by CCW | 9 June 2024 10:00
The Epistle and Gospel reading this morning not only complement each other but provide a strong encouragement to enter into what is made known to us in Jesus Christ. To put it in another way, our excuses are absolutely nothing when it comes to the heavenly banquet, itself an image of the soul’s enjoyment and fellowship with God. Our relationship with God cannot be simply what and when and if we please. What kind of God would that be? A God of our own devising, which is to say, no God. But God is greater than us, greater than our hearts in disarray, indeed, as Anselm so memorably put it, “God is that than which nothing greater can be thought,” to which we might add, and loved. Nothing greater.
Our excuses do not excuse us. This is a tough but obvious truth. Worship has priority. It is as simple as that. Yet to say this misses the greater reason. Worship cannot be coerced; it cannot be forced. It is about more than mere duty. It is about what we love. It is about our loving worship of God whose love defines us. It is so easy to miss the essential point. You can’t sell the Gospel. It isn’t a market commodity. God is not for sale.
The proclamation of the Gospel is the repeated invitation to enter into life with God. Today’s Gospel story is about the invitation to the kingdom of God’s blessedness. What launches the parable is the Gospel proclamation that “blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” That is, to be sure, a blessing. As such it is not a right. But the refusal of the invitation is the refusal of the blessing.
What is Jesus saying by way of a parable about our threefold refusal of the invitation? He is convicting our hearts about our indifference to the things of God and about the distractions in our lives. He is reminding us of the priority of God’s grace and the importance of entering into what God provides for us. We can only be moved by our hearts and minds. The parable convicts our hearts and our minds about our neglect of the things of God because of our indifference and our preoccupation with land, property, and personal affairs. I have bought a piece of ground; I have brought five yoke of oxen; I have married a wife.
Interesting and provocative excuses. Does the third imply that wives are like ground to be inspected, or oxen to be proved? But then again, is there not an even deeper critique implied in the ownership of land and the use of domestic animals? Is the land really ours? Are the oxen simply there for our use and pleasure? And then by extension, are we here simply to be used by one another, and then to be cast off into the dustbin of history? In a way, these excuses open us out to a larger view of the spiritual nature of our everyday lives.
It is not that these things don’t matter; rather they are by definition secondary to what does matter. What matters is grace. Grace is what comes from God to us. It is objectively signalled and present in the sacramental and worshipping life of the Church. It is the moving principle in all our works of love and service that counters all the forms of judgmentalism in our divided world. Loving one another, as John emphasises, is what Jesus has commanded. In responding to that commandment we find our blessedness. It is found in him and in our lives as pleasing in his sight. And that has to do with our relation to the land and to the other creatures of the land and with one another.
We are more than our doings and more than our being in the world. Gerard Manley Hopkins wonderfully reminds us that “the just man justices/ Keeps grace; that keeps all his goings graces; / Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – / Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” This transcends the current discourses of judgement that pit one against another. This calls us to the challenge to love not only in word but in deed and in truth; to a life of love that is grounded not in ourselves and our self-interests but in the pursuit of God’s truth and goodness.
How do we come to that understanding? By what we are given to see and hear. By the proclamation of the Gospel in Word and Deed. That element of proclamation is about you and me. It is about our faithful witness and commitment. But above all it is about our love. That is John’s whole point. We can only love one another out of our love for God. We are not fully ourselves simply in what we do. We are more in Christ whose grace “keeps all [our] goings graces.”
We betray that love so easily with our rather paltry excuses. There is no point in saying a whole lot about the examples that are given. The point is clear. Our excuses are about our failure to act upon what we have given to see and do. The Scriptures and the Church, too, for that matter, don’t simply give us a blueprint for action. They give us the principles and challenge us to apply them. Perhaps that seems too much. There are those who insist on sets of rules and regulations and there are those who push back against anything that might constrain their immediate self-interest. What matters are the spiritual principles thoughtfully articulated out of the Scriptures by way of careful reasoning upon them. It is about a way of thinking that in turn leads to a way of being and living. But if we are not alive to God, then we are dead in ourselves and far removed from the banquet of heavenly love to which we are called.
What Luke is saying here is how easily we deceive ourselves even as John is reminding us of something greater than our wayward hearts. God is greater than our hearts – by definition – and greater, too, than our hearts of condemnation both of others and of ourselves. This is the good news. The good news is about the radical nature of God’s grace, itself the motions of God’s love towards us, the grace that graces us.
The Gospel convicts our hearts and the Epistle convinces us of God’s love which is greater than all that we can desire or deserve. We can only love. “Love God and do what you will,” as Augustine put it, for if you love God then you will only want to do what pleases him. In his love we find true blessedness. His love is greater than our wayward hearts, to be sure. Our hearts are made right only through the gentleness of his love for us. God seeks to move our hearts by love. That is the great and good news.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity II, 2024
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2024/06/09/sermon-for-the-second-sunday-after-trinity-14/
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