by CCW | 18 September 2016 15:00
What’s this? Upward mobility for Christians? Ambition or presumption? Neither. It’s really about the hope of transformation. It is really about our Christian vocation. We are called to something more that counters all the fearful fatalisms of our world and day as well as the endless narcissisms of our self-obsessions. It signals ever so profoundly the necessary condition of soul for the realization of God’s will and purpose for our lives. The necessary condition is humility. “He that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”
The operative words in the Gospel reading are “friend” and “go up higher”. The Epistle from Ephesians reminds us of our baptismal identity and vocation; “walk[ing] worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called”, for “ye are called in one hope of your calling” for there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” In our baptisms we have been called up higher but only through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; such is the heart of baptism. We are identified with Jesus in his free-willing identity and sacrifice for us. We live from him and with him in the Holy Eucharist, the spiritual and sacramental means of his continuing presence with us in our lives.
Jesus calls us “friends”. He does so not merely by way of a parable but also more directly. He calls us friends at the height of his passion, on the night of our betrayal. God makes us his friends when we were his enemies! This turns the ancient world on its head. It turns our world on its head. We live in a hopeless and fearful world. Here is the antidote to our hopelessness and fear. It challenges us to redeem us. It calls us up but only by our being lifted up by him and in him.
This week past marked the celebration of Holy Cross[1]. It commemorates the 4th century discovery (or invention!) of the Holy Cross and/or the exaltation of the Holy Cross by Empress Helena of Constantinople. But how would one know whether this piece of wood or that piece of wood was the very wood upon which Christ was crucified? One really can’t which is not to say that the crucifixion is a fiction; quite the opposite. But I can’t think of the Feast of Holy Cross without thinking of Jesus’ phrase in John’s Gospel, “And I, if I be lifted up will draw all men unto me.” We are lifted up in the lifting up of Christ on the cross. What does this mean? John is using a reference from The Book of Numbers about the wanderings of Israel in the wilderness when the people of Israel complained bitterly about the journey and their hardships, complaining about the provisions that God has made for them, complaining about the lessons which actually belong to their spiritual freedom.
So God punishes them by sending serpents that bite and kill them. Such is tough love, no doubt; the school of hard knocks, to be sure. In their affliction and suffering, they cry out to Moses to intercede to God for them. He does and is bidden to make a bronze serpent which, when any of them look upon it in their affliction, they are healed and saved. The bronze serpent is lifted up before them. They have to look upon it in order to be saved. An intriguing image and stratagem. They have to contemplate the reality of their sin made objective before them. And so do we.
The same reality obtains to the cross and to our life in Christ. We are bidden to look up and be lifted up. In Christ crucified we behold our sin made objective before us. It challenges us and has the power to change us.
We are called out of ourselves and we are called to God. Only in God can we contemplate the reality of sin. Only the goodness of God makes that even remotely possible. We are called to the service of God in our life together with one another in the body of Christ.
St. Paul reminds us of the qualities of that vocation, about how we should seek to be, about how we should act: “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”. These qualities arise from the doctrine which has been given to us and without which these qualities cannot live in us. “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all and in you all.”
It is a high calling, to be sure. And utterly impossible, except for this. The means whereby it is accomplished in us is the same as what has been shown to us. Jesus himself is the teaching. He is what he says. In other words, it is grace – what comes from God to us. Grace goes before us and after us. Our grace-ordered lives are about the teaching of Christ living in us, without which we cannot “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called”.
“Friend, go up higher” is not our presumption but our calling. Christ has come to where we are but not to leave us where we are. He wants something better for us. He has come to us and we find our vocation in him, in what he says to us and in what he does for us. Our vocation is simply about the quality of our being with him, in our being lifted up by him who is lifted up for us.
That quality of being is not something static. It is dynamic and alive, charged, after all, with the presence of God. The awareness of God in our lives makes all the difference. Awakened to that, we can only be set in motion, in sacrifice and service, in prayer and praise. “Friend, go up higher” signals to us that there is always more and never less with God.
But there is a condition. The condition is humility which really means our openness to the reality of God, individually and collectively. Without that openness to the reality of God, we are trapped in the presumption of ourselves. In putting ourselves ahead of one another, we also put ourselves ahead of God. The God who is the afterthought in our lives is the God who is dead to us because we are dead to him. We forget that the grace of God is the whole premise of our existence: “it is he that hath made us,” as the Psalmist puts it, “and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” In a way, this gospel story would remind us of who we are and what we are called to be by way of a patient, prayerful watchfulness and an acting upon what we see and hear in God’s word. This is the counter and the contrast to our self-presumption and our self-obsessions. The condition is humility.
We so easily get stuck in the various ruts of our lives and so easily trapped in our fears and worries. Our fearfulness is about ourselves. We lose sight of the grandeur of the mystery of God. We so easily forget the gospel of our transformation. God has come to us to raise us to where he is. This is the radical grace of the gospel. It is made visible and audible to us in our liturgy. Here we are called “friends” and here we are called “up higher”. But only through humility, the humility signaled in the very prayer before we come to the Sacrament, The Prayer of Humble Access, the very condition of our being in Christ and He in us.
We do not presume anything of ourselves but everything of the God who bids us go up higher, the one who in being lifted up on the cross draws us to himself in love, the one who says to us,
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Trinity 17, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/09/18/sermon-for-the-seventeenth-sunday-after-trinity-6/
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