Category: Sermons

“Whose is this image and superscription?”

What’s this? Can it be that we are defined and governed by money? Does everything come down to money? “Money makes the world go round, of that we all are sure,” as the chorus sings in Cabaret. Is the “cabaret of life, old chum,” simply the cash nexus as Thomas Carlyle first suggested and Karl Marx famously claimed? And if so, what does that make us?

Money, it is proverbially and scripturally said, is “the root of all evil.” Why? Because money is power. The misuse of money is the abuse of power. Money is twisted around from being a medium of exchange to becoming a form of domination and control. There is, at once, the use of money to dominate and manipulate others; but there is, as well, the fact that money comes to dominate us.

It causes us to forget who we are. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more apparent than in our own world and day. Whether we are rich or poor, employed or unemployed, pensioned or unpensioned, we are constantly beseiged by images that persuade us that we are essentially economic beings, that our worth and the meaning of our lives is to be measured materially and financially. This is not only destructive of human personality and the human community but also of the forms of honest and meaningful exchange so necessary to the welfare of souls and communities. Their end, our end, “is destruction, whose god is their belly.”

Money comes to possess us because we allow it to define the way in which we live out our lives. Means become ends which they cannot be. Economic ends must always fail us for the simple reason that our lives and the worth of our lives cannot be reduced to an economic quantity. When we are defined economically, then, we are but “bellies,” as it were, mere consumers, and, no doubt, “bellyachers” too! We are seduced into thinking that everything, including God and religion, must be a consumer product, a marketable commodity. The evil of money lies precisely in making us forget who we are.

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“Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy”

The leaves are scattered on the wind and the rain. The splendor of yesterday’s golden glory lies in scattered heaps. And, yet, in the soft dying of nature’s year, when the colours of blazing reds, bright yellows and vibrant oranges have been dimmed to burnished gold, there is a gathering; a gathering into glory far greater than any spectacle of nature.

There is a gathering of the scattered leaves of our humanity, and like the gathering together “into one volume” of the scattered leaves of Sybil’s oracles, as the poet, Dante, puts it, the gathering has to do with our remembering, with the quality of our recollection. There is a gathering of scattered minds into unity and order, a unity and order which signals the redemption of our humanity in the truth of its diversity. The Feast of All Saints is the great autumnal festival of spiritual life, the great celebration of the redeemed community of our humanity.

All Saints recalls us to the spiritual community to which we belong. It signals the vocation of our humanity, both individually and collectively considered. We are called to holiness even in the face of our sinfulness.

The text which is central to this recollective gathering is at once provocative and paradoxical. It is The Beatitudes, the blessednesses, from The Sermon on the Mount. They have, it seems, an inexhaustible content that challenges us because of the quality of uncompromising objectivity.

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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 – seeing – 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, on the other hand, 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.

The captivity of our understanding to the Word gives meaning and purpose to our desires without which they are essentially nothing. For where our understanding is captive to the Word, there the Word is allowed to shape our desires. In contrast to the all-absorbing tyranny of the self, they are shaped “according to thy word.” It is “thy will be done” and my will only as it is found in God’s will. Our wills find their place in God’s will, but only in the captivity of our understanding to the divine Word – to the resonance of that Word in us,  to that Word taking shape in us according to its sovereign freedom.

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“Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is”

What is prayer really all about? Is it about bartering and badgering, bargaining and begging God to get something we want? What does it mean to pray?

It means quite simply to want God’s will to be done in our lives. It is what we pray in the prayer which shapes and governs all prayer, the Lord’s Prayer. In a way, the whole attitude and approach to prayer and to our lives in faith is captured in the words “thy will be done.”

These words reverberate throughout the Scriptures, especially in the New Testament where they take on a new kind of intensity of expression. They are there in Mary’s great ‘yes,’ her wonderful and active acquiescence of her whole being to the divine will. “Be it unto me according to thy word;” in short, she prays that the divine will be done. Her words are the prologue to the most intense expression of this concept and idea voiced by Christ in the agony of the Garden of Gethsemane; “not my will, but thine be done” and then, captured on the Cross in the last word of the Crucified; “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit.”

In other words, our prayers are grounded in the Son’s prayer to the Father in the bond of the Spirit. “When you pray,” Jesus tells us, “say, ‘Our Father’,” which is itself an amazing thing. His Father becomes our Father to whom we have access through the Son and in the Spirit.

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“I am the bread of life”

Images of paradise abound in the festivals of harvest thanksgiving. Here we are in a corn field, it seems, surrounded by the rich bounty of the harvest, the fruits of nature and human labour. And yet, we are in the Church. Somehow what belongs to our human engagement with the created order also belongs to our worship of God.

Harvest Thanksgiving is actually a movable feast. It can take place anytime during the season of the Fall harvest. After all, the patterns of seed-time and harvest vary from place to place, from north to south, as it were, depending on climate and landscape. Not every year is the same as the previous in terms of the richness of the harvest. This year we have been blessed in the Valley, it seems, with a bountiful harvest. It is a bumper year for apples.

The Prayer Book readings often signal thanksgiving themes in the early Fall of the year that reflect the movable nature of harvest thanksgiving. The older medieval tradition of “the labours of the months,” depicted in sculpture and painting and in the decorated Books of Hours, the prayer books of the rich, illustrate that the labours of each month of the year varied according to place throughout Europe.

Tomorrow in Canada is designated as National Thanksgiving Day. It marks our thankful commemoration for the rational and spiritual freedoms which we are privileged to enjoy in this nation of Canada. That is important to remember. We should no more take our rational and spiritual freedoms for granted any more than we should assume that the harvest will always be good and plentiful, let alone that we are entitled to the good things of the land.

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“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”

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 concept. 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. That heart is the heart of Christ. That love is spoken and shown in the face of controversy and debate; in short, in the midst of the hostilities and animosities of our human hearts. “And yet the common people heard him gladly.” I hope that can be said of us.

Two things are extraordinary and noteworthy here. First, God commands us to love him. Secondly, Christ unites the love of God and the love of neighbour in himself. At first glance, such things may not seem so amazing. After all, they are words which we frequently hear: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength;” in short, with the whole of our being. “Hear O Israel,” says the One who is the Word of God himself.

To hear that Word is to be Israel, a people who are open to the Word of God, who are defined by that Word as a people of the Law. They come to be that people by that Word spoken in the Burning Bush, by that Word passing over them to free them from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke, by that Word delivering them from the Red Sea waters, by that Word sustaining them in the wilderness wanderings, by that Word establishing God’s will and covenant towards them in the Law. That self-same Word now proclaims that “the Lord our God is one Lord.” That unity is no mere oneness, no empty aloneness. It is fullness and the completeness of the divine life in itself. As Thomas Aquinas remarks, “the perfection of Christian life consists in charity.” That charity begins and ends with God.

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“Michael and his angels fought against the dragon;
and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not.”

Angels. What are they? Angels are messengers. A good messenger is an evangelist –angel is in the word. Evangelist is the Greek word for the Gospel – the good news, the good message. There is, then, an inescapable connection between Angels and the Gospel.

Angels are a feature of many religions. They are certainly a big part of the biblical landscape. They are a feature of the spiritual landscape of the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians know as the Old Testament, as well as being an integral part of the spiritual landscape of the Christian New Testament. They are also an important feature of the Islamic Qu’ran.

Whether or not one believes in Angels exactly, they are undeniably part of the religious world of Jews, Christians and Muslims. While not a matter of creedal doctrine for Christians, belief in angels is a defining feature of Islam. More importantly, though, is the role and place of angels intellectually or theologically speaking in the three monotheistic faiths. To put it simply, angels belong to the thought-world of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; in short, to the thinking that belongs to these revealed religions. There is a branch of theology that is devoted to angels – angelology. To put it in another way, angels are about our thinking God’s thoughts, the thoughts which come to us from God and our Godward thoughts which are carried on angels’ wings to God.

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“Friend, go up higher”

There was a healing done on the Sabbath before hostile eyes. There was a parable spoken in the face of resentful silence; a parable told to counter our presumption and hypocrisy. 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 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 extends into every aspect of our lives.

St. Paul reminds us of the qualities of that vocation, about how we should seek to be and 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.”

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“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.”

In the Gospels, Jesus Christ seems to come and go constantly as a visitor, a man of no fixed address and one who is always, it seems, passing through. He is the babe of Bethlehem, but apart from his birth there is no mention of his birthplace. He is the boy of Nazareth, but apart from his boyhood, Nazareth is only the city to which he returns once and then, only to be rejected. He is by the sea and on the sea; upon the mountains and in the desert places; in the fields and on the roads. He passes through all the countryside and every region of that ancient promised land. He comes to innumerable villages and towns. He makes his way to Jerusalem. He is constantly drawing near and passing through. And yet, he is constantly in our midst, the abiding presence of God with us.

He comes and goes, strewing blessings on his way. But the blessings are not the passing moments of God’s visitation. They are the signs of his abiding presence.

In the gospel story for today, Christ comes to the city of Nain. It is really a little town or village. If I am not mistaken, this is the only time that it is mentioned in the Scriptures. And “as he came nigh” – as he came near – to the gate of the city, he meets a funeral procession. Christ is the stranger who becomes a neighbour to those who mourn. He enters into the sorrows of the mourners and, most especially, into the grief of the widow of Nain whose only son lies dead and is being carried to the grave.

It is a most extraordinary and touching encounter. “And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” Compassion. The word is strong; it refers to his inmost being. He takes her sorrow into his abiding love for the Father. “Weep not,” he says to this woman who has lost everything. What he means is, ‘do not weep forever’; ‘don’t always be weeping’; ‘don’t keep on weeping’. The weeping is not to be forever, for in the compassion of Christ we see the abiding love of God for us. That love means resurrection and life in and through the conditions of sorrow and death. That love means fellowship and joy. “Young man, I say to thee, Arise. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak: and he delivered him to his mother” (Luke 7.14,15). He delivered him to his mother for whom he had already carried him into the heart of his abiding love for the Father. He delivered him to his mother even as we have fellowship with the Father through the Church.

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“Her sins, which are many are forgiven, for she loved much”

It is hard to imagine a more amazing statement. It dovetails wonderfully with the lesson from Ezekiel which speaks about “one heart” and “a new spirit” within us, “a heart of flesh” and not of stone; in short, a living heart, a heart that is alive to the presence of God. That lesson along side of this gospel story of the unknown and unnamed and utterly silent woman about whom Jesus says, “your sins are forgiven” is astounding. We see something of what that living heart of God in us really means.

What it doesn’t mean is the end of struggle and persecution, at least in this vale of tears. The story in Luke’s Gospel is particularly poignant and real. The woman who came to the house of Pharisee came because she learned that Jesus was there at table. She is described in the most wonderful economy of language by Luke as “a woman of the city, who was a sinner.” She is, in other words, a prostitute. She comes to Jesus.

She says nothing, yet her silence speaks volumes. Her heart is fully on display, fully transparent, a heart of flesh, we must say, though it is Jesus who has to teach us, hard-hearted ones such as we are, just what her actions mean. Her action is, perhaps, even more extreme and extravagant than the action of the one leper who was a Samaritan about whom we heard last Sunday. She brings a precious alabaster flask of ointment; she weeps, wetting his feet with her tears, and wiping them with the hair of her head, kissing them and anointing them with oil. It is an amazing act of devotion and love, an amazing scene of love-in-forgiveness.

Yet, it is the occasion of scandal. Doesn’t Jesus know who she really is? What kind of a religious hot-shot is he if he can’t recognise the garden-variety example of a sinner in this common “woman of the city?”

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