Category: Sermons

“Rejoice with me”

Humility is the condition of our rejoicing, the condition of our redemption in Christ. Luke presents us with a very powerful message about the nature of humility as the counter to human pride and about the divine redemption of our humanity. The context is animosity and hostility. Tax Collectors and sinners, the despised and the outcast of the world, draw near to Jesus; Pharisees and Scribes, religious leaders, murmur in contempt because of the company which he keeps. They are scandalised. Doesn’t he know with whom he is associating? How can he be a true religious teacher? Jesus response is revelatory and transforming. He tells two parables; actually, three. We have in today’s reading two of the three, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. The third parable is the tremendous parable of the prodigal son.

The fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke comprises these three parables, each told in sequence. It is a most powerful illustration of the message about redemption and humility. Humility is the counter to our pride which pretends to our self-sufficiency, on the one hand, and our self-centredness, on the other hand. Either we have it all and need nothing outside ourselves or we presume to think that we deserve what we presently don’t have but desire. The gospel of humility is the counter to our pride.

The lost sheep, the lost coin. What do they teach us? Simply this. They teach us the humility of God which is given to shape our souls in the love of Christ. The lost sheep is precious; the lost coin is precious. The shepherd and the woman seek diligently – lovingly – for the one that is lost. Without them the community is incomplete; our humanity less than itself. God seeks the lost. In him we are found.

The third parable captures most fully the dynamic of grace at work in bringing us home to ourselves. We cannot read these two parables without being aware of the third – or at least we shouldn’t. It is the parable of the lost son or the prodigal son.

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“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart”

The Gospel is Christ’s parable about the kingdom of God being likened to a great supper to which those who were invited all made excuse. The Epistle speaks about our hearts in relation to the truth of God revealed.

We are the ones who are invited to a great supper. Our churches stand as the banquet halls of the kingdom of God. “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God,” we may say, as, indeed, did “one of them that sat at meat with Jesus.” Why, then, does Jesus tell this parable to one who was at meat with him about a great supper to which many were invited and yet no one who was bidden came? To make him and all of us realize the nature of our blessedness. It is found in our being with Jesus.

The point of the parable is clear. “Come, for all things are now ready,” we hear. God provides so much and more for us. But, more often than not, it is we who are unready and all because of our excuses. We turn to our own ways, to the ground, quite literally, and to the ways of dust and death. We ignore the vision and refuse the invitation.

The consequence would seem to mean “no feast” and all because of our refusals of God’s inviting grace, as if our convenience and self-interest were to take priority over God’s will. But our preoccupations and our indifference are simply the forms of our atheism, our denial of the will of God for us. No feast for us because there is no God for us. We are unaware of the wonder of grace.

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“If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them”
& “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

A double text to capture two themes. Do we act out of what we have been given to see? Or do we demand that God be accountable to us? To act out of what we have been to see is captured in the first text, “if you know these things, blessed are you if you do them”; the other text expresses the vehemence of our hostility against God, “what have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

We are confronted with the challenge and the refusal. There is the challenge to act out of what we have been given to see of the majesty of God and our blessedness, the divine charity that shapes our lives into holiness. Such is the vision of the Trinity. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven” and we are invited to enter into that vision through the charity of God alive in us. But then, there is our refusal to will that order and truth, preferring, instead, the vanity of ourselves that blinds us to the real needs and even the presence of others. We ignore Lazarus at our feet. He is the image of our wounded and broken humanity, the humanity which God restores but which man ignores. What has he to do with us? we may ask. But in so neglecting Lazarus we are really saying, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

The readings at the Eucharist order our understanding of all the other lessons of this day. The point, too, is very simple. The love that is shown is the love that is to be lived. (more…)

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“If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.”

Do we act out of what we have been given to see? “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” we heard on Trinity Sunday. We are invited to enter into that vision through the charity of God alive in us. Against that stand our stubborn refusals to will that order and truth, preferring, instead, the vanity of ourselves that blinds us to the real needs and even the presence of others. We ignore Lazarus at our feet. Lazarus is the image of our wounded and broken humanity which God restores and man ignores. What has he to do with us, we may ask. But in so neglecting Lazarus, the parable suggests, we are neglecting God. “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.”

The lesson is very simple: the love that is shown is the love that is to be lived. The Epistle teaches us that love is of God because God is love. That love is manifested in Jesus Christ so that we might live in love through him. The only question is whether we will live the vision. The Epistle sounds the theme and the Gospel gives the crucial illustration through a parable about our relationship to the vision of God revealed. The Epistle is John’s treatise about that love. The Gospel is the powerful story of the Rich Man (Dives) and Lazarus.

What does it come down to? Simply this. The love of God compels us to love one another. This is not a may-be, but a must-be for our salvation. We are commanded and compelled to love out of the vision of love which has been shown to us. (more…)

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“To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?”

“No one hath ever seen God,” John reminds us, echoing the Old Testament sensibility that God by definition is beyond the things of this world and is not to be collapsed into them or even compared with them. There is a strong sense of negative theology in the viewpoint of ancient Israel and rightly so; it is the counter to idolatry, the tendency to confuse God with the things of the world, to collapse the Creator into the created.

But then, how to deal with the equally strong idea of God’s being with us, especially in the intimacy of our humanity in Jesus Christ? How to deal with the Creator becoming created, with God made man? Such is the Incarnation.

Trinity Sunday celebrates the revealed reality of God in his transcendence and in his immanence, how God is both utterly beyond and other and how God is intimate and near. It is the central mystery of the Christian faith. To negotiate between these two extremes is the paradox of revelation, the paradox of salvation. No greater mystery and none which is so compelling in its elegance and beauty. The whole challenge is to think the Trinity in the way in which we are given to think it. To think it is to discover the logic contained in the images by which God makes himself known to us.

The whole point of Trinity Sunday, and, especially in our Evensong readings tonight, is that the images through which we understand God as Father, Son and Holy Ghost are not of our making. (more…)

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“Behold a door was opened in heaven”

Today is Trinity Sunday. It celebrates the great, grand, and central teaching of the Christian faith. It is about the extravagance of God, how God is always more and greater than we can ever imagine. The Trinity is that greater extravagance – the extravagance of God, both in himself and for us. The Trinity is the mystery of God revealed, the mystery of love made known, the love that is God.

Think God and everything else comes after. But how can we think God? Only by the extravagance of God’s grace that embraces and enfolds us in the community of love, the communion of the Trinity.

And there is the extravagant grace of language, the language of adoration. The language of adoration is grace-given and spirit-inspired. God is always more – always of another order of reality beyond the mundane and the worldly, beyond what is merely human. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity,” as one of the classical and catholic creeds of the Church puts it, the Athanasian Creed – think of the Trinity in this way, the way which God in the extravagant grace of his Son has opened out to us.

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“Behold a door was opened in heaven”

Today is Trinity Sunday. It celebrates the great, grand, and central teaching of the Christian faith. It is about the extravagance of God, how God is always more and greater than we can ever imagine. The Trinity is that greater extravagance – the extravagance of God, both in himself and for us. The Trinity is the mystery of God revealed, the mystery of love made known, the love that is God.

Think God and everything else comes after. But how can we think God? Only by the extravagance of God’s grace that embraces and enfolds us in the community of love, the communion of God. There is the extravagant grace of Holy Baptism when we are named in the intimacy of God’s own naming of himself as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is the extravagant grace of Holy Communion which gathers us into the community of love, the communion of the Trinity.

And there is the extravagant grace of language, the language of Creed and Liturgy, of poetry and song. It is the language of adoration. The language of adoration is grace-given and spirit-inspired. The Athanasian Creed, found tucked away in the back of the Prayer Book, for example, proclaims in the most extravagant language imaginable the mystery of the Trinity by way of negation and affirmation.

God is always more – always of another order of reality beyond the mundane and the worldly, beyond what is merely human. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity” – think of the Trinity in this way, the way which God in the extravagant grace of his Son has opened out to us.

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