Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity
“I have compassion on the multitude”
Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, we are gathered into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial, that is to say, it concerns the quality of our lives with God and as standing upon the truth of God revealed in Christ Jesus. What are these organic images? They are the images of grafting, growing, nurturing and preserving. They follow upon an understanding of God as the “Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things.” That understanding shapes the meaning of these images. It makes them profoundly sacramental.
The Collect prays the understanding which the Scriptures reveal, particularly in the interplay between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle suggests the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. We pray, too, that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel speaks to us about the sacrament of Holy Communion: there is our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things,” through the compassion of Christ who feeds us in the wilderness and sets us upon our way, “he in us and we in him.” Grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” we are to live from that Word. It is a wonderful illustration of what Augustine calls the gemina sacramenta, the twin sacraments of the Church, baptism and communion which go together, an understanding that I fear we often forget.
This morning we have a wonderful practical illustration of these ideas in the Baptism of Alice Yvonne Profit. She is literally grated into the life of God through Baptism; She has a radical new beginning, a spiritual beginning that speaks to the dignity and truth of our humanity and its freedom. What begins in her incorporation into the life and death of Jesus Christ has its continuance in the life of prayer and praise, of Word and Sacrament.
“Graft in our hearts the love of thy name” suggests that Baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship with God as Trinity which has its continuing in the Eucharist. The fruit of these organic, spiritual, substantial and sacramental relationships is holy lives and a holy end. Paul’s Epistle reading from Romans follows immediately upon last week’ reading from Romans about baptism as our being “baptized into Jesus Christ,” “baptized into his death,” and “buried with him by baptism into death,” but so as to be raised up in him that “we should walk in newness of life.” For being “with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.” The Gospel today also complements the Gospel from last Sunday about loving our enemies. Such is the radical love of God which defines us. Here that love is shown in another register: Christ’s compassion upon the multitude in the wilderness, his compassion upon our awareness of our own emptiness and incompleteness. All these images speak to the meaning of baptism as “that which by nature [Alice and all of us] cannot have.” This challenges the tendency of our age to reduce things to ourselves, to our own projects and fantasies rather than to learn what God wants us to know.
