by CCW | 2 July 2017 15:17
“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][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.
If we were to imagine these parables visually, we might think of a triptych: three connected panels with the parable of the lost sheep and the lost coin depicted on the two outer panels and the parable of the lost or prodigal son in the centre panel. Why put it at the centre? Because that parable shows us the divine movement in us. The prodigal son, having wasted all his inheritance, “came to himself”. It is a confessional moment and a moment of conversion. “I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.” It is a profound moment of self-understanding and humility.
But, as a parable, it is told, as our reading of the first two of the parables makes clear, in the face of animosity and judgment, a judgement against Jesus for “receiving sinners and eating with them”. The parables are told to awaken us to the mercy and the goodness of God which is “greater than our hearts”, as we were told last week in John’s epistle reading, especially our hearts of condemnation. “If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” Something is required again of us, as 1 Peter reminds us. What is required of us is humility. “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God … for he careth for you.” The parables show us the nature of that divine care; the possibility of return lies in the one who turns to us, the one who first loved us. The initiative is God’s, not ours. At issue is our response to what God seeks and provides. The key note is rejoicing.
We see in all three parables the signature note of rejoicing. There is something more and something greater in being lost and then being found; something greater and more mystical about our return to fellowship and truth than simply our being finite creatures. In the strong and repeated note of rejoicing we learn what in some deep sense we must always have wanted – simply to rejoice. For in rejoicing we find ourselves in the company of redeemed creation, a company that is in God and with God through the superlative goodness of God.
As a church and a culture, we are, I fear, lost; lost to ourselves and lost to God. In turning God and religion into a commodity to be bought and sold, or in seeking some sort of practical benefit from religion, and demanding that God and religion be simply accountable to ourselves, we make God in our own image. Such is a reversal of truth; it is our atheism. Here in Luke’s Gospel, we are provided with a powerful picture of the divine love which seeks us when we are lost and gathers us back to himself in love and praise. In a way, too, it is the proper business of the Church to be that place of confessing love and the place of the constant conversion of souls to God, as the joining together in commemorative celebration of St. Peter and St. Paul equally suggests.
When we rejoice we are with God in his love for us and for his creation. Then we are the church, then we have have time for one another because we are with God and his Spirit guides our hearts and minds. We find ourselves in being found by God and in the divine delight for all that he has made and redeemed. We are recalled to who we are in the sight of God. It is the counter to the narcissisms of identity that so beset our world in the endless parade of ‘look at me, looking at you, looking at me’. The paradox of identity politics is that we lose ourselves and, yes, pride is our actual wilderness, the wilderness of our narcissism and our nihilism. We forget the great lesson of this Gospel – God’s will to reach out and find us and to gather us to himself in his infinite love and goodness. Our liturgy is always about our being gathered by God and with God into the life of God and with one another. The signal note of the liturgy is rejoicing. It is all and always God’s praise.
Fr. David Curry,
Trinity 3, 2017,
(In the Octave of SS. Peter & Paul)
Christ Church & St. Thomas’, Three-Mile Plains
[1][2] Actually it is “a parable” in three moments but is usually spoken of as three parables.
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/07/02/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-after-trinity-4/
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