Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity

admin | 26 June 2022

“Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God”

It is true, profoundly true. Why then does Jesus respond to the statement with a parable about our excuses? We excuse ourselves from the heavenly banquet by turning to our worldly interests such that “none of those which were bidden shall taste of my supper.” Strong words that highlight the problem of our indifference. We exile ourselves.

Once again, it seems, like the parable of Lazarus and Dives, the rich man, that we have ignored the truth that is before us and negated the calling of our humanity to abide in that truth. Our preoccupations are with ourselves and to the neglect of others more than perhaps we realize. In a way, these readings counter the tendency to think that salvation or human happiness is found in our choices and actions in themselves. We forget that the ground of all human activity is God. The parable Jesus tells is simply about our turning away from the divine life into which we are constantly invited and turning instead to our own concerns apart from God. In a literal sense, it is about turning to the ground of human affairs as if that were everything, a kind of divinizing of ourselves and our doings.

It is not that the places of our lives, the “piece[s] of ground” upon which we live, and our activities with the living creatures of the land, “prov[ing] five yoke of oxen,” and our lives with one another in such things as marriage, symbolizing one of the sanctified states of life in the world, don’t matter. The question is, in what way? Through our daily lives God is readying us for the fullness of life which is found in him with one another. “Come, for all things are now ready.” Such is the banquet of heavenly love in which we participate now sacramentally. The strong teaching is that our liturgy is not simply an add-on, an extra, an option; rather it is a necessity and for no other reason than that it is about our life with God and in God. When we ignore or neglect that we are forgetting the real truth and dignity of our humanity.

We meet in the Octave of the Nativity of John the Baptist. His whole ministry from the moment of his conception in the womb of Elizabeth to his being beheaded by Herod is about one thing: pointing us to Jesus as the one whom we seek and with whom we dwell. He points us to Jesus so that we can be with Jesus. His ministry is a ministry of preparing the way of Christ by the “preaching of repentance.” That is about a constant metanoia, a constant turning of hearts and minds to God in Christ. Repentance is the counter to all our prosaic complacencies and preoccupations; in short our indifference to the things of God. It means taking the love of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ seriously and joyously out of an awareness of our sinfulness.

Our excuses are not reasons. Our excuses are the problem because they mean granting priority to our immediate interests rather than to our life as grounded in God. After all, the very places where we live, the very things we do in those places, the very form of our lives together is not simply of our own making. In the Christian understanding, we are to see the circumstances of place and activity and one another as belonging to God’s Providence. In this sense, we are not the victims of Covid. It is just the circumstance in which we continue to seek God’s wisdom and truth for us in our lives.

In so many ways, it puts us to the test about what we deem important and in what way. How does the love of God dwell in us? John asks in the Epistle reading, noting our neglect of one another as belonging to our neglect of God. Thus these readings today complement those of last Sunday in terms of our abiding in the love of God. Here it is opened to us sacramentally and theologically in terms of how we look at the world. As separate from God or as grounded in God?

The blessing of eating bread in the kingdom of God is not pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, mere wish; it is now because it is always about the now of God, God as ever present. It concerns the forms of our incorporation into the life of God by way of the activities of contrition, confession, and satisfaction in us which belong to the principles of justification, sanctification and glorification; in short, the ways of our blessedness through the forms of our incorporation into the body of Christ. It is about how we look to God from where we are and what we do in the daily patterns of our lives now understood as gathered into God and grounded in God.

“Love bade me welcome,” George Herbert’s famous poem ‘Love (III)’ begins, “yet my soul drew back guilty of dust and sinne” The soul is self-aware that “dust and sinne” is the truth of our turning to the ground and away from God. The parable and the poem show that God seeks something more for us. ”But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack from my first entrance in, /Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/If I lack’d any thing,” meaning needing or wanting something. There is a gentle tenderness of feeling in the poem. This draws out of us what indeed we should be seeking.

“A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here;” love’s banquet cannot be taken for granted. What is sensed is that something is required of us. “Love said, You shall be he,” without any conditions, it seems, other than what God says. “You shall be he.” “Thy will be done.” The soul’s response is contrition, a sense of sorrow at ourselves and our actions, again a kind of self-awareness. “I the unkinde, ungrateful? Ah my deare,/ I cannot look on thee”. It is what we pray. “We are not worthy So much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table.” This is true but once again there is a greater truth that counters our awareness of our blindness and our turning away; it is love’s motion towards us.

In an exquisite phrase, “Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,/ Who made the eyes but I?” We are recalled to creation, to our maker, to the truth of our humanity as spiritual beings called to the love and knowledge of God. God is not ‘made’ for us but we are made for God. Is not Love’s smile enough to move our hearts of contrition and sorrow? Yes and no.

The soul, moved by a true awareness of all that belongs to the human condition, “guiltie of dust and sinne,” echoes of the Fall, confesses to Love. “Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them.” You have given me being and sight but I have misused them; such is sin, our misuse of the goodness of God in creation, our own creation. In that knowledge, there is the sense of exile. “Let my shame/ go where it doth deserve,” a sense of justice, of getting what we deserve. Such is the true meaning of confession. It is the awareness of our separation from God and creation, from one another, and from ourselves; self-exiles from truth.

This, too, is true yet only occasions the greater truth of what God seeks for our humanity. “For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” On the one hand, it is as in the Gospel parable where the master of the house bids his servant “bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt and the blind … that my house may be filled;” this is what God wants for us. On the other hand, it is redemption signalled by way of Christ’s sacrifice; in the poem, this is what God provides for us. “And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?” Simple words which encapsulate the whole pageant of redemption. God himself makes right and satisfies, makes up, what is lacking in us to bring us to what belongs to the truth of our lives in him. Can we be indifferent to such love?

How, then, do we respond? With excuses? With the endless whining of the ‘poor-me’s? Such things are really all about ourselves. No. The only true response is loving service. “My deare,” the soul says to Love, “then I will serve.” Yet our service of prayer and praise will be something more than servile. It will be the “blessing of eating bread in the kingdom of God.” “You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat.” God would have us enjoy the banquet of love.

“O taste and see how gracious the Lord is:/ blessed is the man that trusteth in him,” the Psalmist says (34. 8); it is the gradual Psalm for All Saints. We are called to the communion of saints. “O fear the Lord, ye that are his saints;/ for they that fear him lack nothing” (34. 9). “So I did sit and eat.” And so may we, for “they who seek the Lord shall want no manner of thing that is good” (34.10).