Category: Sermons

“Be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods
or worship the golden image which you have set up.”

We know them better, perhaps, by their Hebrew names from the canticle, the Benedicite, Omnia Opera, taken from the Apocryphal book, the Song of the Three Young Men, regarded as an addition to the Book of Daniel between verses 23 and 24 of this evening’s first lesson from the 3^rd chapter of the Book of Daniel. The canticle, appointed for use at Morning Prayer, speaks of Ananias, Azarias, and Misael. Here they are known by their Persian or pagan names of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, colourful and memorable names, to be sure.

And a colourful, memorable and powerful story. But then, that is a feature of the Book of Daniel, a book comprising six stories and four dream visions, a book which has bequeathed a number of memorable commonplaces which are, perhaps still with us even in our biblically illiterate era. We still speak of “feet of  clay”, of “the writing on the wall”, of being “in the Lion’s den”, and, for the historically minded, perhaps, “the king’s matter” – a reference from the Book of Daniel delicately applied to Henry the VIII with respect to his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Written during the Hellenizing reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, following upon the conquests of Alexander the Great, the stories are set in an earlier period of persecution and conquest when Israel was in captivity in Babylon.

They are stories of courage and conviction, stories which reveal the primacy of faith and the worship of God in his majesty and truth over and against the tyranny and overreach of worldly powers and potentates. Here Daniel’s companions are put to the test about their primary allegiance: to God or to the image of the King Nebuchadnezzar who ordered that at “the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music” everyone was to fall down and worship the golden image? Failure to comply meant being cast into “a burning fiery furnace”. Charmingly and colourfully told, with the fourfold repetition of the cacophonous command, for instance, it concentrates an all important question of conscience. What do you really value? Or to put in the language of Matthew from tonight’s second lesson, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” What do you treasure? Which is a way of asking what do we really worship? God or ourselves in our practical, hedonistic and economic pursuits?

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“Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful”

These words of Joel the Prophet sound a particularly fitting and providential note on this Sunday which is designated in the Anglican Church of Canada and beyond as “Back-to-Church Sunday.” What Joel’s words remind us is that back to Church really means back to God. “Return to the Lord, your God.”

In so many ways, this is the problem that the Churches confront in our contemporary culture. While God may or may not be a believable concept, the Church certainly is not. Beset by scandals and decay, despair and demographical decline, there seems nothing positive and attractive about the institutional church, especially in the face of the feel-good culture of the contemporary smorgasbord of “spiritualities.” And yet the words of Joel, within the context of our liturgy as a whole, speak profoundly to the discontents and fears of our increasingly anxious and fretful world. All our vaunted certainties have crumbled into the dust of uncertainty.

The progressivist myth that things are always getting better and better is simply not true and no longer credible, however much we try to cling to it. It is, perhaps, in that context that Joel’s words here have a kind of resonance for us and signal the possibilities of a new beginning.

For that is what the Prophets of Israel are always about. Their words, which sometimes seem so harsh and uncompromising, are the strong wake-up call that we desperately need to hear, now and always. They recall us to the most primary relationship in our lives: God, without whom there is nothing and we are nothing. In a way, we know this and in a way, we don’t. What gets in the way?

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“And one turned back… giving him thanks”

God is extravagant with his mercies; we are miserly with our thanks. 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.

It is the point of this gospel story and the signal note of all our liturgies – “Lord, have mercy upon us”. Our “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” arises only out of a due sense of all God’s mercies. And if we should think the actions of one Samaritan to be bit extravagant and a trifle excessive – not only “turn[ing] back” but “glorify[ying] God with a loud voice” and “fall[ing] down on his face at [Jesus’] feet, giving him thanks;” in short, making a bit of spectacle of himself, we might think – then we have only to reflect for a moment upon the extravagances to which our liturgy regularly calls us.

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“Walk in the Spirit”

“Walk in the Spirit”, Paul bids us. “How do you read the Law?” Jesus asks before responding to the rhetorical question, “and who is my neighbour?” with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Spirit and Flesh, Law and Grace. In the Epistle, Paul notes the opposition between the Spirit and the Flesh. In the Gospel, there is the contrast between Law and Grace. What does it all come down to? To the grace of God which causes the fruits of the Spirit to be manifest in our lives. To the grace of God which allows us to go and do as the Samaritan has done, for love is the fulfilling of the Law.

Paul elaborates on the opposition between Spirit and Flesh. It is important, I think, to be clear about what he is saying. He is not saying that the flesh, meaning the body or physical material reality, is evil. It can’t be in a Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding since creation and everything in creation is by definition “good” and the whole of it “very good”. This is the fundamental perspective granted to us in The Book of Genesis and one which has profound consequences for how we think about good and evil.

What he teaches here is the ancient wisdom shared by Greeks, Jews, Christians and Muslims, among other religious traditions, which recognizes that the problem is about our attachments to things. This is heightened in the Christian view by seeing evil as really being about our wills, what Paul calls here “the desire of the flesh”. He provides a list of “the works of the flesh”. In every case it is about our relation to the body, to the world, and to one another, all of which involve a denial of our primary relation to God. In short, the problem is not the world or the flesh per se but our willful attachment and obsessions with the world and the flesh. From adultery to idolatry to witchcraft to wrath to drunkenness, each of the works of the flesh reveals a disordered relationship to the things of creation and, particularly, to one another, and, of course, to God. Ultimately, Paul’s list here will be given a more systematic expression in the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust.

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“Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.”

It is a healing miracle and one which excited great wonder and astonishment, so much so that Jesus’ charge to “tell no man” gets completely ignored! We sense the power of the occasion. One who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech is brought before Jesus. Those who bring him to Jesus want him to lay his hands upon him – signifying  a blessing and, perhaps, a healing.

Jesus’ response is intriguing. Curious actions and, then, a powerful word. The actions and the word go together. The healing is in some sense sacramental – words being used with the ordinary things of the world to effect something quite extraordinary, even supernatural or spiritual. What actions? Jesus takes the one who is afflicted aside, meaning away from the multitude – a bit like going into the privacy of a doctor’s office, I suppose. He examines him, physically it seems, putting his fingers into his ears which might seem a wee bit strange. Not so strange, though, as what he does next: he spit, and touched his tongue! Then there is one further gesture or action. Jesus looks up to heaven and sighs; only at that point does he speak, saying in Aramaic, “Ephphatha, that is, be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed and he spake plain.”

Ephphatha. It is one of the few places in the New Testament where we have an Aramaic word even though Aramaic was probably the actual language which Jesus spoke. Aramaic is a semitic language related to Hebrew. Mark transliterates the Aramaic word into Greek letters and then gives us the interpretation of the word in Greek. Be opened is the English translation of the Greek and the Aramaic.

Jesus the Son is defined by his relation to the will of God the Father. I love the picture here of Jesus looking up to heaven and sighing, especially after the intimate gestures of touching the ears and tongue with his fingers and spitting on the ground. There is something wonderfully hands-on about this entire scene, something empirical and tangible; in short, something quite real about Jesus’ engagement with our humanity. The spiritual is not something ethereal and remote but rather down to earth and ordinary. Paradoxically, that makes the scene all the more extraordinary and special.

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“By the grace of God, I am what I am”

“I am the least of the Apostles,” St. Paul declares and then goes on to say that “by the grace of God, I am what I am”. The phrase complements, it seems to me, the prayer of the humble publican, “God be merciful to me a sinner”.

What can it mean? Is it by the grace of God that Paul is a sinner? No. But it is by the grace of God that Paul can in all honesty know that he is a sinner. Why is he “the least of the Apostles”? In his eyes and in his words, “because I persecuted the Church of God.” It is all part of the story of how Saul the Persecutor became Paul the Apostle.

But do you and I do much better or any less when in our pride and arrogance, in our folly and deceit, we deny the very truth of God upon whom we so utterly depend? Are we not persecutors, too, when like the proud Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, we do nothing more than pray with ourselves, giving mere lip service to the presence of God? The odd nod to God, as it were, but where it is really all about us?

In a way it is the quintessential picture of pride. Jesus in the parable names it ever so clearly. “He prayed thus with himself”. Not to God, it seems. The consequences are wonderfully clear in the content of his prayer. He claims to be better than everyone else. “Thank God that I am not like them”. But that is no prayer.

There can be no prayer when we are not open to the otherness of God and so to one another. There can be no prayer when we are closed in upon ourselves, standing upon the ground of our own self-righteousness. There can be no prayer without the humility which alone is the counter to all pride.

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“Love your enemies”

“Love your enemies”, Jesus says. He doesn’t say, “don’t worry, you don’t have any enemies.” For he knows only too well about our enmities and hatreds. Yet, “love your enemies,” he says. How utterly impossible, it seems!

We have the hardest time imaginable loving the more obvious and, dare one say, more ordinary objects of love: our friends and family, our country and world, our God and Saviour. How can we be commanded to love those that have set their faces, their hands, and their hearts against us?

Yet, the demands of the Gospel are precisely impossible because our ordinary loves are equally impossible. They are all the places of our enmity, too. We are defined by our loves and so by our hatreds too. For what are our hatreds, but our loves in disarray?

Our enemies, after all, are rarely far-off and faceless. They are frequently only too close at hand. Their faces are only too often mirrored by our own. We are at enmity with ourselves, with one another and with God. It is no good pretending that our hearts are not touched by such enmities when our hearts are precisely the places of enmity. We have seen the enemy and it is us! But it is precisely in the face of these enmities – these animosities in the soul – that we are bidden, indeed, commanded to love.

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“Jesus sat down and taught the people out of the ship.”

Jesus, “seeing the multitudes went up into a mountain … sat down and opened his mouth and taught them,” saying “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Jesus, standing by the lake of Gennesaret when “the people pressed upon them to hear the word of God,” entered one of the ships, and “sat down and taught the people out of the ship.” Like the ancient philosophers of the schools of pagan antiquity, he sits in the seat of wisdom. He is the teacher. It is, I think, a wonderful image. Jesus in the seat of wisdom; Jesus as the wisdom of God. The image of sitting and teaching belongs to the great religions and philosophies of the world.

But what does Jesus teach us? All the things that belong to wisdom. What is wisdom? All the things that belong to our life with God, the eternal things that are opened out in the midst of the passing things, the temporal things, of our world and day. It is about the understanding which alone can govern and peaceably order our world. It is about the understanding which alone enables the “Church to joyfully serve [God] in all godly quietness.”

Now there’s a thought! “Godly quietness.” It seems the exact opposite of our activity-fixated age in our obsession with practicality and action and our lust for power and domination. The very things, of course, which contribute to the destruction of our world and ourselves.  When wisdom is lost and gone, we are easily the victims and even the perpetrators of violence and destruction. We contemplate the horrendous loss of life in Norway by a right-wing fanatic intent, it seems, in making a statement about political policies regarding immigration, resulting in mind-numbing and indiscriminate carnage. Terrorism is always indiscriminate in the range and the rage of its destruction.

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“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful”

Luke provides us with an extended version of what we know as the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s Gospel. Only here it is a Sermon on the Plain, on the flatlands of our human existence, as it were. Today’s gospel is sometimes known as ‘the mercy gospel’ because of this opening line.

It complements one of the most powerful of the Beatitudes in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.” Unlike the other beatitudes which confront us with the paradox of difference, this beatitude is about the paradox of the same. Luke emphasizes that element in this passage and in a way deepens, perhaps, our understanding. There is the element of equality: judge not and not be judged; condemn not and not be condemned; forgive and be forgiven; give and it shall be given to you. But these conditions hang, it seems to me, on the opening statement. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.”

It is, I think, a remarkably profound statement. It lies at the heart of Christian prayer, captured in the Lord’s Prayer: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The point is that somehow the realities of heaven are what are looked for and expected on earth. But that is the point of Jesus Christ. He is God with us, the very Logos of God who “suffers in us at every moment”, as James Joyce notes in his rambling novel, Ulysses. What is opened out to us are the properties of heaven, of what is eternal and true, as being the measure and truth of our lives. “For with the same measure that ye mete withal, it shall be measured to you again.”

You get what you give, it seems. There seems to be a kind of justice in that idea, yet one which does not always equate with our experiences. (more…)

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“Rejoice with me”

Jesus tells two parables, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. They are interrelated parables and they actually serve as the introduction to a third parable, the parable of the prodigal son. They are all about the divine mercy which reaches out to gather us into God’s love.

Such is the occasion for rejoicing. In what do we rejoice? We rejoice in the redemption of the lost sheep and the lost coin. We rejoice in the redemption of the lost son. Through these parables we rejoice in the redemption of our humanity.

The parables are lessons in the divine mercy which redeems our humanity. What does that mean? It means that there is more to our lives than the everyday and the mundane. It means there is more to who we are than just what belongs to the immediacy of our experiences. The mercy here which is the occasion of great rejoicing is that we are found in God’s love for us without which we are lost in ourselves and in the vagaries of our circumstances.

Trinity Season abounds in the lessons of love, the divine love which sets our human loves in order. We are meant to see ourselves in these parables as the one lost sheep or the one lost coin whom the shepherd and the woman of the house “seek diligently,” meaning lovingly, until we are found. God is the shepherd and God is the woman who rejoice in our being found. Even more, we are meant to find ourselves in the figure of the prodigal son who returns in repentance, having squandered all that he had, and finds that he is embraced in his father’s love. God is the father. But Christ is the son who has gone into the far-away land of our sinfulness and wastefulness. In coming to ourselves, we remember who we are in the sight of God. That remembrance marks a turning point. It is a movement of divine grace in us that impels our return to the one whose love seeks our return.

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