Christ our Anchor Anglican Mission

Welcome to AnchorCast, a weekly podcast of homilies and sermons from Christ our Anchor Anglican Mission in Nashville, Tennessee.

Let us pray.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.

Amen.

So over the last several months, I’ve been reading a really great book by this German philosopher and theologian, Roman Catholic, called Joseph Pieper.

And the book is on the cardinal virtues.

Now, I must admit, I almost looked it up in writing this, but I was kind of afraid to, so I didn’t.

I’ve been reading this for a very long time.

I’m afraid to see how long I’ve been reading it.

It’s been slow going, but it’s been really good, and kind of getting back my schedule in the new year, back to reading.

I’ve really been reading a good bit of it here in the last few days.

And as I was thinking about this new season we’ve entered in with Epiphany, that book, some stuff early in the book that I read months ago kind of came to mind.

So just as a quick brush up, the four cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.

And in the book, I’ve just finished the section on justice, and it’s amazing kind of what Pieper has to say about that.

But what really hooked me on the book is how the author engages with the idea of prudence.

So before reading this book, I probably would have defined prudence as simply just wisdom.

So doing smart, clever, and wise things, being slow to act, observant.

And of course, all of these things are true, but what I really love about what Pieper’s doing is he is one Roman Catholic and an Aquinas scholar, so he takes things a little further by bringing the church then into the conversation with the virtue.

And so what St.

Thomas has to say about prudence when he engages it, which he does quite a bit in his writing, Thomas defines prudence as reason perfected in the cognition of truth, which is like a really meaty phrase that’s kind of difficult to interpret.

But what that means, Pieper says, is that the way Thomas looks at it through the lens of a church is that prudence is a regard for an openness to reality, and it’s an acceptance of reality.

So that means that being prudent and things which are prudent are actually just things that are keeping with the reality, with truth as it really is.

So how that relates to epiphany is that in this season, we are reflecting on the many ways that God revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ.

And this really, really relates to what Pieper and Thomas have to say about prudence and accepting and living into reality, because in our baptisms, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are made new creatures.

And so for the first time in our lives, we are now moving towards our full, true humanity as God designed it, and reborn some of that haze from our eyes is gone, and we can start to see reality as it truly is.

Now of course, sometimes that reality isn’t what we’d like it to be.

Accepting the true state of the world and the depth of sin isn’t necessarily pretty to look at, and it’s not for the faint of heart.

But living into life of virtue, which is another way of saying living into a life of holiness and striving to be closer to God, means that we need to work towards being prudent.

We are to strive to live in the world as it is, as it truly is, as the reality, and not as we’d like to pretend it would be.

So I’m thinking around this time of the year is usually when many people are already disappointed and depressed because they’ve once again failed at their New Year’s resolutions.

And the truth in that is, is that they weren’t very prudent when they established them.

They were setting goals for a person who didn’t really exist, and they were kind of forcing themselves to believe a lie.

Now of course if we kind of leave things here in this surface level of what reality is, it would be pretty depressing.

You know, of course, our glowing screens are showing us lies constantly, and the flashy, clean, and new world that surrounds us with the shops and the stores and the lights are of course a facade, right?

They’re a big lie, but behind them it’s patching over deep pain and suffering.

But thanks be to God, the true reality of the world goes deeper than what is hidden behind these facades we’ve built.

Behind the reality we see with our eyes out on the streets, an even greater reality is breaking through.

And that is that Christ sits enthroned on high, our sins are forgiven, and that the new creation will come.

And better yet, even with our physical eyes, we can already see the true reality won by Christ breaking in.

We can see people healed, we see relationships restored, we see that the hungry are fed, the downtrodden are lifted up.

Even sometimes, evil and selfish men will unexpectedly have moments of mercy and grace.

So I think especially in this epiphany season, as we’re looking to Christ revealing himself to us, to the Jews, to the Gentiles, we need to cultivate prudence as St.

Thomas saw it.

We need to confront the lies that we tell ourselves about reality, and we need to try to see things as they really are, see things through God’s eyes and not our eyes.

We need to look to the revelation of Jesus, and we need to stand firm in his promises and the hope that he alone brings.

We need to release ourselves to think and act as a man who lives in Jesus' world.

So we need to learn to be generous, to be just, to be kind, to be loving, because we know that the true reality of things, even though what we sometimes see before us is scarcity, needing to hoard things for ourselves, needing to defend and protect ourselves.

The true reality, the prudent way to live, is to live justly and loving and generously and merciful, because we know Christ has conquered all of these things and allows us to live into that life.

So God has freed us from being slaves to the lie, so let us take this time to reflect the light that lightens the Gentiles, as the canticles say, to the glory of God.

Amen.

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