Category: Sermons

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”

In the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering. In the greyness of the year comes Christ the King striding across the barren fields of our humanity to gather us into glory (with apologies to T.S. Eliot). It is the glory of the Communion of Saints.

All Saints’ Day recalls us to the vocation of our humanity. We are not called to heroic pretension and presumption but to holiness. We are called to the Communion of Saints. An article of Faith, the lovely vision of the City of God is nothing less than a vision of our redeemed humanity. It signals what God seeks and wills for us and reminds us that our life in Faith always places us in a community. But what kind of community?

The Gospel reading for All Saints shows us. It is a spiritual community defined by blessedness, the blessedness that comes from God to us and is about nothing less than the grace of God at work in human hearts. There is at once diversity and unity to our life in the Communion of Saints. Nowhere is that signaled more profoundly perhaps than in the Sermon on the Mount, in what is known as well as the Beatitudes.

The Beatitudes are counter-culture both with respect to the ancient and the contemporary world. They counter our self-absorption, the narcissism and the nihilism that surround us and defeat us. They challenge us precisely because the Beatitudes place our lives upon the foundation of heavenly grace. They do so in the awareness of the limits of human life and experience considered simply in itself.

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“I do as the Father has commanded me,
so that the world may know that I love the Father”

It is surely a kind of wonderful providence that our second lesson should encompass this morning’s Gospel at Holy Communion. A wonderful providence that confirms the essential point that the Holy Spirit “shall teach [us] all things and bring all things to [our] remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you,” Jesus says. Somehow that point is brought home to us in the collocation of these lessons. But are we listening?

Or shall we discover our unbelief and our disdain and dismissal of the “righteous man” whom we have afflicted, scorned and derided only to discover that “it was we who strayed from the way of truth, and the light of righteousness did not shine on us, and the sun did not rise upon us?” Such have we heard in our first lesson from Wisdom this evening. To hear that would be a saving knowledge, to be sure, but how much better to let God’s Word have its resonance in us and in our lives? For that is the point.

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“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

Seeing is believing, it is commonly said, but here is the story of someone who having heard believed and having heard again, believed yet again – all without seeing. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us since “faith cometh by hearing” except that what is heard and believed stands in such stark contrast to what is wanted to be seen. “Except ye see signs and wonders,” Jesus says, “ye will not believe.” He names our expectation and its consequence – our unbelief. For where God is wanted to be tangibly present – immediately there for us, subject to us, as it were – faith has no meaning. The Word has no resonance in us.

In the Gospel, the demand is that Jesus should be physically present for an act of healing to be effective: “Come down ere my child die”. Something divine in Jesus is at once acknowledged and denied in the request. For where the Word is made captive to our desires, there the sovereign freedom of the Word can have no play upon our understanding. To acknowledge the sovereign freedom of the Word, on the other hand, means that our understanding is made captive to the Word and not the Word to the immediacy of our desires. Such acknowledgement is faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen”. It has its play primarily upon our understanding and not upon our senses.

The captivity of our understanding to the Word gives meaning and purpose to our desires without which they are essentially nothing. (more…)

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“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you.”

It is a powerful passage and one which takes us back to the Sundays of Easter leading to Pentecost, to the coming down of the Holy Spirit, hence the liturgical colour of red which connects the Holy Spirit with the Apostles who are sent in Jesus’ name. In other words, this powerful passage from the Gospel of St. John places us in the very heart of the Trinity; in short, in the communion of God who is the basis of our communion and fellowship with one another. We live only when we live with God.

That must seem a hard saying or at least a puzzling statement and yet it lies at the very heart of the Christian understanding of our life with God. Through the witness of the Scriptures, Jesus, who is the Word of God, has made known to us the things which God wants us to know and live. His word becomes the very basis of our life in his body, the Church. The Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude reminds us of the apostolic fellowship to which we belong precisely because of the power of the Holy Spirit “teach[ing us] all things and bring[ing] all things to [our] remembrance,” all the things which Jesus has said to us.

At first glance, such ideas might seem merely dogmatic and authoritative. But upon consideration, perhaps, you can begin to see their wisdom. Left to ourselves, it can be said, we are destructive monsters – the whole of the biblical witness bears testimony to this idea, an idea which is equally confirmed by experience itself.  We live in the midst of a bloody, violent and uncertain world, a world of our own making, to be sure. And yet, the Scripture readings of this day remind us of another kingdom, the kingdom of God, another city, the heavenly city, the City of God. They remind us of the apostolic fellowship of the Church which, if it is to be the Church, must stand upon the authority of God’s Word.

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“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you.”

It is a powerful passage and one which takes us back to the Sundays of Easter leading to Pentecost, to the coming down of the Holy Spirit, hence the liturgical colour of red which connects the Holy Spirit with the Apostles who are sent in Jesus’ name. In other words, this powerful passage from the Gospel of St. John places us in the very heart of the Trinity; in short, in the communion of God who is the basis of our communion and fellowship with one another. We live only when we live with God.

That must seem a hard saying or at least a puzzling statement and yet it lies at the very heart of the Christian understanding of our life with God. Through the witness of the Scriptures, Jesus, who is the Word of God, has made known to us the things which God wants us to know and live. His word becomes the very basis of our life in his body, the Church. The Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude reminds us of the apostolic fellowship to which we belong precisely because of the power of the Holy Spirit “teach[ing us] all things and bring[ing] all things to [our] remembrance,” all the things which Jesus has said to us.

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“Be renewed in the spirit of your mind”

It is a wonderful phrase set in the midst of a powerful passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, a passage which opens us out to the possibilities of our being transformed into better and more thoughtful people, literally new people. At issue is whether we have learned Christ – the constant challenge in our lives, I might add – “if so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus.” It means a change, a change of mind, of attitude and outlook. What stands out is the very thing missing from our culture and church – teaching and a commitment to intellectual and spiritual life. We are, I fear, like those whom Paul calls the Gentiles, who walk, he suggests, “in the vanity of their mind[s]”, their “understanding darkened”, “alienated from the life of God” through two things: “ignorance” and “hardness of heart.” Tough words!

The consequence, as Paul sees it, is a dissolute and aimless life – “lasciviousness,” and “all uncleanness with greediness”  are the terms he uses. He could be commenting on our world! Yet it is precisely in the face of such things that something new and strange is revealed; a change in attitude and outlook. By God’s Word and Spirit we are called to a new life, a constant “renew[ing] of the spirit of our minds.”

Paul makes it clear that this change in attitude and outlook is founded in the motions of God’s love towards us in Jesus Christ. The Epistle reading ends with the exhortation to be “kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” Forgiveness. (more…)

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“Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

We seem to be very much in the company of grieving widows and sorrowing mothers! Naomi has lost her husband Elimelech and her two sons who were also the husbands of her two daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, after whom The Book of Ruth is named. In a way, such situations, though sad, are hardly unique. You only need to think about your own families and your own communities to recall similar sadnesses, sorrows and loss. And yet, as Paul suggests in our second lesson from his Letter to the Philippians such commonplaces of sadness and sorrow, the thing that have happened, can “really serve to advance the Gospel.” Somehow such circumstances can be the occasion in which Christ can be honoured and glorified. In another words, the Scriptures give us ways to face the hard and sad things of human life.

Probably written sometime after the Babylonian exile, The Book of Ruth with its timeless and reflective mood is notionally set in the time of the Judges. In the Christian Bible it is found immediately after The Book of Judges. In a way it is a kind of critical commentary on The Book of Judges, offering a completely contrasting account of Jewish identity and mission. The Book of Judges like many of the early books of the Hebrew Scriptures are written from a kind of exclusionary viewpoint with the emphasis upon Israel as the Chosen People separate and apart from the nations round about. Over and against that stands another perspective which emphasizes the role and mission of Israel as “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” as Isaiah puts it and as the Nunc Dimittis from Luke’s Gospel repeats in our evening liturgy, the idea that what has been proclaimed to Israel is for all people, something universal in principle. These tensions define Jewish history and thought which oscillate between the one and the other.

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