Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity

admin | 14 July 2024

“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.

It is quite a vocation: “But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.” This is what is wanted for Alice. The interplay between the Epistle and the Gospel is like the connection between Baptism and Communion. This is in accord with classical Anglican and Catholic teaching. As Richard Hooker puts it: “we receive Christ Jesus in baptism once as the first beginner, in the eucharist often as being by continual degrees the finisher of our life” (Lawes, Bk.V, ch.LVII). He rightly notes that it is a basic Christian understanding: “nevertheless touching Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, we may with consent of the whole Christian world conclude they are necessary, the one to initiate or begin, the other to consummate or make perfect our life in Christ” (Lawes, Bk.V, ch.LXVII). Such is the teaching of the essential catholicism of the Church in and through the churches, at least in principle.

A branch is grafted into a living vine without which it is but a dead stick. It lives not from itself but from the vine. It is no longer dead or dying but alive and growing. Imputed, “put into” the vine, the vine then infuses, “pours into,” the branch its life-force. The branch lives from the vine to bring forth what belongs to the truth of the branch in the vine, namely, its blossom and fruit. The branch does not cease to be itself by being grafted into the vine; rather it becomes its living self, a living branch. Apart from the vine, it would be dead. “Apart from me,” Jesus says, “ye can do nothing”. More directly, apart from God, we are nothing but the walking dead.

But what does it mean to be grafted into “the love of thy Name”? What is “thy Name”? In Scripture, in Liturgy and in Prayer, the word “Lord” is frequently the circumlocution – the way of speaking around – the holy name of God revealed to Moses in the Burning Bush (Gen.3). The holy Name is “I am who I am.” It is not an arbitrary, conventional or nominalistic appellation, a term which we might agree among ourselves to use. Rather it conveys an understanding about something known which is altogether beyond the ordinary and beyond the natural; in principle, beyond empirical, scientific verification. It is instead wholly spiritual and metaphysical. God reveals himself as “I am who I am,” as that upon which everything else depends. Everything else – the phenomenal, natural, empirical world – is secondary. It is revealed as a product of what is primary – God alone.

But what exactly, then, is the relation of everything else to that principle of origin? Jesus intensifies and clarifies the understanding of God as “I am who I am” into the spiritual relationship of the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost. God in his perfect self-relation is the basis of his relation to all else. The division between God and what is other than God is brought into the life and unity of God himself. Such is the meaning of the Word and Son of God, Jesus Christ, the divine mediator between God and Man. And it is the meaning of Alice’s baptism. She is named Alice Yvonne in God’s own naming of himself: She is baptized in the Name of The Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

In Christ we are nourished with all goodness even in the wilderness of our lives. Grafted into him, we have our life and our growth and our abiding in him. He has compassion on us in the wilderness of our lives. What is needed for this compassion to live in us? At the very least, our attention to the language of the images of Scripture “which have a depth, a richness and a wholeness which the exactness and explicitness of scientific language can never quite exhaust.”

When we forget to live from the Word, we are dead. Ours is the culture of emptiness and fear because we have despaired of the understanding. We have despaired of the understanding in our idolatry of the practical, or in our adolescent adulation about the merely technological as the solution to all our woes, or in our will to despair. And yet, here in the wilderness of our bewilderment, Christ has compassion on us. His love reaches out to us. Thomas Aquinas puts it best and in so doing recalls us to “that pattern of teaching” that draws upon these organic images of living from Word and Sacrament, the Word audible and Word visible.

He who does not nourish himself on the word of God is no longer living. For, as the human body cannot live without earthly food, so the soul cannot live without the word of God. But the Word proceeds from the mouth of God when he reveals his will through the witness of Scripture.

That will is signaled for us in Jesus’ word. It is his compassion for us. It is his word to us and it is made visible to us today in Alice’s baptism, a reminder to us of our own.