Category: Sermons

“There was war in heaven”

It is hard enough to contemplate the realities of hell on earth let alone to consider war in heaven. Just last Sunday we had the spectacle of the grieving widow and the sorrowing mother, images which in our day are often about the tragic loss of sons and husbands in the theatres of wars all over our war-torn and weary world. Sadly, not even Sunday Schools are safe as the reports this morning from Nairobi, Kenya, indicate. Only the compassion of Christ, it seems, can speak to such hard and harsh realities if anything can.

These harsh realities belong to an ancient understanding about the disorders of our humanity. They recall us to the story of Cain and Abel, the classic story of the first murder, the murder of a brother, fratricide, that arises out of resentment and envy, we might say, at a benefit that another has received. And so begins the long sorry tale of man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man. The point of the story is that we are in it. Have you thought or said about someone, particularly a sibling, “I hate you!” or worse, “I’ll kill you”? At the very least such things belong to our thoughts and words. I hope not our deeds! The moral point is simple and clear. If looks could kill we would all be dead; even worse, we would all be murderers! In the ancient biblical story, God’s challenging question, “Where is your brother?” speaks to Cain’s conscience which he tries to deny by the age-old phrase, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God reminds him and us, “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”

Nothing, after all, can be hidden from the sight of God. “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid …” We deceive only ourselves.

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“There was war in heaven”

It is hard enough to contemplate the spectacle of war on earth. How much more disturbing to think of war in heaven! For however we think of heaven, if we think of it at all, surely, it is about what is beyond the strife and stress of a weary, and war-torn world. What can it mean to speak of war in heaven?

The ancient biblical story of Cain and Abel is the account of the first murder. A fratricide, the killing of a brother, its intention is to awaken us to a larger sense of our common humanity in its disarray. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is Cain response to God’s convicting question, “Where is your brother?” God’s question in that story echoes and extends God’s first question to us in the whole Bible, “Where are you?” Where we are is very much bound up with one another. Cain’s response is a question of dismissal and denial, a dismissal and a denial of his obligation and concern for his brother and by extension to anyone else.

“Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God says. It is a wonderful image that contains within itself volumes upon volumes of the sense of justice that means that no injury, no hurt, no deed of undoing, no act of malice can go unnoticed and overlooked. It opens us out to truth, the truth of God before which we are held accountable, a truth which transcends, but does not ignore the things of our hearts or the things of our hands, both the seen and the unseen. After all, if looks could kill not only would we all be dead, but even worse, we would all be murderers!

But angels? War in heaven? What does any of this have to do with Cain and Abel? The point is already there implicitly in the ancient Genesis story. It is simply this. The struggles between good and evil are cosmic in scope and they are inescapably spiritual struggles with which all spiritual creatures contend.

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“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

We have seen this picture far too many times. It is the picture of the weeping widow and the grieving mother. Almost every day and for far, far too many years, we have had to contemplate the spectacles of unbearable griefs and unspeakable sorrows: mothers and wives weeping for the loss of their children and husbands obliterated and destroyed in acts of calculated yet mindless violence in the troubled war zones of our world and day, in Kabul, in Aleppo, in Benghazi, to name but a few. Such pictures have become the commonplaces of our culture and, paradoxically, the commentary upon our capacity for compassion.

We have, I fear, become too accustomed to such sights. Grief has become politicized; our emotions have become the battleground for competing political causes. The real casualty is compassion. Compassion has been killed in us. How can it be made to live in us again? That is the purpose of this Gospel story.

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“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

We have seen this picture far too many times. It is the picture of the weeping widow and the grieving mother. Almost every day and for far, far too many years, we have had to contemplate the spectacles of unbearable griefs and unspeakable sorrows: mothers and wives weeping for the loss of their children and husbands obliterated and destroyed in acts of calculated yet mindless violence in the troubled war zones of our world and day, in Kabul, in Aleppo, in Benghazi, to name but a few. Such pictures have become the commonplaces of our culture and, paradoxically, the commentary upon our capacity for compassion.

We have, I fear, become too accustomed to such sights. Grief has become politicized; our emotions have become the battleground for competing political causes. The real casualty is compassion. Compassion has been killed in us. In its place, there reigns frustration and rage, cynicism and despair at our own impotence. We look upon what we cannot control or perhaps even begin to comprehend. We look and then we look away. We want to run away. Any vestiges of compassion that we might once have felt are swallowed up in bitterness and anger.

And yet, perhaps, just perhaps, another glance at this gospel story might help us to look again and to look again with eyes of compassion, not just cynical disdain, to look with hearts of patient hopefulness, not just crippling despair. Perhaps, just perhaps, there is something here that speaks to the unspeakable griefs of our world and day. In our cynicism and despair, we are like the young man who is dead and who is being carried to his grave. But in the looking again at this poignant picture of a widow’s grief and a mother’s sorrow, perhaps, just perhaps, we shall be raised up in the hope that arises from the compassion of Christ.

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“Her sins which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much”

To my mind it is one of the most moving stories in the Gospels. In relation to our first lesson from Ezekiel it challenges us about our hearts: hearts of stone or hearts of flesh? What Ezekiel envisions, it is not too much to say, is what is illustrated in this Gospel story, namely, the hardness of our hearts of stone and whether we can be moved to compassion and seek forgiveness.

Ezekiel is speaking about the condition of Israel, about God’s strengthening and providential presence with his people in the places of their exile, about a change in them by his grace and spirit. One heart and a new spirit; a heart of flesh in contrast to a heart of stone.

There is just that sense of contrast between a hard and inflexible spirit and a forgiving and compassionate spirit that is also brought out ever so personally and powerfully in Luke’s story. It is not about being soft and wimpy; it is about something vital and living that moves in us if we will set aside the empty dogmatisms of our empty lives. In a way, this gospel story challenges us about what really matters and about what kind of hearts are actually in us. It brings us to some of the essential and central teachings of the Christian faith. Of course, that is the real challenge: to acknowledge and name the essential teachings which ultimately shape our lives.

It is this unnamed and unspeaking woman who teaches us so much. Jesus is at pains to show the importance of her action and its meaning. He knows what is moving in her heart. Her act, extravagant and moving, is an act of love in repentance. I cannot stress enough how powerful and important that is. I cannot stress enough the importance of the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins of which this Gospel story is such a compelling witness. Jesus says to her, “your sins are forgiven.”

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“Be not anxious”

I like to think of this as “the anxiety gospel” but that runs the risk of only adding to the problem. “Behold, the fowls of the air,” Jesus says, “consider the lilies of the field” and “Seek ye first the kingdom of God”. Behold, consider, and  seek are strong words  that offer a compelling antidote to our anxieties.

What is Jesus saying here? He wants us to look at the world with new eyes. And it makes a difference for us in our lives. To behold what he wants us to see, to consider what he wants us to ponder, to seek what he wants us to desire counters the paralysis of our fears, the terror of our anxieties and even the anxiety about our anxieties.

Jesus says “be not anxious” and he says it more than once in this gospel. He knows our anxieties and how prone we are to being anxious, quite literally, about “a multitude of things”. It is “The Martha Syndrome” as Jesus diagnoses it elsewhere: “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. And we can worry ourselves, quite literally, to death about them.

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“And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to me.”

The Cross is the meeting place of lovers. That “strange and uncouth thing”, as the poet George Herbert calls it, reveals the incompleteness of our human loves and the all-sufficiency of divine love. It signals what might be called the erotic liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy shaped and governed by the Cross, the liturgy of eros redeemed, the liturgy of the redemption of desire.

I have often been struck with the coincidence of the late summer with the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14^th) and especially with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks so profoundly and yet so paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise in the resumption of studies at our Colleges and Schools. Inventio crucis.

Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem and 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 of things, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual life that belongs especially to academic communities. The cross is the meeting place of such lovers, too.

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“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger”

He is named, by Jesus, as “this stranger,” the one who is the other, the foreigner, literally, the alien. An outsider, too, we might say, to capture all of the inflections of meaning in this text and story. Luke sheds further light on “this stranger” in the simple phrase “and he was a Samaritan.” He was in the company of nine others sharing with them a further identity of exclusion; they were ten men that were lepers – the rejects and outcasts of ancient society. And on top of that, a Samaritan, the outcasts of the Jewish culture.

What stands out in the story is that “this stranger” is the one who gives thanks and “this stranger” is the one who is not only healed, like the other nine, but more importantly is made whole. Salvation, it seems, is more than just the healing of our physical infirmities.

This is a powerful story about the power and truth and the beauty of a profoundly spiritual activity, the act of giving thanks. A thanksgiving story, it appears in our liturgy in the late summer and early fall as well as being appointed for the Gospel for Thanksgiving Day, meaning our national day of Thanksgiving which in Canada is coincident with the older traditions of Harvest Thanksgiving and often eclipsed by them. It illustrates profoundly, I think, the spiritual nature of all our thanksgivings.

The giving of thanks is a free act, perhaps, the freest act that we can do. And yet, that act of thanksgiving, so central to religious and spiritual life, is not simply about ourselves. It is more about the movements of God’s grace in us; God in us, if you will. This is part of the deep Christian insight that relates to who Jesus is for us. I think this Gospel story provides the Christian understanding that transforms the idea of thanksgiving. It is, ultimately, about our participation in the act of human redemption accomplished by Jesus. His life, and therefore his life in us, is about thanksgiving. His life is his thanksgiving to the Father; the thanksgiving of the whole of redeemed creation has its highest expression in the thanksgiving of the Son to the Father. Like the stranger, in returning and giving thanks we are being made whole.

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“How readest thou?”

“Walk in the Spirit,” St. Paul exhorts us. “Go and do thou likewise,” Jesus says to the lawyer as the conclusion and application of the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan. There is, it seems, a kind of emphasis on acting and doing. And yet, doing is really only the active expression of our thinking. The key question here is captured in our text. It is Jesus’ question. “What is written in the law? How readest thou?”

How do you read? It is really a way of asking how do you think about things. In this case the context is intriguing. The question, asked by the lawyer to tempt Jesus, that is to say, to put Jesus to the test in an attempt to catch him in a contradiction, was “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ response is to ask him about the law. The answer to his question has to do with how the law is understood. In short, our doings have some kind of intimate relation to our thinking and understanding. By law here Jesus refers to the most important part of the Jewish Scriptures, known as the Law or the Torah. It has pride of place in the Jewish understanding in the same way that the Gospel has a kind of primacy in the New Testament and which is signaled in our liturgy. We are immediately thrown into the important questions about how we read and understand the Scriptures.

This is one of the pressing problems of the contemporary Church. What I find important here is that the practical urge and spirit ultimately turns upon our thinking and understanding.

There are already several levels of thinking at work in this remarkable and rich Gospel story. First, the lawyer’s initial question about eternal life is a concern far later than the Law itself. It is really a question that belongs to late Judaism, though the ideas of eternal life are found in the Psalms. In general, though, the strong Jewish emphasis on the objectivity of the Law as eternal and everlasting is in contrast to the fleeting nature of the passing world and of human life. The idea of immortality is, perhaps, implicit in the recognition of the divinely given Law but only becomes explicit, I think, through the later engagement with Greek thought. Yet, here, the lawyer is directed by Jesus to the Law and to its understanding.

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