Category: Sermons

“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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“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart
and knoweth all things”

It is, I think, a great comfort. St. John in his epistle-treatise on love seeks to settle us upon “the one thing needful”, our contemplation of the love of God that dwells in us and the necessity of acting out of that love in our love for one another. Yet, while it is comforting in the biblical and theological sense of strengthening, it is also convicting. It challenges and convicts our hearts.

For where are our hearts? Everywhere except with God because of our excuses. The Gospel story from St. Luke illustrates how our hearts condemn us. There is the invitation to love and there are our refusals of that love.

Excuses, excuses. We all make them. What are they about? Simply our capacity to turn away from God. How? By our turning towards the everyday and the practical, so-called, which is always about our own immediate interests; by our turning, quite literally, to the ground rather than to God. The problem here is not with the world, with the everyday realities of our lives, with the practical necessities of life. No. The problem is with our wills. The question is about our attachments. We are too attached to the wrong things or in the wrong way.

This is a function of the disarray of our hearts. The whole project of the Trinity season and, indeed, of the pilgrimage of our lives in faith is about “setting our loves in order”. We all stand convicted by the Epistle and the Gospel of the forms of our disordered souls. The theological insight here is our experiential reality. Just consider.

If I were to ask you, as I sometimes ask the students in Chapel, how many of you have said to a brother or a sister, a husband or a wife, a mother or a father, or any figure in authority, “I hate you” or, “I kill you” the chances are pretty good that most of you, if you were honest, would have to raise your hands. Even more, if were to ask how many of you have ever thought such things! I argue that we all stand convicted. And what is John telling us? “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.” Guess what, at least in thought and often in word, we are all murderers! If looks and words could kill we would all be dead; even worse, we would all be murderers.

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“God is love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him.”

It is the manifesto of the Trinity Season, and, indeed, of the Christian religion itself. We know it more familiarly, perhaps, in Tyndale’s translation which also remains in the Prayer Book in the sentences for Morning and Evening Prayer. “God is love and he that abideth in love, abideth in God and God in him.” Abiding and dwelling. Same idea.

Well, it must seem that we have gone from Heaven to Hell in short order! Just think, last Sunday we had that marvelous vision of Heaven in the celebration of God as Trinity. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven” and we were allowed to enter into what we were given to see and hear. What was that? A vision of heaven, a vision of worship. The four and twenty elders, symbolic of the witness of the Old Testament to God, and the four living creatures, symbolic of the witness of the four gospels of the New Testament to God in Christ, worship the Trisagion, the thrice-holy God. There is a unity of the Old and the New in the worship of Trinity. How do we know God as Trinity? Through Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son, “the Word made flesh [who] dwelt among us”. There is that word again.

We are to be what we behold. It means being born anew, born into that vision of divine love, the community of the Trinity.

But what do we have in this morning’s gospel? Luke’s powerful parable of Dives and Lazarus juxtaposed with the lessons about love in The First Epistle of St. John. It is a kind of treatise on love. So what is this all about?

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“How can these things be?”

“How can these things be?” asks Nicodemus, not “what’s in it for me.” Therein lies all the difference, the difference between idolatry and true religion. Trinity Sunday is the great counter to all our idolatries, our idolatries of experience, of the practical and of our minds and imaginations.

There is really something quite wonderful about Nicodemus’ question. “How can these things be?” he asks. It is a real question, not unlike Mary’s question, “how shall this be seeing I know not a man?” A question about the Incarnation, Nicodemus’ question belongs to the Trinity. The two are inseparable; they go together, as John’s marvellous gospel reading makes clear.

What is wonderful about Nicodemus’s question is that he is open to the wonder and the marvel of the revelation of God. He is a learned rabbi in Israel. He comes, not openly, but secretly, by night to Jesus to ask him about the meaning of what he has heard and seen about Jesus. What can it possibly mean to be born again, he wonders? Can a man who is old be born again, literally as it were, from his mother’s womb. His initial perplexity has all of the characteristics of a kind of literalism. Jesus response is really quite wonderful. It is about opening out to him the meaning of the spiritual reality of the living God. Such, we might say, is precisely the mystery of the Trinity.

God is Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the holy and blessed Trinity. It is the central and most fundamental teaching of the Christian faith. Not just one doctrine among many, it is the central doctrine which gives coherence and credence to all of the other doctrines of the faith, expressed in the Creed.

What makes Nicodemus’s question so powerful is that it is not a subjective question primarily. He is open to the objective reality of Jesus Christ and to the living God who confronts him in Jesus Christ. It is precisely in this way that Trinity Sunday in the classical readings for this day confronts our modern idolatries of experience, of the practical and of the intellectual.

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