Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity.
Year: 2021
Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity
“O Lord, I believe; help my unbelief”
Mark alone records this phrase in his Gospel (Mk. 9.24). It arises in the context of the healing of a boy who has what we might call epilepsy and his father’s request to Jesus, “if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.” Jesus reacts to the conditional, “if you can” with a certain asperity. “If you can! All things are possible to him who believes.” That is the occasion for this response, “O Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” which leads to Jesus rebuking the unclean spirit and thus healing the child.
The story and the phrase go to the issue of faith and to the struggle of faith in all of us. Ours is the culture of little faith. “O ye of little faith” ((Mt. 6.30), Jesus says to us about our fears and worries, our anxieties and our over-carefulness, our being too full of cares about the world. We are caught in the ambiguities and confusions of competing certainties and uncertainties in contemporary culture and especially with respect to faith. What do we believe and how strong are we in our faith? This text, I suggest, speaks to today’s Epistle and Gospel. Paul in this powerful passage from Ephesians bids us “put on the whole armour of God” and “above all, taking the shield of faith.” The Gospel story of the certain nobleman who seeks the healing of his son sick at Capernaum illustrates what “taking the shield of faith” really means.
He has asked that Jesus “come down and heal his son” who is “at the point of death.” Jesus simply says to him, “go thy way, thy son liveth.” The wonder and the miracle is not simply the healing, a healing at a distance by way of the power of the divine word, but that “the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken and went his way.” He further learns as he returns that his son was healed “at the same hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth.” In other words, he had faith in the word of Jesus but not according to his own demand that Jesus come down. He does not let his own assumptions get in the way of God. He has faith in the word of Jesus, an insight into what truly abides, in what is truly substantial (υποστασις), as Hebrews defines faith.
This Gospel story of a miracle of healing was, we are told, “the second sign that Jesus did.” The first sign or miracle in John’s Gospel is, most significantly, the story of the turning of the water into wine at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee. What makes that story so significant is that it signals the true meaning of all of the Gospel miracles, namely, that God seeks our social joys as found in our communion with God and with one another.
Week at a Glance, 25 – 31 October
Sunday, October 31st, Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The Twenty-First Sunday After Trinity
The collect for today, the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
GRANT, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace; that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 6:10-20
The Gospel: St. John 4:46-54
Artwork: Joseph-Marie Vien, Jesus Healing the Son of an Officer, 1752. Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille, France.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 21 October
God questions
There are questions and there are questions, different kinds of questions. There are questions about God but more significantly there are the questions of God. The grand narrative of the Fall, as we have seen, is about our questions of deceit and denial in contrast to God’s questions that call us to truth and awaken us to understanding. Thus the questions of God actually teach us a lot about the idea of God and about the nature of learning.
This week in Chapel we have had a barrage of questions, first, in the classic and foundational story of Cain and Abel, and, secondly, in the powerful questions of God to Job (and to us) in The Book of Job. The questions of God open us out to wisdom and understanding about creation and about ourselves.
It is always a bit of fun with the Junior School Chapel to ask students and faculty if they have any brothers and sisters and then to ask them if they have ever said to their brother or sister (and with a certain intensity), ‘I hate you!’ or ‘I’ll kill you!’ A fair number are honest enough in their response! The point is that we are all in the story of Cain and Abel, the story of the first murder, at least in terms of our thoughts and words. We hope not in terms of our deeds!
The story is part of the fall-out from the Fall and belongs to the transition from the purely mythological and poetical to the beginnings of something like history and civilization. Abel is a keeper of sheep and Cain a tiller of the ground. There is just a hint of criticism about our assumptions in our mastery of nature by way of agriculture over and against the more nomadic qualities of shepherding. At issue, perhaps, is a deeper sense of dependence upon God as opposed to the illusions of our control and management that contribute to exploitation, violence, and abuse. The image of keeping the sheep is the classical image of care and in a way that is transcultural. Genesis, along with much else in the Hebrew Scriptures, is quite sceptical of human presumption.
It is not by accident that the overarching icon in the Chapel is the image of Christ the Good Shepherd whose care is sacrificial love. In the story of Cain and Abel, there are, as with the story of the Fall, five questions of which four are God’s and one is Cain’s. His question echoes the same kind of question of denial as the serpent’s question, “Did God say?” God asks Cain, “why are you angry?” and “why has your countenance fallen?” and challenges him about the necessary control of his emotions, the need to master our desires.The division between our knowing and our willing is often so deadly and destructive. We so easily take offense at a perceived slight or sense of being ignored and lash out in anger sometimes because of envy and jealousy.
St. Luke the Evangelist
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
ALMIGHTY God, who calledst Luke the Physician, whose praise is in the Gospel, to be an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul: May it please thee that, by the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him, all the diseases of our souls may be healed; through the merits of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: 2 Timothy 4:5-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-52
Luke was a physician, a disciple of St. Paul and his companion on some of his missionary journeys, and the author of both the third gospel and Acts.
It is believed that St. Luke was born a Greek and a Gentile. According to the early Church historian Eusebius, Luke was born at Antioch in Syria. In Colossians 4:10-14, St. Paul speaks of those friends who are with him. He first mentions all those “of the circumcision”–in other words, Jews–and he does not include Luke in this group. Luke’s gospel shows special sensitivity to evangelising Gentiles. It is only in his gospel that we hear the Parable of the Good Samaritan, that we hear Jesus praising the faith of Gentiles such as the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, and that we hear the story of the one grateful leper who is a Samaritan.
St. Luke first appears in Acts, chapter 16, at Troas, where he meets St. Paul around the year 51, and crossed over with him to Europe as an Evangelist, landing at Neapolis and going on to Philippi, “concluding that God had called us to preach the Gospel to them” (note especially the transition into first person plural at verse 10). Thus, he was apparently already an Evangelist. He was present at the conversion of Lydia and her companions and lodged in her house. He, together with St. Paul and his companions, was recognised by the divining spirit: “She followed Paul and us, crying out, ‘These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation’”.
Week at a Glance, 18 – 24 October
Tuesday, October 19th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Donna Leon’s My Venice and Other Essays (2013) & Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight (1937, trans. from the Hungarian in 2000 by Len Rix).
Sunday, October 24th, Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The Twentieth Sunday After Trinity
The collect for today, the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O ALMIGHTY and most merciful God, of thy bountiful goodness keep us, we beseech thee, from all things that may hurt us; that we, being ready both in body and soul, may cheerfully accomplish those things that thou wouldest have done; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 5:15-21
The Gospel: St. Matthew 22:1-14
Artwork: John Everett Millais, The Marriage Feast, from Illustrations to `The Parables of Our Lord’, 1864. Wood engraving on paper, Tate Collections, London.
Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, Bishops and Martyrs
The collect for today, the commemoration of Hugh Latimer (1485-1555), Bishop of Worcester, and Nicholas Ridley (c. 1500-1555), Bishop of London, Reformation Martyrs (source):
Keep us, O Lord, constant in faith and zealous in witness, that, like thy servants Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, we may live in thy fear, die in thy favor, and rest in thy peace; for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 3:9-14
The Gospel: St. John 15:20-16:1
Two leaders of the English Reformation were burned at the stake in Oxford on this day in 1555. Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, and Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, were removed from their positions and imprisoned after Queen Mary ascended the throne in 1553. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533, was deposed and taken to Oxford with Latimer and Ridley.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 14 October
I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed.
In the soft gentleness of October, there is much for which to be thankful even in the midst of the anxieties of our age. Paradoxically, the ‘fall-out’ from the Fall in the Book of Genesis, despite the curses and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, contains the seed, if you will pardon the pun, of thankfulness and blessings. It is found in the 15th verse of Chapter Three and is known, in the Christian understanding, as the Protoevangelium, the first Gospel, understood to point to a Saviour who will overcome all evil.
Gospel means good news. The Protoevangelium is understood to point to Christ the redeemer, the one who overcomes the tempter. Speaking of the serpent, God says to Eve, “he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” but only through “her seed,” meaning Christ in a symbolic sense, where Mary is the new Eve. So while we read about the consequences of humanity’s disobedience, as it were, or, philosophically, of the contradiction between our knowing and our willing, in terms of the curses of the pain of childbirth, and of the necessity of human labour in the sweat of our brow, there is also an intriguing note of good news which is the underlying theme of redemption. A blessing in the curses! Something good comes out of our evil, which does not excuse our evil, I hasten to add!
The story of the Fall endeavours to provide an explanation for human suffering and pain and for our alienation from the paradise of creation. Our humanity “has become like one of us,” God says, “knowing good and evil,” but knowing good and evil, not as God knows good and evil, namely, intellectually and spiritually, but experientially, by way of separation. Our ‘likeness’ to God is not the same as being God, a critical distinction. We are sent forth into the world “to till the ground from which [our humanity] was taken.” Our vocation is to learn about our way back to God through our connection and engagement with the world. Salvation, our being made whole, is not about a flight from the world in some sort of technocratic and rationalistic fantasy. It has altogether to do with the nature of our thinking and doing within the order of creation. We are part of something greater than ourselves.
It has very much to do with how we think about the nature of the good, of God himself, in relation to the created order and in relation to one another. Something redemptive is at work through creation and our labours in the land, even in the sweat of our brow, learning the hard way but learning something about the power and the wisdom of God which are one in God albeit divided in us. That division takes the form of pain and labour and importantly the idea that there is no going back. The Garden of Eden, it turns out, is not our end but only a starting point to a deeper and more profound relation to both God and nature, including ourselves.