawn by the power and inspiration of God the Holy Spirit sent to dwell within them, to praise Him and thank Him for what he had done for them in redeeming them by his great mercy and grace.

Paul wrote elsewhere that the message of Christ crucified is offensive (1 Cor 1:24). In the politically world of today, the message of the love and mercy of God in sending his Son to redeem sinful man would almost certainly be categorized as a “macro-aggression”; as it apparently was in Paul’s day as well, his faithful proclamation having landed him in a prison. Paul said the gospel is a stumbling block, and folly to those who hear it.

Why? Because it not only does not accommodate the world’s way of thinking;

–It identifies any liberty other than liberty in Christ to be a continued state of alienation and rebellion against God,

–and any inner conviction other than that which derives from faith in Christ to be idolatry;

–and identifies those who have not come to faith in Christ to be lost and in need of repentance and true faith in Christ.

But those who are called hear the message of Jesus Christ as the power and wisdom of God. It becomes implanted within, takes root, and grows; bearing fruit in due season. Paul encourages the Colossians that such spiritual formation in the knowledge and wisdom of God will empower one to lead a life (a walk) fitting unto the Lord; will form them into good citizens, fully pleasing to Him —

–bearing fruit in every good work,

–increasing in the knowledge of God,

–strengthened with all power by the infilling of God the Holy Spirit, and according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy.

And all this flowing out of a life characterized by a devout and persistent offering of worship and thanksgiving to God the Father, “who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light; who has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

In his 2016 Commencement Address at Hillsdale College, Justice Clarence Thomas told of having grown up on a small farm:

In the broader context, we were obligated in our neighborhood to be good neighbors so that the neighborhood would thrive. Whether there was to be a clean, thriving neighborhood was directly connected to our efforts. So there was always, to our way of thinking, a connection between the things we valued most and our personal obligations or efforts. There could be no freedom without each of us discharging our responsibilities. When we heard the words duty, honor, and country, no more needed to be said. . . .

As the years have moved swiftly by, I have often reflected on the important citizenship lessons of my life. For the most part, it was the unplanned array of small things. There was the kind gesture from a neighbor. There was my grandmother dividing our dinner because someone showed up unannounced. There was the stranger stopping to help us get our crops out of the field before a big storm. There were the nuns who believed in us and lived in our neighborhood. There was the librarian who brought books to Mass so that I would not be without reading on the farm. Small gestures such as these become the large lessons about how to live our lives. We watched and learned what it means to be a good person, a good neighbor, a good citizen. Who will be watching you? And what will you be teaching them? . . .

These small lessons become the unplanned syllabus for learning citizenship, and your efforts to live them will help to form the fabric of a civil society and a free and prosperous nation where inherent equality and liberty are inviolable.

And so once again, we pray:

“Lord, we beseech thee mercifully to receive the prayers of thy people who call upon thee, and grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfill the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”

Archdeacon Michael Williams is an Anglican Priest and retired Air Force Chaplain, currently serving as Vicar General of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy for the Anglican Church in North America and Convocation of Anglicans in North America.