A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. This is a special reading for this feast of Saint Ignatius of Antioch. Jesus said to his disciples, I solemnly assure you, unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it produces much fruit. The man who loves his life loses it.
While the man who hates his life in this world preserves it to life eternal. If anyone would serve me, let him follow me. Where I am, there will my servant also be. Anyone who serves me, the father will honor. And this is the gospel of the lord.
Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Everything we know about saving nations of Antioch, we know from his own personal letters that he wrote on route from Antioch in Syria, and you know where that is. On route to Rome, and you know where Rome is. And he didn't have a seven forty seven taking him over there.
He had a royal escort, 10 Roman soldiers, And he went in chains from Antioch all the way over to Rome. Because he had in some way, and I and it generally held voluntarily, willingly, eagerly, wanted to be a martyr. And so, whatever happened, he he he was condemned to be a a victim of wild beasts in the Arena over in Rome. Remember, this is all happening over in Syria and under Trajan, under the emperor Trajan. And so they they gave him a squad or ten ten Romans.
We know this because he calls them his 10 leopards. And they conduct him from Antioch, then through Asia Minor, up through Troas, Troy, then across and then from Troy, they shot by boat up to Philippi at Neapolis, then up to Philippi, then they went west to Rome. The trip from Philippi was about six weeks, we know that as they traveled. They had good roads remember. Now, our route, this bishop of Antioch was well treated by the Christian notice, Trajan dies in 01/17, a hundred and seventeen.
So we know that that Saint Ignatius martyrdom was somewhere before a hundred and seventeen. A probable date, who knows? It was about a hundred and ten. 01/2010, the very beginning of the second century of the Christian era. So this man is a very important witness to the early church.
He We have seven of his letters. He may have written more, but we have seven of them. All of course, is all in Greek. Greek was the common language, that whole Mediterranean Basin. So the Christians treated him kindly, and as he went from Christian community to Christian community, escorted by his 10 lepers leopards, why he wrote back these letters thanking them for their hospitality and then giving them a few words of fatherly advice.
Because even now, the church is in turmoil. Because the very people who came into the church became its worst enemies, which of course you that's exactly the way it is today. The church produces its own Judas'. It's always been that way. Anyway, this man then winds up in Rome and became a martyr.
Beyond this, everything else about him is fiction, and there's a lot of it. He, remember, is dead before a hundred and seventeen. Now, we're sitting here in Garrard Park in 1984. There wasn't very much known about the nuclear free area of Garrett Park in January. And yet when you pick up, some here have read these letters, at least excerpts from these letters.
And when you pick these up, you find yourself at home with them. Now yesterday, I told you about some of the saints we have. Well, here's another one. He's about as different, let us say, from mother Satan or saint or or saint Theresa of Avila or saint Theresa of Lisi or any other of these saints that you can imagine. And yet, he is one of us.
And our only prayer should be, are we one with him? Let me I can't read you the seven letters. Could But you you should And this is a translation not by a Catholic. Remember, the church fathers are very much cherished and worked on by especially by our high church Episcopalians and Lutherans. Now, for example, in this letter that he wrote to the Sermonians, here we have the first use of the word Catholic church.
Let me read you the sentence. He says, you should Notice his reference to the Eucharist. He says, you should regard that Eucharist as valid which is celebrated either by the bishop or by someone he authorizes. Where the bishop is present, there let the congregation gather. Just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic church.
Without the bishop supervision, no baptisms or love feast. Notice this. Notice this distinction between the Eucharist and the love feast. The Greek for that is agape. Some of these great brains, you know, try to tell us that these two things are the same.
Here's a man speaking from the beginning of the second century, and he says they are not the same. He says, no baptism or love feast are permitted on the that is without the bishop. On the other hand, whatever he approves pleases God as well. Now, the one thing that this man had a fight was docetism. Not donatism, but docetism, d o c e t I s m.
What do we mean by that? We mean something which we're having right today. That the physical body of Christ was just an appearance. See, I refer often to these to the spiritual elite. These people, we've had them all down the centuries.
We have them with us today, who somehow rather downgrade the physical, the matter. They can't believe that God became man and had a real body. They can't accept that the son of God died on a cross. They can't accept that he rose from the dead. I am talking about the present tense in October 1984, And I am talking about some so called theologians in who are still in the church.
They were just written up within a week. The idea we always have just recently, I was discussing something with a very sincere religious woman. And she says, doesn't make any difference to me whether Christ physically rose from the dead or whether he had a physical body. What matters is his victory over sin. That's hogwash.
Hogwash. It matters immensely whether Christ rose from the dead, physically. It matters immensely whether Christ had a body as good as mine or as bad as mine. It matters immensely whether Christ suffered on the cross. And then you come along with your spirit.
You see, it's elevated spirituality. They are not grubby. See, they are not down with the rest of us. These are you they have different names, gnostics and all kinds of names, but we've always had them with us. We have them right now.
I'm telling you, I'm not pulling I'm not fighting windmills at all. I mean within the Catholic church. And yet, one of the one of the points that Ignatius makes in one of these letters which I've just reread is this, the unity of the Catholic church and the reality, the actuality of Christ's incarnation, his virgin birth, his passion and death, and his resurrection from the tomb. I am not pulling those things at all. They are explicitly treated in the first century AD by this great man, Ignatius of Antioch, because these things were negated.
They were denied, and they were denied on the basis of a superior Christianity. And so it is today. Right now, I know people who can't accept the thought. They don't like the reference to blood in the mass. What do they make of the reference to blood in the New Testament?
They say that's so physical. Well, if anybody looks at the cross, I believe that's pretty physical. When old man Maximilian Kolbe plunges into that hung starvation bunker, That is pretty physical. Physical. What's wrong with the physical?
And if Christ doesn't have a true body, if he didn't have if he was just an appearance, I say it's hogwash. Or worse, there there are other words I could use. It'd be more like Luther would have used. So when we take what I want I I can't He well, let me read just another passage. Can't can't reject resist it.
Here, he's talking about the docetist. Now that don't let these words see, remember that Catholic church was Greek in the beginning, not Latin, Greek. So let's not and these words are very simple. Dosatis is the same as the word to seem. Doceo, dokine in Greek.
To seem, to appear. So that these people who maintain that the physical appearance of Christ was just a seeming thing, just an appearance, they were called docetists. See see how difficult this stuff is. So Saint Ignatius is is speaking to to the Sumerians. He says, the docetists hold aloof from the Eucharist and from services of prayer because they refuse to admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which in his goodness the father raised from the dead.
Does the do these words strike you as familiar? Yet this is denied today by so called Catholics. Consequently, those who wrangle and dispute God's gift face death. There would have they would have done much better to love and to share in Christ's resurrection. Resurrection.
The right thing to do then is to avoid such people, and to talk about them neither in private nor in public. Forget them. Forget them. Yet, these are the people who are quoted in the Washington Post. Rather, he says, pay attention to the prophets, the old testament, and above all to the good news, the gospel.
There we get a clear picture of the passion and see that the resurrection has really happened. And that translation isn't by a Roman Catholic. It's by an Episcopalian. And so today, we celebrate the feast of saving the nations of Atlanta. He couldn't wait to get to Rome to be a martyr.
He begged. He could have gotten out of it. But he begged the Romans in another letter to leave it alone. He wanted to become the wheat in the mouths of the beasts. That's the reason we have that reading today about the seed.
He couldn't wait to get to Rome to be a martyr. He was afraid that if anyone did anything to soften it, he would lose his courage. So he prayed and said, leave me alone and pray that I do quickly meet my savior Jesus Christ. Ignatius of Antioch dies about a hundred and ten AD. That's just about twenty or thirty years after the last after the gospels were written.
He asked us to believe firmly in Jesus Christ, son of a virgin, son of god, who suffered and died and rose from the dead physically. In the name of the father, the son, holy spirit. Amen.