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The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost
O God, forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee, mercifully grant that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the same Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Proper 19)
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The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 14:25-33
A Sermon by
Fr. Mead
on
Luke 14:25-33
✛
To Count the Cost and Persevere
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In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Today we welcome, and welcome back, the boys of our Choir School and the faculty and staff who teach and support them. Welcome to the new boys; welcome also to new members of the faculty and staff. Also, welcome, and welcome back to the parents and families of the boys. You are part of the Saint Thomas family through your sons. And I thank you for the gift of your sons and their singing in our Choir.
What you see and hear this morning is the fresh start of our full Choir of Men and Boys who form a crucial part of our stated mission. The mission of Saint Thomas is “to worship, love and serve our Lord Jesus Christ through the Anglican tradition and our unique choral heritage.” This is a clearly defined, substantial enterprise, and it is no small endeavor to carry it out here on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street.
Jesus in today’s Gospel from Saint Luke has words to take to heart when we think of our beloved church and choir school in the context of this mission. He says, Count the cost of being my disciple. It means shouldering one’s own cross and following me, says the Lord. Then he uses two examples, one of a builder building a tower; the other of a king going to war.
The wise builder does not simply start building. He first sits down and figures out what it will take. He counts the cost. He makes sure he has enough material, energy, skill, knowledge and wherewithal to build the tower. Even if he decides not to build, this is better than starting, laying a foundation for example, and abandoning the work – which then becomes a spectacle of folly and waste.
Similarly, the wise king, before going out to face an adversary in war, takes counsel to see what it will take to counter and defeat his enemy. If he has the means to win, and his adversary threatens, he may meet him and must fight to win. Otherwise, he had better ask terms of peace, which is far better than losing a war.
These are Jesus’ examples of sober realism in counting the cost. As for being his disciples, he tells us we must be prepared to renounce everything for it – in other words, to give everything to it, for there is nothing higher, not even the highest goods and loves in the world, not even family and friends.
We here at Saint Thomas are now counting the cost of what is required to sustain and advance our mission here. Scaffolding will be appearing this fall on the upper north clerestory; the start of a three-year project. All our glorious stained glass windows are aging and in need of restoration from many decades of weathering and big city dust and dirt. If we ignore them, they will eventually fall out; we would deserve the mockery of the foolish tower builder. Similarly, a bit further on, our Great Organ has reached a life crisis. Having taken a lot of time with expert consultants, our Organ Committee and Vestry have decided we must replace it with an instrument which more fully supports our choral tradition as well as thrills the hearer with power and flourishes. All this involves planning, fundraising, hard work, and long term effort. Like the king in the Lord’s example, we have a campaign on our hands, and we are moving to meet the challenge. As the months and seasons go by, you will be hearing more on this. But it is an honor to be called on to rise to such an occasion on behalf of Saint Thomas. Earlier generations did. Now it falls to us.
Now let me return to our choirboys and speak to them. Boys, you give us the gift of your singing. But here at Saint Thomas you receive a gift, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. When you first arrive here, you may not yet realize what a gift this is; but it will grow on you. You enter into a tradition that goes back over a thousand years, singing the praises of God with voices that will last only a few short years before you mature into young men. But for those few years your voices will sing sacred music, ancient and modern, written by great composers. This sacred music honors the majesty of God. It sets sacred texts to flight using the finest instrument in the world, the human voice. In your case, this voice is the boy treble, flowering for a few years at the crown of your young lives. You are trained by one of the true masters of Anglican choral music, in a wonderful school setting, and in this glorious temple of Jesus Christ. By the time you leave us, you have a much fuller, even poignant, appreciation of what you have received here. Each year, we hear our graduating eighth graders bear witness to this truth.
As you sing, we also want you to learn. You will get a good all-round education. You will be in an environment that believes and teaches the virtues of respect, good manners, kindness, generosity, honesty, mercy. You will learn why such words as Please and Thank-you are not just words but signs that we respect the dignity of every human being, including the person in front of us right now. You will hear the name of God and of his Son Jesus Christ (the names whose glory you sing) used with reality. We say prayers and we do pray; we know the Lord is a presence and a force to be appealed to and reckoned with. We want you to catch that spirit yourselves and take it with you all through life.
This brings me back once more to the Gospel. Although what you undergo here is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience, it is also something you can take with you. It is portable for life and beyond. Your treble voices will change (we hope you keep on singing as men, as altos, tenors, and basses, maybe even countertenors), but what you have learned here serves well for what lies ahead of you in life. What we see and hear at Saint Thomas is not just a bit of religious aesthetics, here and now; it is a glimpse of the beauty of the holiness of God, who is with us always and everywhere. This is something to be believed, grasped for dear life, and practiced. Jesus not only told us to count the cost of following him; he also said, similarly, that he who perseveres, who endures, to the end shall be saved; shall win the prize of life.
So welcome and welcome back, choirboys and all the rest of us, as we begin another season with our mission in full swing. May we all rise to the challenges of this time, and of all the times, which God presents us in his good providence.
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
