Category: Sermons

“Have you considered my servant Job?”

In the Sunday Office of Morning Prayer, we begin to read from The Book of Job.  Job is the proverbial man of troubles. “All God’s children got troubles,” as the old gospel song puts it, but few have as many troubles as Job. Yet the point of The Book of Job is not simply the extent of his troubles. The point is more about the nature of Job’s dealing with his troubles, especially his faithfulness which takes the form of wrestling with God and for God.

The Book of Job is really a kind of play, a drama of the possibilities of salvation and grace which arise out of the awareness of our utter emptiness. Job, like Abraham, is put to the test. But unlike Abraham, with Job we get to see the inner struggle. We get to see how things look like from the inside of the man of troubles.

It is not about a whine, a whinge or a whimper. But neither is it about lying down and letting God, the world, and other people simply walk all over you. In short, it is not about our fatalistic surrender to the seemingly arbitrary and bitter pointlessness of life. If anything, The Book of Job is a resounding testimony to the justice of God which cannot be reduced to human calculation, whim and demand. For no matter how things appear God’s justice runs and moves through all things, including our hearts. As such The Book of Job is a radical affirmation of the doctrine of creation.

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“Be not anxious”

I have to admit, nothing makes me more anxious than this text! And not just because it falls this year at that time when we are getting back to our regular patterns and routines, to the beginning again of our various programmes with all of the anxieties and worries, the busyness and the annoyances, too, that attend such things. Why, then, the anxiety about not being anxious? Because it is so easily said and yet so greatly misunderstood. To be sure, we are rightly exhorted not to be anxious not just once but actually three times. To be sure, we are given powerful illustrations and reasons not to be anxious. “Behold”, “consider”, “seek” – these are the strong verbs which counter explicitly and wonderfully all our anxieties. They recall us to the great doctrine of the Providence of God. And yet, what makes me anxious, year after year, is how we fail to get this central teaching, the deep doctrine, the critical understanding, that is, in fact, the only true and real counter to the anxieties and the cares, the fears and the worries of each and every age.

That central teaching is further illustrated, I think, both in the Epistle reading and in the Gospel by way of other texts. “God forbid that I should glory,” St Paul tells us, “save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He goes on to say, that “neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.” That is the key phrase, a new creation. Something has changed; the old has become new. There is a new creation. Such is the radical meaning of human redemption. It is entirely about a new creation. We are a new creation in Christ. We forget this at our peril. And in the Gospel? Well, just ponder the weight and meaning of the final coda: “Be ye not anxious about the morrow; for the morrow shall take care for itself: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

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“And one turned back… giving him thanks”

God is extravagant with his mercies; we are miserly with our thanks. There is something profound and wonderful in this quintessential gospel that speaks so wonderfully to this time of transition from Summer to Fall, and especially on this Labour Day weekend. Nothing quite so transformative, in a way, than thanksgiving, the counter to all the tedium of our endless complaining, the counter, too, to all the despairing fatalisms of our world and day. Thanksgiving  is our true and freest labour. We are, I think, a long ways from the suffering of the lepers – the outcasts and rejects – of the ancient world and, yet, there are the fears and anxieties of our own times that beset us and trouble us and which separate us from God and from one another.

There were ten “that lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us”. But only “one of them when he saw that he was healed, turned back and with a loud voice glorified God and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan”. In short, there are many who cry out for mercy but few who return to give thanks. To cry out for mercy, it seems to me, is itself a great matter, a matter of honest realization about ourselves and the human condition. But to return – literally, to turn back – and to give thanks, well, that is something even far more amazing.

Repentance and thanksgiving go together. Both are a return to God, a turning back to the one from whom we have turned away in one fashion or another and turning back to the one upon our whole being depends. Redire ad principium. Repentance and thanksgiving are both about returning to the very principle of our being and knowing, to God in whom we find our truth and life.

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“Brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant”

Ignorant about what? Ignorant about what belongs to the nature of our identity in Christ. But, we are, I am afraid, only too ignorant. And because of our ignorance we are easily “overthrown in the wilderness” of our lives, both individually and corporately. The good news is that even the things of our ignorance can be used to bring us to understanding, to the understanding of the good and to the doing of all “such things as be rightful”, as the Collect puts it.

In the witness of the Scriptures, we have the stories of the ignorance of our humanity written out for us to read just so that we will not be quite so ignorant. “These things”, Paul tells us in his to First Letter the Corinthians, a people remarkable for their willful ignorance, we might say, “were our examples”. And they still are “our examples”. What things? The things belonging to our identity in the body of Christ which we have ignored and denied. But in making such things known to us, we may learn “not to lust after evil things, as they also lusted”. He has in mind the stories of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness; in particular, the stories of disbelief and complaint on the part of Israel towards Moses and, more significantly, towards God.

Paul is doing two things here. First, he is saying that these formative stories of the people of Israel are things from which we can learn. They are “our examples”. Secondly, he is saying something even more significant. He is saying that we are in these stories. The Old Testament stories actually belong to the story of our life in Christ. Paul sees in the wilderness journeys of the ancient people of Israel something which both anticipates and participates in the definitive journey of human redemption signaled and accomplished in the passion of Christ. He is providing an interpretative approach to the reading of the Scriptures.

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“You have received a spirit of sonship”

It was the year 524. The place was a northern Italian town called Pavia. There, in prison, languished a scholar named Boethius, falsely accused of treason against the Arian king, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Boethius would be brutally killed. But not before writing, while in prison, one of the great intellectual and spiritual classics of the West, The Consolation of Philosophy. It, along with Boethius’s theological works, would have an enormous influence upon the development of European culture and understanding.

The word “person” for instance, so much in vogue in our own culture in the discourse of natural rights and identity politics, has its roots in the definition of person that Boethius provided in his treatise about the humanity and the divinity of Christ, Contra Eutychen.  Distinguishing between nature and person is essential for understanding the unity of God and man in Christ and for thinking about the unity and difference of God as Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; in other words, Boethius developed a concept that serves to illuminate an understanding of the names of God revealed in Scripture as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. From such language and terminology for God, there is the natural application of the term to our humanity, especially since for Boethius, following Augustine, man is imago Trinitatis. Being made in the image of God means being made in the image of the Trinity. Such are some of the fruits of his labours by which he is known.

We have, perhaps, as a church and culture forgotten all this. There is something entirely providential in being reminded about the legacy and deeper meaning of such terms as person, defined by Boethius as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” For it reminds us that the language we use about ourselves has its roots in language about God; the two are inseparable. And isn’t that central to the Christian witness in the contemporary world? Namely, to proclaim that our humanity is radically incomplete without God, in this case, that even our language of political and social discourse is grounded in theology? “You have received a spirit of sonship,” Paul proclaims, and from that, and only from that, we might say, flows the true meaning of our actions. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” We are at once our actions and yet more than our actions.

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“I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now been with me
three days, and have nothing to eat”

Seven loaves of bread and a few small fishes. Compassion is dietary light, it might seem, perhaps a Gwyneth Paltrow special. Yet,  the story of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness compels our attention. It is actually part of a kind of New Testament conundrum: there is the story of the feeding of the five thousand and the feeding of the four thousand almost juxtaposed, side by side. There are a host of intriguing differences which suggest some sort of larger design and purpose rather than incompetent mediocrity and forgetfulness, as if confused about a single event and how to tell it.

But without getting into the intricacies of comparing the accounts of Mark and Matthew in relation to Luke and John about these double miracles with differing figures – five thousand, four thousand, seven loafs, five loafs, seven baskets left over, twelve baskets left over, to mention a few – what does this story really signify?

I think it is captured in Mark’s succinct phrase. “I have compassion on the multitude,” Jesus says. In a way, these remarkable stories are all about the compassion of Christ, the Son of God, in whom we learn the love of God for our wounded and broken humanity, even more, for our humanity in its disarray, our humanity lost and hungry in the wilderness.

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