Sermon for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity
“Our citizenship is in heaven”
The leaves lie scattered on the wind, the trees barren, and the fields desolate and empty. Grey November has descended upon us, dark and drear, it seems. And yet, in that time of year “when yellow leaves or none or few do hang/upon those boughs which shake against the cold”, we are recalled to something more than ourselves, our culture, and even our churches, which may seem to be but “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” We are recalled in the November greyness of nature’s death to our life in the spirit, at once in the great and defining spiritual festivals of All Saints’ and All Souls’ and in their secular after-effects in things like the Remembrance Day weekend, but equally and most importantly in the Scripture readings which grace this time of year and which speak profoundly and reflectively to our spiritual identity.
“How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?” Peter asks Jesus as we heard last Sunday and, then, in response, Jesus says “until seventy times seven” before proceeding with a parable which illustrates the immeasurable and incalculable nature of God’s merciful forgiveness and the willful folly of our humanity which negates his infinite forgiveness by refusing to forgive others. And, now, as if in a kind of complement, this Sunday we are reminded of “our citizenship in heaven” in contrast to our worldly and economic concerns. In each case, the whole matter turns on our sense of spiritual identity. Who are we in the sight of God?
Our buildings, too, stand as eloquent testaments to our spiritual identity. The year 2017 marks the 135th anniversary of the building of Christ Church within the longer history of the Parish going back to the 18th century. The year 2017 also marks the 140th anniversary of the building of Hensley Memorial Chapel at King’s-Edgehill School, now in its 229th year. These are strong markers of our heavenly citizenship and ones which stand as stern and stark reminders to what is so easily forgotten and overlooked if not altogether denied and scorned.
Perhaps no Gospel story speaks more directly to our contemporary confusions and uncertainties about identity than this one about the tribute-money. The key question is the one which Jesus raises in the context of animosity about identity. The Pharisees seek to “entangle him in his talk”, to trap him in his speech with a question about paying taxes to Caesar. The context is about Israel under Roman domination but it extends to each and every form of domination. To what extent are we defined not only by the powers that be but by the ideologies of our world and day which compromise, confine, and constrain us to the agendas of profit and tyranny however much we are their willing or unwilling slaves? At issue is really nothing less than what it means to be human. There is already the increasing recognition that “we are slaves to the algorithm,” the invisible ghosts in the machines that dominate the social media world. As Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world-wide web, warns, “the system is failing. The way ad revenue works with clickbait is not fulfilling the goal of helping humanity promote truth and democracy”. Others have called it “the weaponisation of social media,” again highlighting the idea of domination.
