Sermon for the Third Sunday after Trinity
Rejoice with me.
“I must have always wanted to rejoice”, Hagar Shipley Currie (no relation), a ninety year old lady says in Margaret Laurence’s Canadian classic novel, The Stone Angel. She is dying and yet in the days and weeks leading to her death, she is beginning to come to a better understanding of who she truly is. It is a kind of confessional moment, a conversion of the understanding. “Pride was my wilderness”, she realizes. She has recognized that she has been like the literal stone angel, a monument erected in memory of her mother but as an expression of the pride of her father in the cemetery in fictional Manawaka, Manitoba. The angel is literally doubly blind; as stone it literally cannot see and its eyes as carved do not even convey the illusion of sight.
Hagar comes to realize that she, too, has been doubly blind; blind about herself and about the needs of others. She was lost in the wilderness of pride but now is found. The catalyst for this self-discovery was the verse of the familiar hymn, All People That on Earth Do Dwell, Rev’d William Kethe’s sixteenth century paraphrase of Psalm 100. The melody and words were composed and written within ten years of each other. The tune, usually attributed to the French composer Louis Bourgeois, first appears in the 1551 edition of the Genevan Psalter; the words may have been composed by Kethe, himself a Scot, while in exile in Europe at the same time. The first verse provides the moment of self-understanding for Hagar.
All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him gladly serve, his praise forth tell,
Come ye before him, and rejoice.
The fifteenth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel tells three interrelated parables, the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, which we heard this morning and the lost or prodigal son.[1] In each case, the parables end on the strong note of rejoicing, signifying the greater nature of the return to wholeness and completeness, to family and community, to self and God. What makes the return possible is the point presented in the first two parables where what is lost is found because, and only because, of the movement of God towards us imaged in terms of the shepherd leaving the ninety and nine sheep and seeking out the one lost sheep and the woman seeking diligently for the one lost coin. We are the one lost sheep and the one lost coin. The principle of return is emphatically and completely God. Neither the sheep nor the coin have any power of movement in and of themselves.
