by CCW | 21 July 2019 15:00
In the face of the nihilisms of our contemporary culture, this is a welcoming word that signals an openness to God and to his will and way for our humanity. It should and is meant to complement the opening line of the Epistle reading, “be ye all of one mind,” but it doesn’t, at least not now in our situation as a church. We aren’t of one mind on many matters of great importance. We are a church divided, and a community and culture of souls divided. This is, sadly, nothing new. I have offered a brief statement of reflection about the current state of disarray, disaffection, and division with respect to the issue of same-sex marriage. The institutional church remains caught in the controversies of identity in our contemporary culture. We live in a divided church but prayerfully and, I hope, charitably with respect to these divisions and with an openness to the rediscovery of the principles that provide a more complete understanding of our humanity.
Today’s Gospel grounds our lives not on self-assertion but upon God’s word. Ambrose, in his commentary on this passage, indicates that in the figure of Peter especially, we have the figure of the Church. Peter is the rock upon which Christ builds the Church but only “at thy word.” It is a powerful idea and concept. There is the constant struggle to understand what it means to act in accord with God’s Word but, at the very least, it acts as a check upon human presumption. Simon Peter expresses very clearly the nature of the human predicament. “We have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing.” This complements wonderfully Mary’s statement to Jesus at the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee that “they” – we – “have no wine.” The awareness of our limitations, of our mortality, of our insufficiency, of our confusion, is a profound truth about our humanity. In our current distresses, it suggests at the very least uncertainties about ourselves and about the claims of the autonomous self. To put it in another way, what these Gospel stories indicate is that God knows us better than we know ourselves, on the one hand, and that God seeks for us to know what he seeks for us, on the other hand. “We see in a glass darkly,” not least of all about ourselves. “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known,” as Paul says, known in Christ. Hence the significance of the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity in Jesus Christ. Divine love transforms and perfects our human loves in all our confusions and illusions but only “at thy word.”
“Be it unto me according to thy word,” Mary says to Gabriel at the Annunciation. “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word,” Simeon says in the temple at Jerusalem, beholding the infant Christ. “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it,” Mary says to the servants at the wedding feast. “Speak the word only,” the Roman centurion says to Jesus about the healing of his servant. “A certain nobleman believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him” about healing his son and “went his way”. Jesus is the Father’s Son and Word eternal. Church history, and therefore the issues and questions that belong to our lives, is embraced theologically in Christ’s teaching about the Holy Spirit. “He shall teach you all things” and “he will guide you into all truth” but that truth is always governed by the “remembrance of whatsoever [things] I have said unto you”; in short, by the Word and Truth of God. We don’t and can’t begin with ourselves in the illusions of our certainties about identity.
The Word of God goes forth in creation and in redemption. To “sanctify Christ as Lord in [our] hearts” is to attend to Christ as the Word and Son of the Father. That requires humility and compassion in the face of competing assertions as well as commitment to the teachings which we have received in faith. Whatever changes in practise or teaching there might be cannot mean the repudiation of the wisdom of the past but only a building upon it. That can only happen through a commitment to Christ as Word and Son of the Father. Peter’s word is our word too for what governs us in our lives of faith. It is all “at thy word” as the counter and check to ourselves. Only so might we be caught up in the net of God’s love.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 5, 2019
Christ Church & St. Michael’s, Windsor Forks
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2019/07/21/sermon-for-the-fifth-sunday-after-trinity-9/
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