Category: Sermons

“Then Jesus turned”

The Sunday Next Before Advent – proxima ante. What a lovely conjunction of prepositions, those little words that give direction and position to words and ideas in  their relation to one another! With the word ‘next’, we have a sense of continuity, as in a series where one thing follows upon another, next being what follows in sequence. With the word ‘before’, we are alerted to the beginnings of something new; in this case, the season of Advent. This Sunday, with its double prepositions of next and before, signals a transition. It is a time of endings and beginnings; a time, too, of renewal.

The endings and beginnings all turn upon one thing: our life in Christ. “Come and see,” Jesus says here in the first chapter of John’s Gospel, as part of the dialogue of question and answer with two of the disciples of John the Baptist who, as it turns out, are about to make a transition and become the disciples of Jesus. “What do you seek?” Jesus has asked them, having turned to them as they were following him after hearing John the Baptist’s remarkable pronouncement about Jesus as “the Lamb of God.” They had replied, oddly it may seem with another question, “Rabbi – Master, where dwellest thou?”

Jesus’ question and statement are the first forms of direct speech by Jesus in John’s Gospel. “What seek ye?” “Come and see.” The first question; the first command. There is something profound and wonderful in these words. They speak at once to the whole pageant of our lives in faith – seeking ultimately what God wants for us which is to be found in our coming and seeing but also in our abiding with Jesus. This has been, we might say, the nature and purpose of the Trinity season. Yet, there is the Advent theme, too, signalled here, at once by John the Baptist, who points out Jesus to us, “Behold, the Lamb of God,” and in the simple but profound moment of Jesus turning to the disciples of John to ask them, “what seek ye?” Advent is about our turning back to the center of our lives but only because the center has turned to us. “Then Jesus turned.”

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“For God created man for incorruption, and made him
in the image of his own eternity”

In the narthex of the Church, in the entrance porch above the second set of doors, there is inscribed the following: “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God”. I wonder how many of you have ever noticed it or have ever wondered what it means. It comes from The Book of Ecclesiastes, the most philosophical book of the Old Testament, a book which belongs to a form of ancient literature known as Wisdom Literature.

There are, of course, many things that escape our attention and many things that puzzle and confuse us. They are often things which are set before us for our reflective consideration. It belongs to our wisdom, collectively and individually, to ponder them. Not every thing is simple and self-evident.

November is the grey month of our remembering. There is the remembering of All Saints’, signaling our vocation in the perfection and unity of our humanity in the Trinity of God. There is the remembering of All Souls’ in our common passing, the mortality which confronts us all. There is the secular or civil remembering of all those who gave their lives in the great conflicts of the 20th century, a bloody and terrible century, for the sake of the rational freedoms of our political and social life, if indeed we are worthy of such things.

These remembrances have in them an inescapably contemplative quality. In one way or another, we contemplate our end; our end, that is to say, in the sense of purpose. What are we here for, individually and collectively? This sense of end or purpose appears in the Scripture readings at this time of the year which have a contemplative quality to them. We are reading from books, either within or without the canonical Scriptures, which are generally known as Wisdom Literature.

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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 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.

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“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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