Category: Sermons

“Be not anxious”

The strong words of this gospel are large letters written to us by Jesus, as it were. What are the strong words? Behold, consider, seek. Through them we see the world with new eyes even as we bear in our own bodies, as Paul suggests, “the marks of the Lord Jesus”. Large letters to be written in our lives.

Jesus tells us not to be anxious more than once. He knows our anxieties and how prone we are to being anxious, quite literally, about “a multitude of things”. It is “the Martha Syndrome”: “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things” (Luke 10.41). We all have our fears and our worries, our troubles and our concerns, our heart-aches and our despairs. We can worry ourselves, quite literally, to death about them. What are we anxious about? What are our anxieties? Quite simply, they are our cares, the things which, quite literally, occupy our thoughts.

The first Books of Common Prayer, 1549 and 1552, use the phrase “be not carefull” following Tyndale. The King James Version of the Bible, some sixty years later, uses the phrase “take no thought” to capture the Greek word about how our thoughts are taken captive or occupied, possessed, we might even say, with various concerns. The phrase, “take no thought”, became the version in the Books of Common Prayer from 1662 onwards until 1959, when in Canada the word “anxious” was introduced, a word which has 17th century provenance in English but which has been given a greater weight of interpretation in the 20th and 21st centuries; in part, through the influence of the psychology of Sigmund Freud and, in part, through existential philosophy. Angst r us.

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“God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness,
hath shined in our hearts”

It is not often that a Saints’ day intrudes upon our Sunday worship. I say “intrudes” because there is a modern liturgical opinion that such celebrations get in the way of the primary focus of each Sunday service, namely, the Resurrection of Christ. There is the fear that the celebration of a saint might detract from the centrality of Christ. A legitimate fear, I suppose, but it overlooks the ancient wisdom which sees the saints as saints only in the light of Christ’s Resurrection. As today’s epistle appointed for The Feast of St. Matthew reminds us, “we preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake”. The focus, we may safely conclude, is Christ. And if, we look more closely, we shall see that the Call of Matthew is altogether about the Resurrection of Christ in us and about our being with Christ; in short, The Feast of St. Matthew illumines the very nature of salvation for us. Light shining out of our darkness and light shining in our hearts.

And all because Jesus is passing by. It all seems so casual, so accidental, so incidental but, to the contrary, Jesus’ passing by is not casual; it is essential. That is to say, it belongs to the very principle of God who is light and life itself, who is always active, and never static, and whose activity is always purposeful and therefore, always requires a response from us.

Jesus’ passing by is not without consequence. Something happens. He glances upon us. “Salvation begins by our being seen by Jesus, by his turning toward us his compassionate eyes”. Here Jesus “saw a man named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom,” at the tax collector’s bench. Everything unfolds from that glance of Jesus. “Follow me,” he says to Matthew who “arose, and followed him”.

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“They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh,
with the affections and lusts” … “Go and do thou likewise”

A double text. Words from today’s Epistle and Gospel, yet words, too, which illumine and are illumined in turn by another feature of this day, namely, Holy Cross.

I have often been struck by the coincidence of the early beginning of Fall and the return to School with The Feast of the Holy Cross on September 14^th, and especially, with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks profoundly and yet paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise. Inventio crucis.

Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the historical and celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem, and from her so-called discovery of the Holy Cross in the early fourth century as well as the exposition or “Exaltation” of the supposed true cross in the seventh century. Inventio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.

In the Christian understanding, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual and spiritual life. The cross is the meeting place of lovers which demands our action of loving service, our acting out of the charity of Christ, something which belongs to the deep meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Who is the true neighbour? “He that showed mercy on him.” But what is that mercy except exactly that which is ultimately seen on the Cross of Christ.

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“He hath done all things well; he maketh both the deaf to hear
and the dumb to speak”

In the days of the closing down of summer, to use Alistair MacLeod’s compelling phrase and image, the title of his most reflective short story, we make a turn to new beginnings, to the renewal of patterns and programmes in our various lives. On the Sunday after Labour Day, in the Maritimes, at any rate, the cottages have begun to be closed down for the winter, schools and colleges have resumed, vacations are over and done, and even summer seems already a distant and nostalgic memory. We are back, it might seem, to our usual lives.

But are we? Is it really about merely returning to the drudgery and the boring sameness of week after week, day after day, even Sunday after Sunday? It needn’t be, it seems to me. Not only are there the beginning hints of changes in the air but there are the deeper challenges of the Scripture readings. This Sunday marks the notional mid-way point of the Trinity Season and it signals important things to us. We are being challenged to be open – “Ephphatha”, Jesus says, in one of those rare but precious moments where Aramaic appears in the Scripture and is immediately translated by the Evangelist, in this case Mark, into Greek. For us, of course, there is the further translation into English, yet the Aramaic word remains in our text, a quiet witness to another aspect of the reality of the Incarnate Christ. His spoken words were in all likelihood Aramaic, a variant of Hebrew, but we only know his words through the Greek and subsequent translations. His saving word for all humanity is revealed through a particular culture and language; the universal in and through the particular.

“He has done all things well”, Mark concludes, having detailed a healing miracle. What is that all about? In a way, we are being opened to the very thing that St. Paul is saying in the Epistle reading from 2^nd Corinthians. “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life”.

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“Love your enemies”

You’ve got to be kidding! How utterly impossible and totally improbable! Why, we have the hardest time loving our wives, our husbands, our children, our parents, our friends; only, perhaps, our pets. What can it possibly meant to love our enemies? And yet, this is precisely what Jesus commands. A command, we might say, that is one of the distinctive features of Christianity and reveals the essential heart of the Christian Faith.

Enemies. What does that mean? Who are our enemies? Sometimes words reveal themselves. English is a bit of a mongrel language, taking words and bits of words from everything and everywhere. In its historical development much is owed to two streams: the one, Germanic, as in Old English or Anglo-Saxon; the other, latinate, via the influence of the French language, especially after William the Conqueror, 1066 and All That, as it were. Words like friends and enemies, for instance, derive from each stream respectively. Friend connects with freund in modern German, for instance; enemies from ennemis in French but looking back to the Latin, inimicos. We may speak in English, for instance, of being inimically opposed to something or other, meaning strongly opposed, even hostile.

In the French word, ennemis, you can hear the word amis, meaning friend just as in the Latin, inimicos, you can just make out amicos, again friend. This is even more pronounced in Spanish where the word for enemy is enemigos where amigos is clearly part of the word. What does all this word stuff mean?

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“Apart from me ye can do nothing.”

“I am the vine, ye are the branches … abide in me,” Jesus says, in what is known as the last of his famous “I am” sayings in John’s Gospel. For “apart from me ye can do nothing.” The truth and meaning of who we are is found in our being in Christ, our lives enfolded and engrafted into his living word and truth. This second lesson speaks profoundly and provocatively about the nature of our abiding in Christ. In some ways, the image is the greatest of the images of our incorporation into the divine life through the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ. We live in him and he in us.

But how? Only by attending to his word. It may be, as Peter points out to Jesus in the remarkable Eucharistic gospel for Trinity V, that “we have toiled all the night long and have taken nothing; nevertheless, at thy word, I will let down the net.” “At thy word” is the note of saving grace, the note of the means of our abiding in Christ. His word lives in us if we will let it.

The trouble is that we often refuse to hear. We reject the word and truth of God. What that means is shown in the first lesson from The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah, a prophet whose word and presence is unwelcome to King Jehoiakim, has dictated to Baruch, his scribe, “all the words of the Lord which he had spoken to him.” He has written them on a scroll, presumably of papyrus. Then Baruch reads the words of Jeremiah first “in the hearing of all the people,” then, before the court officials, and then, before the princes. Clearly deeply troubled by what they hear, the princes bid Baruch and Jeremiah go into hiding. Finally, the scroll is read before the King. Is he moved to listen to the word of the Lord from the prophet Jeremiah? Not in the least.

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“Nevertheless, at thy word, I will let down the net”

Just another fishing story, it might seem. Jesus, standing by the lake of Gennesaret first teaches “the people who pressed upon him to hear the word of God,” using a ship as his pulpit, it seems, and then bids Simon Peter to “launch out into the deep and let down your net.” Peter’s response captures an essential aspect of human experience. “Master,” he says, “we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing; nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.”

More than just another fishing story, the miracle here is not just in the amazing catch of fishes that broke their net and almost sank their ships. Neither is it just about the call of Simon Peter and James and John to catch men for God. No. This gospel story also speaks to the fears of our contemporary culture in profound and wonderful ways. It addresses the very modern concept of the empty meaninglessness of life.

Sometimes our fears define us and our world and culture. As the philosopher and Christian Peter Kreeft notes, the fear of the ancient world was the fear of death, the fear of the Medieval world, the fear of Hell, but the fear of the modern world is the fear of meaninglessness. “We have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing.” There is nothing and we are nothing, it seems and this has been a feature of modern literature as, for instance, in Ernest Hemingway’s 1933 short story, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, which is about facing the empty nothingness of life.

It is all nada. “Nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada” – Nothing and nothing then nothing and nothing and then nothing – as the older waiter observes, thinking about an old man in the café, perhaps a survivor of World War I and its atrocities in the face of which there is no answer, no meaning just the utter meaninglessness of war and destruction, of death and despair, and in the old man’s case, an attempted suicide. Has anything really changed? we might ask, as a passenger plane is shot down in the Ukraine, as girls from a boarding school are abducted and remain in captivity in Nigeria, as humanitarian disaster after humanitarian disaster unfolds for countless millions of people displaced by wars and conflicts beyond their control. Hemingway’s short story marks the first time the Spanish word nada which means nothing was used in English.

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“We…groan within ourselves”

Groaning is not the same thing as whining. We are rather good at whining and complaining. So what is our groaning? They are our prayers, the deep, heartfelt yearnings of our souls that far outrace the explicit thoughts of our minds. And yet, without a commitment to the articulation of the yearnings of our hearts and the stirrings of the thoughts in our minds, we remain in the uncertainty and the folly of ourselves, subject to a host of arbitrary and incoherent moods and fancies. Increasingly, it seems, our lives are but some celluloid or cyberborg fantasy. We live in the fiction of ourselves, the makers of our own unmaking. As the poet, philosopher, and Kentucky Farmer, Wendell Berry remarks, “the next great division of the world [may well] be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

The note of suffering and groaning confronts the tendencies of our age and culture directly. Neither are welcome concepts to a culture caught in its illusions. But do we have the capacity to see our own illusions? Or are we more quick to point out the deficiencies in others? In other words, “pull[ing] out the mote”, the insignificant speck that is in another’s eye while being blind to “the beam”, the great log, that is in our own eye. Hypocrisy is where we are and where we begin. The blind leading the blind is not just about the clergy, though you could be forgiven for thinking that.

The Gospel for today complements the Epistle. It illumines an interesting feature of the Epistles and Gospels in the Trinity season. The Gospels function as illustrations of the Epistles. In this case, we are given a powerful image of hypocrisy in the proverbial parable of “the blind leading the blind.”  And what is that parable largely about? The blindness of our judgments and the wonder of God’s mercy. “Judge not” but “forgive and be forgiven.”

How is that even remotely possible?  Only by the mercy of God. How do we know that?

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“For God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.”

Humility is not only the counter to pride; it is the condition of our access to God’s grace, the necessary condition of our being raised up or exalted, albeit “in due time” and not without “hav[ing] suffered a while.” Grace is what truly and rightly defines and dignifies our humanity. The Epistle and Gospel for today speak profoundly to lessons which have ever to be learned and relearned, again and again, and certainly for us in our world and day.

Just recently, The Economist magazine included an insert from its sister magazine, Intelligent Life. The first article asked the question “What is the deadliest sin?” and provided a series of very thoughtful reflections by a number of notable writers and thinkers on envy, pride, ingratitude, greed, gluttony, sloth and lust. Not bad. Six out of the classical and traditional seven deadly sins! Though ingratitude is a serious problem it is not one of the seven deadly sins classically speaking. It is wrath that is the one sin that was curiously omitted. I say ‘curiously’ since wrath is such a dominant feature in the destructive nihilism of contemporary culture and so it seems odd that it should have been left out. There are no end of examples of wrath in our contemporary world, after all. But what is more remarkable is that the very idea and language of sin and of the seven deadly sins should be the subject of a sophisticated contemporary journal.

It suggests at the very least that the moral discourse about sin which is part and parcel of the Christian faith is very much needed in our present times and is there to be recovered and reclaimed. Pride, as the novelist Will Self points out, “is so much a part of every one of us that we can’t see how deadly it is – it inheres in our very self-consciousness, and has metastasized through the body politic.” That is a profoundly theological view. He goes on to argue that “pride is paramount” in the modern economy, in what he calls “the commoditisation of pride,” the sense that we think we deserve what we want “because we are worth it.” Even more, he shows how pride “is the three-personed god we have made of ourselves,” which he describes wonderfully as “the Big-I-Am; King Baby, Me-Me-Me,” what he calls “the true trinity of the modern psyche.” Utterly remarkable. The descriptive force of this is undeniable but what is the prescription? Humility.

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