Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity
“I have compassion on the multitude”
It must seem strange in the sultry heat of the quiet summer and in the lush richness of nature’s bounty in the beauty and peace of the valley, to hear about sin and death and about being in the wilderness with nothing to eat. Perhaps, such things merely confirm our current prejudices and biases about religion as something negative and threatening, judgmental and hateful.
To the contrary, it seems to me, these rich and wonderful lessons open out to us things that we need to hear and to hear in the context of the Eucharist, things which have to do with a larger, more complete and more honest view about human life. Ultimately, it is about life with God in Jesus Christ, something of lasting worth and meaning in which we participate here and now. To put it more simply, there is a spiritual and scriptural wisdom here which challenges the all-too-easy complacencies and certainties of our ordinary lives. The culture of full bellies and empty souls faces the deep and great question about what it means to be human. The spiritual and biblical view is that it has altogether to do with the dynamic of our life with God. This is wonderfully illustrated in the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for today.
“The free gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ,” St. Paul tells us. “I have compassion on the multitude,” Jesus says. These are the strong positives of our spiritual life that speak directly and profoundly to the human condition and to the primacy of thanksgiving “at all times and in all places,” as our liturgy puts it, emphasizing in a phrase the freest and truest aspect of redeemed humanity. They are profoundly suggestive of the dynamic of our spiritual life expressed sacramentally in terms of Baptism, on the one hand, and Communion, on the other hand, that capture the distinctive interplay between the theological themes of justification and sanctification; or more simply put, Christ for us and Christ in us. As Richard Hooker notes: “we receive Christ Jesus in baptism once as the first beginner, in the eucharist often as being by continual degrees the finisher of our life” (Lawes, Bk.V, ch. LVII), suggesting exactly how Christ is “Alpha and Omega,” something which even the architecture of our churches often reveals. You need only look up and marvel at the Alpha and Omega beams of Christ Church and of many other Maritime Churches in the Carpenter Gothic style. The idea belongs to a basic and universal or catholic Christian understanding. Again, as Hooker notes: “nevertheless touching Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, we may with consent of the whole Christian world conclude they are necessary, the one to initiate or begin, the other to consummate or make perfect our life in Christ” (Lawes, Bk.V, ch. LXVII).
