by CCW | 10 June 2018 15:00
God invites us. “Come, for all things are now ready.” That is at once a privilege and a wonder. To what are we invited? To love imaged as a banquet but as signifying the real meaning of our lives. In the Christian understanding it is about our life in Christ. “Hereby we know love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” The love in which we abide is sacrificial love. That love is active and alive in seeking the Good, the goodness of God and that self-same goodness for one another.
Do we accept the invitation? Do we embrace the demands, indeed, the commands of the divine love in which is all our good? Well, that is the problem and the challenge. It is the problem of sin. “But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his heart against him: how dwelleth the love of God in him?” This is the problem of our indifference towards one another which separates us from the love of God, illustrated so powerfully for us in last Sunday’s parable, the parable of Lazarus and Dives. It is really all about what is alive in us.
Those lessons are again concentrated for us and developed more fully in this Sunday’s readings. The Epistle instructs but also convicts; the Gospel illustrates profoundly our refusals of the invitation to love and live yet emphasizes the divine commitment to our good. As such they are powerful persuasives to the truth of our lives in Christ.
The paradox is that we are commanded to love. This seems counter-intuitive. How can love be forced or coerced in us and still be love? It can’t. What we encounter is the absolute nature of God’s love as the truth for us. That love is constant and unconditional. It is not changed by our refusals; we are. We encounter simply what God seeks for us even in the face of our disorderly and distracted hearts. Yet “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” It is one of the great teaching insights into the nature of God opened out to us in John’s First Epistle, itself a veritable treatise on love as Trinity and our abiding in that love. “And this is his commandment, That we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment.” Notice the double emphasis on commandment. What does it mean? Simply that we should want what God wants for us.
We live in a sceptical and confused world, seduced by our own powers and desires and destroyed by them. We are at once too much with ourselves and unaware of ourselves. We cannot think God because we are consumed by our own immediate concerns and interests. The idea of God itself is unthinkable because of the ways in which our parody of divine power continues to dominate our imaginations and our world. It is really all a kind of idolatry in which we put ourselves and our interests in the place of God and his will. We do this all the while depending utterly upon God for absolutely everything that we do, and have, and are. This is the irony, the paradox, the contradiction, if you will, that we confront in ourselves, if only we would.
The Gospel highlights two things: our paltry excuses and the reality of God’s will. “Come ye hither All,” George Herbert says in a poem called The Invitation which is a commentary on this Gospel parable. For “where is All,” meaning God, “there All,” meaning our humanity, “should be.” Such is a wonderful insight into the teaching. God is “that All which always is all everywhere” (Donne, The Annunciation), but where are we?
In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted,
Nor tender feelings to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone.
Shakespeare’s love sonnet (#141) suggests something of our problem. We are not invited to “any sensual feast … alone” but to the spiritual and intellectual banquet of our humanity at one with God, “that All which always is all everywhere.” But if we are turned simply to the ground, simply to the sensual and the physical, to our worldly concerns as pointed out in the Gospel parable, then we are empty of the love which is greater than us in which we find our highest good.
This is the constant problem amplified by the presumptions of our technocratic culture. There is more to what it means to be human than simply the sensual and the physical and our endless manipulations of ourselves and our world. We are more though not less than our worldly interests and concerns for property and pleasure; more than our pretensions to power and dominance over nature and ourselves. It is not that our worldly lives in our concerns for property and for our relationships do not matter. They do but only as grounded not in the ground but in God. The story of Christ is about the redemption of the world and our humanity by drawing us into his perfecting love in which the sensual and the material find their true meaning because they are returned to the principle upon which all things depend. The opposition between the sensual and the intellectual is a false one since the former depends entirely upon the latter. But to learn this means to free ourselves from our own obsessions and presumptions.
That can only happen if we are open to what God teaches and to what human experience, too, shows us; namely, the limits of ourselves, even the follies and the foolishness of ourselves in ourselves. God wants us to respond willingly to his invitation for God is and will be all in all, “that my house may be filled,” as the parable puts it. To refuse the invitation is to refuse the love that made us, the love in whom alone we live and love, if ever we will.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 2, 2018
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/06/10/sermon-for-the-second-sunday-after-trinity-9/
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