by CCW | 8 August 2021 08:00
“No-one can say JESUS IS LORD but by the Holy Spirit.” It is the earliest creedal statement from within the Scriptures themselves, wonderfully and significantly highlighted by being passed on down to us in capital letters (though many of the earliest manuscripts were all in majuscules – capital letters). It is a Trinitarian statement really, the nucleus of what we proclaim more fully in the great Catholic Creeds of the Church which come out of the Scriptures and which return us to the Scriptures within a way of understanding. Such clarifying proclamations give shape to our lives in grace. “Concerning spiritual gifts … I would not have you ignorant,” says St. Paul. “Now there are diversities of gifts,” and he goes on to list them. They are gifts which arise, as it were, out of this fundamental proclamation – out of what we have been given to say about God by God himself. “No one can say JESUS IS LORD but by the Holy Spirit.”
The diversity of gifts belongs to our life with God in the communion of God – the Trinity. The different gifts are about his grace in our lives; in short, about the divine unity which is the ground of all true diversity. To esteem them is to honour him. This is something communicated to us by the grace of God with us – Jesus Christ – God’s Word and Son. To confess Jesus as Lord acknowledges him as “I am who I am,” as God with us, God in the very flesh of our humanity, God made man. Only so can he be Lord. In Jesus the Old Testament mystery of God’s name – “I AM WHO I AM” (also in capital letters!) is opened to view, explored and explicated in terms of the spiritual relation of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost and in the forms of our incorporation into that divine life through Jesus as way, truth, life, light, resurrection, door, shepherd, bread, and vine. God’s relation to us radically depends upon his self-relation, upon the communion of God with God in God, the communion of the Trinity.
This is the burden of our proclamation in which we are privileged to participate. For if we cannot proclaim with clarity the God of our salvation, then we cannot participate with charity in the divine life which has been opened to view through the sacrifice of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit.
In preparing for a funeral this past week, I had occasion to look at the remarkable conjunction of two of the seven so-called ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus in John’s Gospel, sayings in which Christ identifies himself with the God of Exodus, “I Am Who I Am,” and with us in the forms of our incorporation into his divine life. In Chapter 10, Jesus says that he is “the door of the sheep” and that he is “the Good Shepherd.” A door is not the same thing as a window. We glimpse at a passing scene, the transient world that passes by the frame of the window. We see but we do not enter into what we see. But a door is precisely what we go through and into what lies beyond. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” the lesson from Revelation on Trinity Sunday proclaims. Through the door of Christ we enter into the sacrificial love of Christ the Good Shepherd. We go through the door into the radical care of God for us as realized in the sacrifice of Christ. He is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. He has come, he says, “that [we] might have life and have it more abundantly.” But what if we are unwise and ignorant about what is before us?
This is the point of today’s Gospel with St. Luke’s account of Christ’s cleansing of the temple. What is it about really, except a recalling of the true purpose of the Temple, a reminder to us of the true purpose of this and every holy place? This is the place where we attend to the high things of God, to the things which Jesus wants us to know. This is to be a place of teaching and of our abiding in the love of God revealed and proclaimed. “This is the gate of heaven,” as is written on the very walls of Christ Church. Such is the challenge for all the churches in our communities; the challenge to be the Church in the communities where we have been placed means acting out of what we have been given to see and what we have been allowed to enter into as through a door.
What stands in the way is our preoccupation with our own immediate, economic, material, and sensual concerns, our wills as over and against God’s will. There is the constant temptation and tendency to want to use the things of God and the places of God for ourselves, for our own ends and purposes, for the projects of our own devisings. We forget that we have an end in God and that such things must fall under the rule of his will and purpose without which they are nothing and nothing worth. When we forget that, then our projects are deadly and destructive “because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” We so easily become the thieves of the grace of God – forgetful of the gifts and the giver.
The challenge is to act out of what we have received and to enter more fully into the understanding of what we have been given. We are not to be strangers “to the time of thy visitation” but constantly on the look-out for the grace-notes of God in our lives, the moments of his visitation with us, even when that means, as the older form of the Visitation of the Sick profoundly states, “know ye that this [sickness] is God’s visitation upon you,” but for your good. Fundamental and necessary to such a view is our attention to the things of God in the places where God’s Word is proclaimed and his Sacraments are faithfully administered. It really cannot be otherwise.
It means that the churches of our communities have to be true to what belongs to their spiritual purpose and identity. Without that they become little more than dens of thievesChanges, thieves of the charity of God. When the churches are brain-dead to the understanding which defines them, when they are willfully indifferent to the spirit which animates them, then they become little more than self-serving cells defined by the ideological flavour of the day. The institutional churches become ends unto themselves and that is always deadly. And deadly at every level – the parish, the diocese, national bureaucracies, and international congresses and conferences. No wonder Jesus weeps!
At the heart of the matter is this “creedal” phrase, “no-one can say JESUS IS LORD but by the Holy Spirit.” To attend to this phrase is to begin to enter into the understanding which it opens to view; it is the door into the love of God. It is to be reminded of our vocation and the vocation of the Church. Nothing less will do because without this our lives are empty and nothing worth and we have nothing to say worth saying or thinking or believing. Nothing less will do because this is all the grace of God for us and in us.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity X, 2021
(reworked from 2001)
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2021/08/08/sermon-for-the-tenth-sunday-after-trinity-4/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.