Sermon for Sexagesima
“The seed is the word of God”
Sometimes it is hard to know about what to preach given the parade of events that appear each day and each week, events that cry out sometimes to be addressed. I don’t pretend to have the answers but there are the questions. What to make, for instance, of President Obama’s gratuitous swipe at Christianity in an attempt to absolve Islam of the latest fundamentalist atrocity committed by the militant ISIS in burning alive a Jordanian pilot? Or what to make of the Supreme Court’s decision about assisted suicide? As Fr. Raymond De Souza observes, there are questions here about whether Canada has abandoned the legal principle that every life is a good to be protected and has embraced the idea that suicide is a social good and that the law no longer upholds the particular obligation to protect the weak and the vulnerable. These are serious questions. As Rex Murphy notes, the President’s swipe at Christianity is a straw man argument, actually, “the logical equivalent of an entire thatched roof of those stuffed puppets,” as he puts it in his own inimitable way.
So much to think about. But how? Ultimately, through the optic of the Scriptures doctrinally understood that challenge us about our humanity in relation to God. And so it seems best to focus on the readings for Sexagesima that encourage us to be “the good ground” namely, those that “in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience”. Perhaps, that is what best speaks to our contemporary concerns. It is about finding a way to think through the confusions that beset us. It means, at the very least, our patient attentiveness to God’s Word proclaimed and celebrated.
The ‘Gesima Sundays’ mark the transition from learning to living, a turn to the practice of the virtues as transformed by divine love to become the means of our participation in Christ’s work of human redemption. That work is the project of Lent, the pilgrimage of love that brings us to “the book of love opened out for us to read” (Lancelot Andrewes) on the cross of Good Friday. Already we are being turned towards Holy Week and Easter.
Today the virtues of courage and prudence are set before us in the Epistle and Gospel respectively. This focus on the classical virtues as transformed by divine love to become forms of love locates the ‘Gesima Sundays’ within a larger tradition of ethical thinking. They connect to the great ethical turn in philosophy by Socrates via Plato and to the idea of philosophy as something lived, the idea of the good life.
