Category: Sermons

“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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“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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