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

admin | 21 October 2012

“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Where are our hearts? What do we want, really and truly? Do we want what is really and truly to be wanted? Do we know what that might be?

We do and we don’t. What is really and truly to be wanted is the “Father’s good pleasure” bestowed through the good virtue of the Mother: the good pleasure of our heavenly Father; the good virtue of Mother Church. But we are all caught, in one way or another, in the ambiguity of our desiring.

There is our wanting, first, this thing and, then, that thing, each with an absolute desire, only to discover that no one thing can really satisfy. “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee,” Augustine said long ago, or as Mick Jagger put it somewhat more recently, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” The double negative is simply part of the double-sidedness of our desiring. We don’t know what we want – is it this or is it that? – because we don’t know what is really and truly to be wanted. Jesus calls this condition of ours, “anxiety”– at least that is the modern English word, at least since the seventeenth century for the state of our distractedness. We are distracted because we are literally “divided in our minds.” How much more so in what Alan Jacobs has called “the age of distraction”?

It is a powerful image really. Our eyes flit quickly from one object to another unable to focus on any one thing. We are distracted and often beside ourselves; in short, divided in our souls. Against this, Jesus, in Luke’s account, would gently recall us to ourselves. He would recall us to what is really and truly to be wanted in which everything else must find its place. He gently but firmly reminds us of the Providence of God, of God’s providential care for us. God sees all things in his single-minded love for us.

“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” and in relation to that everything else is as nothing worth, on the one hand, and on the other hand, everything finds its real worth in God’s Providence. The kingdom is about God’s good will towards us, about what he wants for us and about what he provides for us. The Mind of Providence is written out for us to read in Jesus Christ. In him, in his words and deeds, in the death and resurrection of the Father’s Son and Word, we see the radical meaning of God’s love for us.

But will we read and will we listen? That is the challenge. The challenge of the Gospel to each and every age is to enter into the understanding of the words proclaimed. The challenge is the struggle to understand the Mind of Providence written out for us to read in the Word of God. How will we read if the book is closed and how will we listen if we aren’t present for the reading or if we close our ears to what is given to be proclaimed?

Can we hear, for instance, the powerful paean of praise to domestic virtue set forth in The Book of Proverbs (ch. 31: 10-end) without dismissing it out of hand as somehow patronising and patriarchal? It isn’t, though no doubt some will think differently. It is what happens, it seems to me, when a sociological perspective eclipses a theological and moral understanding.

But just consider the qualities of women, of wives and of mothers that are celebrated here: such things as trustworthiness, goodness, leadership and direction, self-sacrificing labour and foresight, practical and philosophical wisdom, charity and compassion. She is, literally, one might say, the CEO of the household and the community. She is not known on account of her husband but her husband on account of her! “Strength and dignity are her clothing … She opens her mouth with wisdom and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.” It is just such a strong counter to our contemporary scenes of domestic violence and disorder. She is called blessed by her children and is praised by her husband.

Yet all the qualities of this proverbial ‘Mother in Israel’ ultimately come down to one essential thing. At the heart of this domestic virtue is the fear of the Lord. “A woman who fears the Lord” – holds God in awe, in wonder and in respect – “is to be praised.” The fear of the Lord is the single-minded attention to the Providence of God within which each and every activity finds its proper place and its truth.

We want what is best for our children. We don’t always know what that is or how it is to be achieved. It belongs to the challenge of the Gospel in the struggle of our lives as parents, as a community, and as a church. We are reminded that we are all the children of God’s Kingdom. It is his good will to give us the kingdom. We are all Christ’s “little flock” to whom he says “fear not.”

The kingdom is given to us through the total and absolute love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. He has come “to do the will of him who sent him.” He has come to do the Father’s will. He seeks our good. He writes that will in his body which has born all the confusions and anxieties, all the sins and wickedness, of our hearts and world. He gives us the kingdom through his single-minded attention to the Father’s will. It means his death and resurrection, his death and resurrection for us.

The Church is that good mother in whom we are brought to birth, nourished, and brought up in the Father’s good pleasure – if we listen and hear the Father’s Son and Word and let that Word live in us. It is the constant meaning of our gathering here Sunday after Sunday, week in and week out, day by day. This is our challenge and our struggle. It is also our freedom and our salvation. We can, in the long end of the day, only want and only have what God wants and gives to us; all else is nothing worth.