Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity
Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 2
Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God
You’re invited! To what? To the banquet of love. “Love bade me welcome,” as the poet, George Herbert, wonderfully says. “Come unto me, all that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you,” Jesus says. “Come and see,” he says to the disciples of John. “Come, for all things are now ready,” Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel parable. The whole of the Christian life is about the invitation to love. The kingdom of God is not about power and prestige; not some sort of patriarchy, even on ‘Father’s Day’. It is about the divine love which perfects and renews, refreshes and restores the broken loves of our broken lives. “Herein is love.”
And that love is powerfully made known to us. “Hereby we know love.” How? “Because he laid down his life for us.” And because he laid down his life for us, “we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” Thus we see the ever-present aspect of reciprocity and mutuality that belongs to the Christian Faith. Thus we see the paradoxical nature of sacrifice without which love is nothing. We are to act out of what has been shown to us and known by us in the story of Christ crucified, the book of love opened for us to read. Even more, as John again in his First Epistle tells us, we are to love not just “in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.” Something is required of us if love is to be real for us and in us.
Yet “my soul drew back” from Love’s invitation, as the narrative voice in Herbert’s poem says. Why? Why do we not respond to God’s invitation? Is it a failure to pay attention? To God? To the meaning of God in our lives? Such are our modern concerns. God, it seems, is irrelevant to us. Or is it the church which has become irrelevant both to God and to us?
In the current situation of Covid-19, the churches have been caught in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, it belongs to the Christian Faith to invite people to come and see, to come and be fed, to come and be refreshed by God’s Word and Sacrament; to be companions with God and with one another – companion literally means with bread, com panis. We are companions in the breaking of the bread; that is our blessedness. On the other hand, that has been refused by the civil and medical community as being dangerous because of the pandemic. And understandably so. How do we respond to the demands of the invitation which belongs to the Church’s essential proclamation? The last several months have been revealing on that score.
The churches have been effectively shut down both by the state and by the acquiescence of ecclesiastical authorities. It is not the first time that countries, communities, and churches have faced plagues and threats to human life. It may be the first time that the Church in the form of the churches has effectively been denied any real voice and any way of responding to such things pastorally and theologically. Never has the sacramental and pastoral ministry been so completely proscribed except in times of outright persecution. The ministry, being what it is, has, at times and in some places, endeavoured to find ways to honour the dictates of the state while also ministering to souls. Gone are the times when the clergy were often on the front-lines of care and in jeopardy of their own lives. Mercifully, there have been few fatalities of Covid-19 among the front-line health-care workers.
