Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

admin | 26 March 2017

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

March has been brutal, hardly a picnic. And as for there being “much grass in the place,” it certainly hasn’t been here unless in the Cannabis shops, legal or otherwise, or perhaps the Prime Minister’s Office. One way to escape the madness of March, perhaps, particlularly if you don’t like basketball. “Surely the people is grass,” withering away in the cold winds of March. Yet in contrast to the miseries of March we have these wonderful lessons which strengthen and refresh the soul in the things of God.

Our text speaks profoundly and eloquently about the nature of grace and about the meaning of our lives in faith. The gathering up of the fragments, κλασματα, literally, the broken pieces left over from the picnic in the wilderness with Jesus, signals the nature of redemption itself, the gathering up of the broken fragments of our lives, especially, it seems to me in our broken world and in the realization of our own brokenness. The gathering is about the coming together, literally, a συναγωγη, of our wounded and broken humanity in the wilderness of the world. But a gathering to what end? That nothing be lost. Such is the picture of redemption.

The gathering of the broken fragments of our lives is about our being gathered to God. Such are the Lenten mercies of Christ on this day variously known as “Mothering Sunday”, because of the Epistle reading from Galatians which identifies Jerusalem as “the mother of us all.” The nurturing, caring mother is the image of the Church that nurtures and cares for us with the things of heaven. It is also “Refreshment Sunday”, because of the Gospel reading from John about the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness and the further provision for us in “the gathering up of the fragments that remain.” And finally, it is “Laetare Sunday”, because the Introit psalm for the day at Holy Communion is Psalm 122, which begins “Laetatus sum”, “I was glad when they said unto me, ‘We will go unto the house of the Lord.’” That psalm belongs to what are called The Psalms of Ascent, the songs of the going up, the pilgrimage, to Jerusalem. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says in the Gospel for Quinquagesima Sunday just at the outset of Lent.

In the Christian understanding, Jerusalem has become less a physical entity, less a geographical city, and more the image of our spiritual homeland, more the city of God, in which the gathering up of our humanity finds its freedom and its fulfillment in God as a gathering, a συναγωγη, a synagogue, if you will, the place of being with one another in our being with God.

All of these terms of reference for this day, “Mothering Sunday”, “Refreshment Sunday”, “Laetare Sunday”, help us to understand the nature of redemption and the nature of our Christian pilgrimage. It is to God and it is with God. It is about our being gathered to God and by God and it is about our gathering up all the broken bits and pieces of our lives to God. How? In prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament, in service and sacrifice. Such is the litany of our life in Christ.

This gathering is profoundly intellectual and spiritual even as it speaks to our actual experiences. The Litany provides us with a way of thinking about this aspect of the gathering up of all things to God. It is really about the order and form of prayer. The earliest part of the Liturgy to be translated into English, it offers at once an instruction in prayer and the pattern of prayer itself. I encourage you to pray the Litany at some point this week in the quiet of your souls. That is your spiritual homework! It is found on page 30 of the Prayer Book in case you had forgotten.

The Litany begins with the principle of the συναγωγη, the gathering of God in himself, the gathering that is the Holy and Blessed Trinity. Our prayers are placed before the mercy of God as Trinity, God in the fullness of his revealed identity. What immediately follows are petitions which seek God’s delivering us from all that would keep us from that community of spirit, asking God to “remember not our offences” but to “spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood”, explicitly recalling the passion of Christ and its meaning for us in our lives, and then proceeding to identity those things from which we need to be delivered: “from all evil and mischief”, etc.; “from all blindness of heart”, etc.; “from all uncleanness in thought, word and deed”, etc.; “from lightning and tempest”, etc.; “from all sedition, conspiracy, rebellion” – all things belonging to the realm of the political that destroy the gathering. The Litany then focuses on the things that destroy the spiritual gathering, the Church; “from all false doctrine, heresy, and schism; from hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word and Commandment, Good Lord deliver us.” There is an order and a logic to these petitions both in each section and in the sequencing of them.

What follows is equally remarkable. In a way, the pattern here reflects the baptismal liturgy where the renunciations, saying ‘no’ to the things which separate us from God, are followed by the affirmations of the things which gather us to God, namely, the Apostles’ Creed. In the Litany, having just prayed for all the things which separate us from God and from the community of spirit, we literally pray the Creed, going through the doctrinal moments in the life of Christ as being the work of our salvation in Christ and as connecting us with Christ in his identity with us through his Incarnation, the ordo salutis, the order of salvation, laid out in the Creed.

What then follows is a series of petitions pertaining to the Church Universal: for the Queen, understood as having a holy office in governing a Christian commonwealth, anointed, as it were; for the particular offices within the Church, understood here in the tradition of Bishops, Priests and Deacons; the peoples of “the nation and the commonwealth”; and for those who hold public office in the civil realm, “the judges and magistrates”; and for the protectors of the body politic, the armed forces; before proceeding to the various needs belonging to the life of the community in all of its specific moments, ranging from the need for “unity, peace and concord” in the community as a whole to the specific petitions for various peoples and situations, ending profoundly and wonderfully with petitions, not only for our being provided with “the kindly fruits of the earth”, but for “the forgiveness of our enemies” and for our “true repentance” and commitment to God by the grace of the Holy Spirit in his Holy Word. The Litany concludes by calling upon the “Son of God” through whom we enter into the gathering, the συναγωγη, of the Trinity, and by grace pray the prayer which Christ taught us and gave to us, the Our Father.

What we have in the Litany is a complete gathering to God of everything that belongs to the broken fragments of our lives and our world. It is a kind of intellection, an orderly gathering of what we should and must pray for and in what way, namely, through the mercies of Christ in the work of the redemption of our humanity.

This, too, is our refreshment. This, too, is our joy. For this, too, is all part and parcel of Mother Church who would feed us and nurture us with the things of heaven, the food of Jerusalem above, sacramentally in the body broken and the blood out-poured, but also in the Word proclaimed and in the prayers of Christ’s broken and sin-wounded people who seek his redemption. And it is all our comfort and joy, because through the gathering we are reminded of the fundamental nature of the Christian pilgrimage. It is the pilgrimage of love and it is a divine comedy because it seeks not the loss and destruction of our humanity but its restoration and perfection by the completeness of the gathering in which nothing is to be lost.

The only tragedy, and perhaps the tragedy of our Church and culture is our refusal of the mercy and truth of what is here set before us. For then we are empty when he would have us full; lost when he would have us found in his love.