Day: April 2, 2020

Sermons, Theology

Lenten Programme on The Lord’s Prayer IV

This is the fourth and final address in this series. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”

Our Lenten study of the Lord’s Prayer brings us to the last three petitions, to the triad of forgiveness, temptation, and evil. They draw us into the deeper meaning of Christ’s Passion. To pray for forgiveness for ourselves and towards one another, to pray not to be led into temptation, and to pray to be delivered from evil is to pray the Passion of Christ.

We pray to our Father in all of the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. To pray “Our Father” achieves, Thomas Aquinas tells us, “five things.” First, the words “Our Father” serve to “instruct us in our faith”; second, they “raise our hopes”; third, “they serve to stimulate charity”; fourth, they lead us “to imitate God”; and fifth, they call us “to humility”.  In other words, the phrase “Our Father”, which is present throughout the Lord’s Prayer, gives us confidence in God. As Aquinas says, “Our Lord, in teaching us how to pray, sets out before us those things which engender confidence in us, such as the loving kindness of a father, implied in the words, Our Father.” Once again, we see how the Lord’s Prayer is an essential of the Christian Faith.

Augustine breaks off his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer in the sixth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel to speak about the Creed. He is speaking during Holy Week in the context of preparing catechumens for baptism. Both the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed are to be learned by heart. “When you have learned [the Creed], that you may never forget it, say it every day when you rise; when you are preparing for sleep, rehearse your Creed, to the Lord rehearse it, remind yourselves of it, and be not weary of repeating it. … Call your faith to mind, look into yourself, let your Creed be as it were a mirror to you. Therein see yourself, whether you do believe all which you profess to believe, and so rejoice day by day in your faith. Let it be your wealth, let it be in a sort the daily clothing of your soul. Do you not always dress yourself when you rise? So by the daily repetition of your Creed dress your soul.” It is a powerful passage complemented by his teaching about the creedal nature of the Lord’s Prayer as being an essential form of our participation in the life of God in Christ.

From these remarks about the Creed, he turns to the “Our Father,” and highlights its essential and radical nature. In saying “Our Father,” he says, “you have begun to belong to a great family. Under this Father the lord and the slave are brethren; under this Father the general and the common soldier are brethren; under this Father the rich man and the poor are brethren. All Christian believers have various fathers in earth, some noble, some obscure; but they all call upon one Father which is in heaven.” Like the Creed, it is to be prayed every day.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 2 April

It happened late one afternoon

It seems strange to be in the Chapel without all of you physically present but the deeper point of Chapel is how we are connected spiritually through the ways in which we think and pray for one another. What we wrestle with in Chapel, we wrestle with in our global world. Something has happened, “late one afternoon” in this story; late in December, in one part of the world, and now everywhere. In both cases, we are in the story. In both cases, there is an ethical challenge, first, about sin itself, and second, about how we deal with human suffering; in short, how we care for one another in a suffering world.

You have all heard of the ‘slippery slope argument’ and the ‘domino effect,’ about how one thing leads to another, about things going from bad to worse. You may even have realized that at times in your own lives. We return from the March break and, indeed, something has happened. You are not here in the same way and yet we are together in the intellectual and spiritual life of the School. We return to the story of David, but it is not David as hero but as sinner. Something happened. The lessons are there for us all. As the poet/ preacher John Donne wonderfully puts it, “David shows us the slippery ways into sin … and the penitential ways out of sin.”

The Thursday reading is about the first; the Friday reading relates to the second. A marvellous story told with great craft and care, the story of David holds up a mirror to each of us, just as it is also a window opening us out to the wonder of God in the face of human sin. What happened “late one afternoon”? David walking in his roof-top garden in Jerusalem sees a beautiful woman bathing. She is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a soldier fighting for David against the Ammonites. He sees her. He desires her. He acquires her. He has sex with her. He impregnates her. Note the progression from what we see to what we desire to what we possess.

Think about it for a moment and you realize that this story shows the dynamic of the ethics of the universal moral code of our humanity, the Ten Commandments. First, David covets – desires – another man’s wife. Secondly, David commits adultery. But that is not all. She is pregnant. What next? David seeks to cover it up, recalling Uriah from the battle, sending him home to his wife in the hopes that her pregnancy can be attributed to her husband. It is an act of deception through a misuse of reason and speech. But Uriah holds to the warrior code and sleeps at the door of the King’s house, the King whom he serves. He is acting out of solidarity with his fellow soldiers. David then tries to get him drunk in the hopes that he will go to Bathsheba; his plan is foiled yet again. In desperation, David conspires to have Joab place Uriah at the forefront of the battle where he will most surely be killed. Joab reports to David that “your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.” David covets Bathsheba; he commits adultery with her; he conspires to have Uriah killed. Such is the slippery slope of sin graphically and compellingly told. In a marvel of understatement, we are told that “the thing which David had done displeased the Lord.” Do you think?!

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Prayers and liturgy

Henry Budd, Priest

The collect for today, the commemoration of Henry Budd (1814-75), first North American Indian to be ordained to the ministry in the Church of England, Missionary to the Cree nation (source):

The Rev. Henry BuddCreator of light, we offer thanks for thy priest Henry Budd, who carried the great treasure of Scripture to his people the Cree nation, earning their trust and love. Grant that his example may call us to reverence, orderliness and love, that we may give thee glory in word and action; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 5:13-18
The Gospel: St. John 14:15-21

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