Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity
“And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him”
It is a poignant and touching story that speaks to the fears and the experiences of countless parents down throughout the ages. It is a story about a father’s concern for his son who is said to be “at the point of death.” The father is described as “a certain nobleman.” Clearly status and wealth are of no use in the face of death. “What helpes honour or worlde’s bliss”, a fifteenth century English medieval lyric puts it about the fact of mortality. “Death is to man the final way.”
And yet, as a 14th century tutor at Oxford wonderfully tells his students,“live each day as if you are to die tomorrow; study as if you are to live forever.” To study is to pay attention to words and the power of words, and, most especially, here, to the word of Christ.
We forget that we can be profoundly touched by words. Words can make or break our day, raise us up or put us down. How and what we think and say to one another is important. It is important to our spiritual health especially we might say.
Today’s epistle reading from Ephesians abounds with military imagery but in an entirely spiritual context, the idea of a spiritual struggle, the cosmic struggle between good and evil which is not about “wrestling against flesh and blood” but something much more serious:“against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” This must not be misconstrued as gnostic dualism – dividing the world into them and us in which we demonize the other and pretend that we are the good. Such conflict narratives only contribute to the forms of spiritual wickedness that Paul is highlighting.
There is a struggle, to be sure, but the struggle is always first and foremost in us. It is the struggle to be defined by the good, by God’s Word and truth and not by “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” More than thirty years ago, the great English doyenne of mystery novels, Dame P.D. James, wrote a wonderful novel with the title “Devices and Desires.” Against the strong recommendation of her editors, she refused to provide an explanation of the title on the grounds that every educated person should know the reference. This was long before our current fascination and obsession with our digital devices which, paradoxically, reveal only too well “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” The phrase comes from the General Confession at Morning and Evening Prayer in the Prayer Book: “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.”
