Day: October 27, 2013

Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity, 2:00pm service for Atlantic Ministry of the Deaf

“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

A miracle story, to be sure. What do the miracles teach us? They teach us something about the nature of God and about the truth of our humanity. But there is something particularly special and important about this gospel story. It is taken from The Gospel according to St. John. There is an important connection between Word and Wisdom that is wonderfully illustrated in this Gospel.

It is a miracle of healing, and so not unlike any number of healing miracles, it might seem. But there is something special about this story and it is not that Jesus is reluctant to make house calls! John tells us that this was “the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judea into Galilee.” That begs the obvious question about the first sign. What was that? Not a healing miracle per se but the story of the turning of the water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, a miracle that points us to the meaning of the Incarnation and to the social joys of heaven which God seeks for us in and through the fellowship of the Church here and now as well as in heaven. This second sign teaches us something profound about the nature of God and about our humanity.

It teaches us that the Word of God is not confined to the limits of time and space. We are being reminded of the eternal Word of God which cannot be constrained to our experiences and expectations. A certain nobleman beseeches Jesus to come down to Capernaum, another town, to heal his son who was at the point of death. Like so many of us, we want God to do something for us immediately and directly. Here we are reminded of the greater truth of God’s Word and its truer movement in us. Jesus rebukes our presumption about wanting signs and wonders without which we will not believe. For we have forgotten, it seems, what The Letter to the Hebrews wisely teaches, namely, that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” There is a greater power and truth to God’s Word.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity

“I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven.”

There is something quite wonderful in the way in which Jesus teaches one of the great and most distinctive Christian ideas, the idea of forgiveness. He takes Peter’s argument about number, about how many times do you forgive someone who has offended you, to open us out to the infinite nature and quality of forgiveness. It is not merely a matter of substituting a greater number for a lesser number, 490 in place of 7, as if forgiveness could be quantified. No. Forgiveness is a divine quality given to us so as to be lived in us. Not to forgive is to deny the forgiveness that has been given to us. It can only result in cutting ourselves off from God because we have cut ourselves off from one another. Love is dead in us.

This is the point of the parable that Jesus tells. “And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him.” The servant who has been brought to account owes a great debt to his king and is forgiven his debt only to refuse to forgive the paltry debt that another owes him. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, he refuses to forgive his fellow-servant. We sense the outrage, the wrong, the violation of the ethical idea that you should do as others have done to you. Forgiveness received requires forgiveness to be shown towards others; and if it isn’t, then we are in a mess. There seems to be about this a certain quid pro quo, a kind of justice.

True enough but I think this hides the much more radical nature of forgiveness, its divine nature, as it were, and the seriousness of forgiveness. Forgiveness returns us to the will of God for our humanity. It is really about nothing less than the life of Christ in us. It is Paul’s prayer “that [our] love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement”. Forgiveness is nothing less than the love of God ruling in our hearts.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 28 October – 3 November

Monday, October 28th, SS. Simon & Jude
4:45-5:15pm World Religions/Inquirers’ Class, Rm. 206, King’s-Edgehill School
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion

Tuesday, October 29th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place

Thursday, October 31st
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Friday, November 1st, All Saints’
3:00pm Choral Evensong, 225th Anniversary Service of the Founding of King’s Collegiate School (now King’s-Edgehill)

Sunday, November 3rd, Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity (In the Octave of All Saints’)
8:00am Holy Communion (followed by Men’s Club Breakfast)
10:30am Holy Communion
4:00pm Choral Evensong – Christ Church

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, November 23rd
4:30-6:00pm Annual Parish Ham Supper

Friday, December 20th
7:00pm Christ Church Concert Series II: Capella Regalis presents “To Bethlehem with Kings”

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-Second Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

LORD, we beseech thee to keep thy house hold the Church in continual godliness; that through thy protection it may be free from all adversities, and devoutly given to serve thee in good works, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Philippians 1:3-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 18:21-35

Drost, The Unmerciful ServantArtwork: Willem Drost, The Unmerciful Servant, 1655. Oil on canvas, Wallace Collection, London.

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