Day: August 17, 2009

Sermons

Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity, 8:00am service

“Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”

“No-one can say Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit”. This is one of the earliest credal statements from within the Scriptures themselves. It is a Trinitarian statement really, the nucleus of what we proclaim more fully in the great Catholic Creeds of the Church which come out of the Scriptures – out of such words as these – and which return us to the Scriptures within a way of understanding. And such clarifying proclamations give shape to our lives in grace. “Concerning spiritual gifts, … I would not have you ignorant”, says St. Paul. “Now there are diversities of gifts…” and he goes on to list some of them. But they are gifts which arise out of this fundamental proclamation – out of what we have been given to say about God by God himself. “No one can say Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit”.

The diversity of gifts belongs to our life with God in the communion of God – the Trinity. The different gifts are about his grace in our lives. To esteem them is to honour him. This is something communicated to us by the grace of God with us – Jesus Christ – God’s Word and Son. To confess Jesus as Lord acknowledges him as “I am who I am”, as God with us, God in the very flesh of our humanity, God made man. Only so can he be Lord. In Jesus the Old Testament mystery of God’s name – “I am who I am” – is opened to view and explicated in terms of the spiritual relation of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. God’s relation to us radically depends upon his self-relation, upon the communion of God with God in God, the communion of the Trinity.

This is the burden of our proclamation in which we are privileged to participate. For if we cannot proclaim with clarity the God of our salvation, then we cannot participate with charity in the divine life which has been opened to view through the sacrifice of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit.

Something of this underlies the strong scene in today’s Gospel with St. Luke’s account of Christ’s cleansing the temple. What is it about really, except a recalling of the true purpose of the Temple, a reminder to us of the true purpose of this holy place? This is to be the place where we attend to the high things of God, to the things which Jesus wants us to know. This is to be a place of teaching. This is to be a place of our abiding in the love of God revealed and proclaimed.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity, 10:30am service

“Because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation”

“Concerning spiritual gifts, … I would not have you ignorant,” St. Paul tells us in this morning’s epistle. But we are ignorant of spiritual gifts and know not the time of God’s visitation upon us. The consequence is suffering and destruction, enemies that surround us and seek our hurt, the harm of families and home for “they shall not leave one stone upon another.” Wow.

It is not a pretty picture. And Jesus weeps over Jerusalem because of our ignorance of spiritual matters that, in one way or another, have always to do with the quality of our being with God, with the degree of our awareness about the presence of God in human lives and in the life of the world. When we forget or ignore that, then we leave ourselves open to suffering and destruction and death, he is suggesting.

Sometimes this gospel story is taken as a prophecy about the Fall of Jerusalem in 70AD at the hands of Titus who, subsequently, became Emperor. Sometimes, too, it is taken as an indication that the Gospel, in this case, The Gospel According to St. Luke, was written after the Roman occupation and destruction of the Temple. Perhaps. But such speculations are entirely secondary to the spiritual intention of the passage, I think. It is, after all, a recurring theme in the Old Testament. Time and time again, Israel is defeated and destroyed politically but the prophets keep on calling attention to the spiritual conditions of Israel herself rather than just to point at enemies “out there.” The problems are profoundly within. The problems are fundamentally spiritual.

Jesus weeps and accuses us of our ignorance. Then he enters the Temple, “casting out them that sold therein and them that bought”, pointing out, in strong and graphic language, that the holy place has been misused. It is exists as “a house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.” What is the point?

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