Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
Link to Audio File for Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 14, 2020
“One … turned back, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan”
Living in the Spirit means walking in the Spirit, Paul says in Galatians. It is an interesting distinction. Living means more than merely existing, it seems. Walking suggests something intentional, something more about our lives, something more that moves in us without which we are not fully alive. That is what is shown in the Gospel. Walking in the Spirit is about the Spirit of God moving in us, living in us.
This Gospel story follows wonderfully upon last Sunday’s reading.. Once again it has to do with Samaritans, the outsiders within Judaism which Jesus often uses to criticize Israel in her failings about the Law. Last Sunday, as we saw, the so-called Good Samaritan is Jesus Christ. He unites the love of God and the love of neighbour, the divine and the human. The love of Christ living and moving in us is the unity of divine and human alive in us. What appears as a double motion: on the one hand, human; on the other hand, divine, is the same motion viewed from different standpoints. It is the same thing here: it is all the one turning back and all God in him. Such is the dialectic of human and divine which defines the Christian religion.
Today’s Gospel is the classic story of thanksgiving. This Gospel is appointed for Thanksgiving Day, at least in terms of national thanksgiving. In our more primitive and yet profoundly natural realities, thanksgiving is associated with the harvest, Harvest Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving in its larger sensibilities combines the natural and the spiritual, the political and the practical. Holding together the sense of the political with the sense of the natural belongs to the deeper understanding of thanksgiving, a moving from the natural to the political as embraced within the spiritual, we might say.
Voltaire, in his great classic of the Enlightenment, Candide, considers a utopia, a fictional place, an ideal society, in which the only religion is that of thanksgiving. The inhabitants of El Dorado give thanks to God who provides for them all that they need. Simple. And, in a way, profound. But it falls far short of the much more radical doctrine of thanksgiving which Luke presents to us here, and which in Luke’s telling occasions a kind of wonder in Jesus himself.
