Category: Sermons

“The wedding is ready”

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” Shakespeare’s famous sonnet begins. “The marriage of true minds” is a wonderful concept. It reminds us that there are different ways of speaking about marriage including metaphorically. Scripture, too, uses the marriage image in different ways that go beyond the literal and institutional. In fact, marriage is frequently used as the image for the union between the grand opposites: between man and God, between heaven and earth.

The Gospel for The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity is a case in point. “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, who made a marriage for his son.” The parable is rich in its suggestive power. It points to the union of God and man in Jesus Christ, to the marriage feast of human redemption, as it were. But the parable is also about the impediments, the obstacles, that stand in the way. The wedding is said to be ready but are we? What does it mean to be ready?

This Sunday falls within The Octave of All Saints’. All Saints’, too, is about a kind of marriage, the union of God and man in the Communion of Saints. In a way, the Communion of Saints is a wedding celebration where everyone has on “a wedding garment” for all have been made ready for the marriage feast.

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“I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number”

It is “that time of year… when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” In the culture of scattered souls and in the season of scattered leaves, we are gathered together. There is something more than our just being scattered, it seems. Like leaves scattered on the wind in all their colourful autumnal array, but then gathered into heaps of burnished gold, so we are gathered to celebrate the gathering into glory of the scattered fragments of our humanity. Such is the meaning of the Feast of All Saints’.

Are we simply like leaves collected into bags tossed upon some compost heap? Yes and no. The image of the story of human lives as scattered leaves goes back to the Sibylline Oracles of Roman Antiquity as conveyed most wonderfully by Vergil and then used by Dante even more wondrously to capture our being gathered together into the Communion of Saints. The whole human story belongs to one book, divinely written, to be sure, but scattered about on the wind; the leaves of the pages, like the leaves of the trees, are scattered and blown about. But by God’s grace the scattered leaves are gathered together into one volume; the leaves of the autumn likened to the pages – the leaves – of a book.

It is a powerful image and one where the ancient culture speaks profoundly to our contemporary world. We are the culture of the scattered, the disconnected and the distracted – never mind the claims of connectivity. Has it never struck any one as passing strange that in the age of almost endless connectivity we have as well the culture of almost total distraction, indeed, the attention-deficit culture, par excellence? We are the culture of the connect to the disconnect.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the counter to these contemporary experiential realities is the Communion of Saints, the gathering together of the scattered leaves of the human story. Nothing speaks more profoundly to the loneliness and the despair, the desperation and fears of our contemporary world than the idea of the Communion of Saints. We are reminded in the strongest way possible that we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we are not alone but belong to a company beyond number, a spiritual company.

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“Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”

It is, I think, a most compelling and touching scene, at once a story of friendship and forgiveness and of healing and restoration. In so many ways, it illustrates what St. Paul is telling us in the Epistle. Do we not see here in this Gospel scene the kindness of friends towards one another? Do we not hear in this Gospel Christ’s words of forgiveness to the man sick of the palsy? Is it not the tender-heartedness of Jesus that we see displayed here in all of its wonder and power?

Well, to be sure and wonderfully so. And yet there is something more, something of a more sombre and disturbing nature. There is as well in this Gospel scene the vanity of minds, the darkening of the understanding, the hardness of hearts, the corruption of souls; in short, all the other things that the Epistle mentions. There is an evil in the heart which resents and opposes the good that might be done to others.

The soul is the battlefield between good and evil. And we all stand convicted or better yet, in the imagery of the Gospel, we all lie paralysed, unable to move, our palsied limbs reflecting a deeper paralysis of the soul which we see in the resistance and opposition of the scribes to Christ’s words of forgiveness to the one who was paralysed. They say nothing, but “Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?”

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“And one turned back… giving him thanks”

God is extravagant with his mercies; we are miserly with our thanks. October is the month of thanksgiving, especially harvest thanksgiving. But thanksgiving is something more and greater than our thanks for the great bounty of God’s creation and the fruit of human labours. This Gospel story opens us out to the deeper meaning of thanksgiving and its importance with respect to the understanding of our humanity as spiritual creatures. Just note.

There were ten “that lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us”. But only one turned back “and he was a Samaritan”. In short, there are many who cry out for mercy but few who return to give thanks.

To give thanks is more than good manners; it is to acknowledge the mercy freely given and received and to esteem the giver of the mercy freely and supremely. No doubt we have good reason to cry out for mercy like the ten lepers and yet God’s mercy is not given simply for us to take and run away with it. In returning and giving thanks we are more than healed; we are saved or made whole for then we enter into the motions of God’s own love: the going forth and return of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. We enter precisely into the thanksgiving of the Son to the Father. That is the greater mercy and point of all God’s mercies towards us.

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“Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward”

The patience of Job is one of those familiar proverbs or sayings that remain with us even in a less than biblically literate age. Some have pointed out though that Job is anything but patient. He seems remarkably impatient. Yet patience here is not about the quality of our waiting so much as it is about suffering. To be patient is to be acted upon.

The patience of Job is actually a way of talking about the sufferings of Job. And, Job has more than his share of suffering.

The whole book is a kind of drama, a moral drama about suffering and grace. The Book of Job interrogates certain ancient and modern assumptions about suffering. The passage this morning is from the first speech of the three comforters of Job. The phrase ‘Job’s Comforters’ is another one of those once familiar phrases. The phrase is ironic, referring to the patter of pious platitudes which are more annoying than comforting and fundamentally wrong in the way in which suffering is viewed.

This morning’s second lesson suggests a certain way of looking at the human experience of suffering. It opens us out to the idea of redemptive suffering. “After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, establish and strengthen you.” Comfort, it should be noted really means strengthen. The so-called “comfortable words” in the Communion Service are strengthening words, we might say.

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“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”

“Religion,” a comedian once said, “is only guilt with different holidays”. No doubt there is something in the comment. No doubt sin and guilt are among the great commonplaces of religion and especially of the Christian religion.

Right up there with sin and guilt is another great and important Christian commonplace, that much used, much abused, much confused, big, little word, ‘love’, so commonplace as to be found plastered even on bumpers! “Smile, God loves you”. No doubt, it is terribly well-meant, but I wonder whether it evokes anything more than either cute sentimentality or aesthetic revulsion! However nice smiles may be, even as frozen upon the faces of God’s chosen frozen, the love of God, surely, does not reduce itself to mere smiles and happy faces! Love in the gospels, I venture to say, is not about niceness, however nice that might seem to be! It was once complained about a friend of mine that he was not nice, to which he replied “God is not nice and neither am I,” which actually was quite true.

Love constrains us to speak of love. It seems such a commonplace thought. Yet, I wonder if we do not altogether miss the absolutely extraordinary thing about this commonplace. I wonder if we do not altogether fail to see how special, how precious, how extraordinary Christ’s lesson is for us here in this gospel. It goes to the heart of the matter, to the heart that was willing to be pierced and broken for you and for me, indeed, for the whole world.

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“Friend, go up higher”

There was a healing done on the Sabbath under the suspicious eyes of hostile intent. There was a parable spoken in the face of resentful silence; a parable told to counter our presumption and hypocrisy, our hostility and discontent. Jesus speaks and acts. He teaches. At issue is whether we will be teachable. Only so can we ever hope to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith [we] are called”.

For make no mistake, we are called. There is our common vocation. We are called out of ourselves and we are called to God. We are called to the service of God in our life together with one another in the body of Christ. It is really the purpose of our being here today, a purpose which must extend into every aspect of our lives. We either stand for something or we fall for everything. And then there is the matter of how we stand – with gracious determination and faithfulness or in resentful distrust and defensiveness? With bitterness or with graciousness?

St. Paul reminds us of the qualities of that vocation, about how we should seek to be, about how we should act: “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”. These qualities arise from the doctrine – the teaching – which has been given to us and without which these qualities cannot live in us. “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all and in you all” – things which cannot be compromised or denied by concessions to the pressures of the world and society. For then we betray the vocation. We betray what we have been given to proclaim and who we are called to be.

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“I am the bread of life”

Thanksgiving is a strong reminder to us of our spiritual identity. We are inclined, perhaps, to think of Harvest Thanksgiving as a form of folk religion left over from our more agrarian past when we were more directly dependent upon our labours in the fields, the woods and the seas. Or we may be inclined to think of our National Thanksgiving Day, as the left-over of the long durée of the state nationalism of the last century and more, now passé in the age of the global community and the end of the cold war. What, then, are we to make of this Thanksgiving weekend? Does it simply remain with us as a social gathering, a family event, an occasion to get together and enjoy a common meal? Or is there something more to the idea of Thanksgiving?

In the contemporary world where everything, from health care to the environment, from warfare to education, is said to be “driven by technology” or “driven by market forces”, we are in danger of forgetting the spiritual principles which belong to our social and political relationships and identities and which have a more organic character to them, something which is wonderfully illustrated in the way in which our churches are so beautifully decorated with the rich bounty of the fruits of creation at Harvest time. It is, after all, for no technological purpose or economic reason that the fruits of the harvest are before us here in the Church.

No. The point is that Thanksgiving is a profoundly spiritual activity. Pumpkins and zucchinis, apples and turnips, all the rich variety of the harvest are gathered into our churches. Why? To feed God? No. To signal the praise of all creation and all human labour to God. We are with the whole created order in giving praise and thanks to God for what God has given us without which there could be no harvest, no life, no being whatsoever.

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“If any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed;
but let him glorify God in this name.”

His martyrdom, it seems, holds sway over his scholarship, and yet, perhaps, the two are really one. Martyrdom is about a witness to truth; translation was his witness. Tonight we commemorate “William Tyndale, Translator of the Scriptures into English, Martyr, 1536,” as the Calendar of the Book of Common Prayer so concisely and simply puts it. It both reveals and conceals a whole story and an important concept. A translator of the Scriptures into English and a martyr? To be sure.

Some of the greatest achievements of the Anglican witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ are precisely about the connection between language and martyrdom. William Tyndale inaugurates a fateful tradition belonging to a fateful century. Tyndale, Cranmer, and Latimer – all of them great masters of the word in English; two of them as translators and one as a preacher – all of them martyrs. There are others, too, of course, who were martyred in that age when politics was religion and religion was politics; all of which is hard, if not impossible, for us to understand. Yet, there is this wonderful idea that we cannot ignore, I think, namely, the power of translation as a witness to truth.

In the second century BC, the only named author of one of the apocryphal books, Ecclesiasticus, or The Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, comments in the prologue the problem of translation.

“For what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly
the same sense when translated into another language.”

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“Be not anxious”

Jesus’ words are comforting words that speak to an anxious world. 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, 1552) use the phrase “be not carefull,” as derived from William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament. The King James Version of the Bible, produced four hundred years ago in 1611, uses the phrase “take no thought” to capture the Greek word about how our thoughts are so easily 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 in its place, a word which has 17^th century provenance in English but which has been given a much greater weight of interpretation in the 20^th century, no doubt, through the influence of the psychology of Sigmund Freud. The German word angst has entered into our contemporary vocabulary with a vengeance. We are anxious about our anxieties, stressed out about our stresses; in short, self-absorbed.

Our anxieties are the cares which choke and oppress us and preoccupy us. Our problem, it seems, and the cause of our anxiety is that we are often too careful, quite literally, too full of cares about the wrong things and/or in the wrong way. It is not too much to say that out of self-preoccupations arise no end of disorders and troubles: anger and depression, recklessness and stupidity, meanness and selfishness.

The cares of this world beset us but Jesus would have us view the world and its cares in a new way. The passage here from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount recalls us to the great and grand theme of God’s Providence by way of reference to Creation and the Fall.

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