Category: Sermons

“Be not anxious – Behold, Consider, Seek”

I can think of no better antidote to the anxieties of our “anxious generation” than what this day has set before us, first in Alec’s baptism, itself the result of a long gestation and period of questing, and, secondly, in the readings for this Sunday which speak so directly to the contemporary disorders of our lives and our institutions. Both recall us to the things which matter most, the things which belong to God and to our life in the body of Christ.

Paul makes a point of calling attention to the “large letters” that he himself writes in his own hand to the Galatians. This is similar to what Alec’s baptism makes visible for us, namely, “the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” Such is the meaning of dying to ourselves and living to God in Christ, to our being incorporated sacramentally into the life and death of Christ. We are “a new creation” not at the expense of the body but through its redemption. Like Paul, we bear in our bodies “the marks of the Lord Jesus”, the signs of sacrifice, literally, the sign of the Cross.

This is the true meaning of being born again. It is about being born upward into the things of God but only through Christ’s sacrifice and love for us. This is exactly what Jesus explains to Nicodemus in the Gospel reading for “those of Riper Years” as the Prayer Book so quaintly puts it. Yet the context of that expression is crucial for it is about hardships and sufferings that are part and parcel of our lives and, indeed, of the history of our institutions in their folly and disarray; they are nothing without the principles for which they stand.

Why ‘Riper Years’? Because it refers to adult baptism, the baptism of those who can answer for themselves as distinct from infant baptism which for fifteen years or more had been banned during the English Civil War and the reign of Cromwell in the mid-seventeenth century. And yet, somehow the principles of the Christian Faith survived and were revived in their classical forms.

What I want to emphasize is that the principles which define and shape our spiritual lives are the things worth living for and are always there to be reclaimed despite the ravages of sin and folly and the ruins of institutions. With the restoration of the English Church in its reformed catholic nature, there was a need for a service for those who did not receive baptism as infants, hence “those of Riper Years” who could answer for themselves the questions which otherwise would have been answered on their behalf by parents and godparents. Those who are baptized as infants, those who are literally without speech (in-fans), are meant to grow into the understanding of the vows made on their behalf and to own them for themselves.

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“Now these things were our examples”

Examples of what exactly? Of things good and bad such as is illustrated in the Gospel where “the unrighteous steward” is praised by his master not for his unrighteousness but for his “prudence,” the one bad, the other good. There is always, of course, the prospect of learning hard things the hard way: “Teach your children about taxes, eat 30% of their ice cream,” as we saw on a road sign the other day!

Yet these readings challenge us about how we journey in the wilderness by recalling us to the things that we should know about our spiritual life in Christ particularly through our communion in the body of Christ. The Gospel actually ends with a warning and negative note about unrighteousness and a strong and positive note about faithfulness.

The point of both Epistle and Gospel is that we learn from both things good and bad. Such is prudence, the practical wisdom that is meant to guide us. Prudence here is seen as having to do with the God-given “spirit to think and do always such as be rightful,” as the Collect puts it, yet full knowing, and this is key, “that we cannot do any thing that is good without thee.” To live according to God’s will is our desire but one which requires our recognition of God’s grace. Here the classical virtue of prudence is seen not simply as a human excellence in itself but as properly belonging to our life in Christ.

Thus Jesus’ parable is a criticism of “the children of light” for their lack of prudence. What does that mean? It has very much to do with using the things of this world with a view towards our life in God and not as ends in themselves. When we forget that then we fall into idolatry, treating the things of the world as divine, a massive category mistake, a confusion of the creator and the created, and, paradoxically, a loss of true human agency.

“Apart from me,” Jesus famously says, “you can do nothing.” As Augustine observes, “all that we can do of ourselves is sin.” But to know our sins and failings is itself to know the goodness of God as prior and absolute. Paul in his 1st Letter to the Corinthians provides a profound spiritual commentary on the pilgrimage of our souls. He looks back to the ancient Exodus of the Hebrews and connects the images of the Exodus with the forms of our sacramental participation in Christ. “All our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea,” he says, recalling God’s providential guiding of the people of the Hebrews at the Passover, “a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of light by night,” and leading them across the Red Sea. We forget how powerfully paradigmatic and symbolic these Passover images are in the Judeo-Christian understanding.

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“We are children of God”

Our readings set before us, it seems, a series of binary opposites: in the Epistle, flesh versus Spirit, servitude versus sonship, suffering versus glorification, and in the Gospel, prophets outwardly “in sheep’s clothing” but “inwardly ravening wolves,” good fruit versus evil fruit, a good tree versus a corrupt tree, saying versus doing. But are we simply left with a series of binaries, caught in the back and forth, the to and fro of division and opposition? What would be the good in all of that?

We are being tasked with thinking through these binaries to grasp an underlying sense of spiritual integrity and wholeness, to who we are in God, and, as the Collect suggests, under the Providence of God. This transcends the binaries and oppositions though without negating them. The Epistle is emphatic that we have “received a spirit of sonship” that frees us from slavery and fear. “We cry aloud, Abba, Father; the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit, that we are children of God,” and “fellow-heirs with Christ, if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” Such is the greater vision and vocation of our humanity in the midst of the turmoils of our souls and our world.

Some of you will recognise this reading from Romans as one of the lessons provided for the Burial of the Dead in our corporate parish life. It speaks directly to us as mourners in the face of death highlighting the awareness of our own mortality yet reminding us of our life in God through the sufferings of Christ. In other words, it recalls us to our sonship as the children of God not in a flight from the world and the flesh but through our redemption and freedom in Christ.

This belongs to the radical meaning of the doctrine of the Incarnation, to the reality of the Word made flesh who is Christ Crucified, and to its meaning for us in the pilgrimage of our lives as eloquently expressed in the Eucharistic Prayer. Almighty God, our heavenly Father, gave his “only Son Jesus Christ to take our nature upon him, and to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption.”

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“I have compassion on the multitude”

Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, we are gathered into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial, that is to say, it concerns the quality of our lives with God and as standing upon the truth of God revealed in Christ Jesus. What are these organic images? They are the images of grafting, growing, nurturing and preserving. They follow upon an understanding of God as the “Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things.” That understanding shapes the meaning of these images. It makes them profoundly sacramental.

The Collect prays the understanding which the Scriptures reveal, particularly in the interplay between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle suggests the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. We pray, too, that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel speaks to us about the sacrament of Holy Communion: there is our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things,” through the compassion of Christ who feeds us in the wilderness and sets us upon our way, “he in us and we in him.” Grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” we are to live from that Word. It is a wonderful illustration of what Augustine calls the gemina sacramenta, the twin sacraments of the Church, baptism and communion which go together, an understanding that I fear we often forget.

This morning we have a wonderful practical illustration of these ideas in the Baptism of Alice Yvonne Profit. She is literally grated into the life of God through Baptism; She has a radical new beginning, a spiritual beginning that speaks to the dignity and truth of our humanity and its freedom. What begins in her incorporation into the life and death of Jesus Christ has its continuance in the life of prayer and praise, of Word and Sacrament.

“Graft in our hearts the love of thy name” suggests that Baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship with God as Trinity which has its continuing in the Eucharist. The fruit of these organic, spiritual, substantial and sacramental relationships is holy lives and a holy end. Paul’s Epistle reading from Romans follows immediately upon last week’ reading from Romans about baptism as our being “baptized into Jesus Christ,” “baptized into his death,” and “buried with him by baptism into death,” but so as to be raised up in him that “we should walk in newness of life.” For being “with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.” The Gospel today also complements the Gospel from last Sunday about loving our enemies. Such is the radical love of God which defines us. Here that love is shown in another register: Christ’s compassion upon the multitude in the wilderness, his compassion upon our awareness of our own emptiness and incompleteness. All these images speak to the meaning of baptism as “that which by nature [Alice and all of us] cannot have.” This challenges the tendency of our age to reduce things to ourselves, to our own projects and fantasies rather than to learn what God wants us to know.

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“Love your enemies”

How utterly improbable, how utterly impossible, and how completely nuts! But who says this? Jesus says it. Maybe, just maybe that makes us pause but maybe not. Yet this powerful moral imperative is based upon a profound theological truth. It signals what is at once a divine necessity and a human impossibility. This brings us face to face with the radical and awesome truth of the Gospel: as “baptized into Jesus Christ,” we were “baptized into his death”; as “buried with him by baptism into death,” so too we are raised up from the dead to “walk in newness of life,” being “also in the likeness of his resurrection.” That “newness of life” radically changes how we see ourselves and one another. We are no longer to be defined by the things that belong to division and animosity and, ultimately, death. Our life is both hidden and manifest in Christ.

How can we be commanded to do what we ourselves cannot do? Because God makes possible what is humanly impossible. In the commandment to “love your enemies” we see the real force and character of love; its truth and its reason. It is the radical overcoming of sin and evil through the reconciling power of Christ. This should shake us out of the soft sentimentalities and hard meannesses of our inconstant and divided hearts. We are shaken into a strong desire for the love of God, on the one hand, and into the conditions of its accomplishment, on the other hand. “Pour into our hearts such love toward thee,” we pray in the Collect, while acknowledging that “God has prepared such good things as pass [our] understanding,” and that his “promises exceed all that we can desire.” Obviously this is not just what we think we want but somehow a greater good which God seeks for us above and beyond us and yet belonging to the deeper truth and yearning of our souls for God himself.

The radical, uncompromising, and unconditional commandment to love confronts us with what is beyond our human understanding, considered in itself, in order to raise us to a divine understanding. “Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more” so “likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord,” as the Epistle teaches. What is commanded by God for man is accomplished in Christ Jesus, both God and man. It is to be realised in us by the quality of our life in Christ. “Know ye not that so many of us as were baptised into Jesus Christ were baptised into his death?”, that being “with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.”

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“Thou shalt catch men”

Today’s Gospel illustrates rather wonderfully the Epistle reading from 1 Peter. We meet within Petertide, in the Octave of St. Peter and St. Paul, the twin pillars of the Apostolic Church. In a way, today’s readings provide a kind of commentary on the Church and our life of Faith. “Be ye all of one mind,” the Epistle begins and ends with the command to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” And in between? A way of facing suffering and hardship.

The Gospel begins with the people pressing upon Jesus to hear the word of God. It ends with Jesus saying to Simon Peter “from henceforth thou shalt catch men,” and he and James and John, his fellow fishermen, “for[saking] all, and followed him.” And in between? Nothing but an image of the futility of our lives, it might seem. “Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing,” Simon Peter says to Jesus. Nothing. The point is clear, I think. The ultimate end and good of our humanity is not found in the riches and abundance of the world and in our human endeavours and labours. In and of themselves they are nothing. Something more is wanted and looked for.

The Epistle shows us what that something more is. It is our communion with one another through our communion with God, “having compassion one of another,” blessing one another because we are called to blessedness, to an end that is beyond the world. But does that mean forsaking the world? It might seem so from the conclusion of the Gospel. But that would be to overlook what lies in between the opening lines of the Epistle and the Gospel, each of them a commentary on our lives as lived in the world but not of the world. In the Epistle, it is loving as brethren, forsaking evil and doing good, seeking peace and following after it, being followers of that which is good even in the face of evil and suffering. And why? Because of Christ.

In the Gospel, it is in what follows Simon Peter’s statement of futility: “nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.” The point is not that there is suddenly wealth and abundance materially speaking, “a great multitude of fishes” so much so that “their net brake,” an image of what is more than we can handle or need. God does provide, to be sure, but in different ways. No. The deeper point is that “apart from me ye can do nothing” (Jn. 15.5), as Jesus says. The deeper point is about our abiding in him and he is us in his body the Church. Apart from him we are nothing and our lives are empty and nothing.

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“He was not that light but was sent to bear witness of that light”

What light? The light which is Christ. Christ is “essential light” without whose light we are blind, and, like the parable in today’s Gospel, “hypocrites,” who lead one another astray, the proverbial “blind leading the blind.” It is an ancient commonplace about a critique of leadership, on the one hand, and about a self-critique of our own self-certainties and judgmentalism, on the other hand. But who is the “witness of that light?” John the Baptist. We stand on the cusp and eve of the midsummer’s festival of the Nativity of John the Baptist. In a way his witness marks the beginning and end of our summer reflections (at least here in the Maritimes!) with his Nativity tomorrow and his martyrdom, the Beheading of John the Baptist, in late August, itself another kind of nativity. Birth and death go together. As dying, we live.

There are only two nativities that belong to the major and scripturally based festivals of the Church: the Nativity of Christ and the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. The latter coincides with the summer solstice, the longest day, and points us to Christ’s winter birth, the fons et origo of Christian life and faith, the longest night in which the greatest light is made manifest. John’s Nativity celebrates the purpose of his very being and so, too, of our lives. It is captured in our text: “He was not that light but was sent to bear witness of that light.” Along with the witness of Christ to himself and the witness of the Father to his only-begotten Son, there is the witness of human testimony as inspired by the Spirit. The whole life of John the Baptist is a witness to the one who comes who is greater than himself, the one for whom he is sent to prepare his way.

He points not to himself but to Christ but even more to Christ in us. Such is the necessity of the preaching of John the Baptist. He comes for the purpose of “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Yet John is not himself the forgiveness of sins; only the instrument of God preparing us for the coming and indwelling of Christ in us. This is what Paul in the Epistle reading from Romans, too, is reminding us: “the whole creation is waiting for the revelation of the sons of God” in whom we “shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” That mercy is what Luke highlights at the same time as showing what stands in its way: our being blind to ourselves and to one another is about our being blind to God and his will and purpose for our humanity.

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“Rejoice with me”

The parables in today’s Gospel illustrate wonderfully the teaching in the Epistle. Not only does “God resist the proud and gives grace to the humble,” but that grace conveys us unto glory for God “himself shall restore, stablish and strengthen you … after that ye have suffered a while.” God is “the God of all grace” and the parables illustrate the nature and the immensity of God’s grace.

The parables come as a response to an accusation. Christ is accused of receiving sinners and eating with them, thereby identifying himself with sinners, being made sin himself, as it were; condemned by association. But Christ’s response shows that he does this, not so as to be defined by sin, “he who knew no sin,” but for the sake of our redemption, “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” He tells three parables, two of which comprise today’s gospel: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin. Beyond them, but as the completion of them, is the parable of the lost or prodigal son.

Sheep, coins, sons. There is a progression to these images. They belong together. I like to think of their interrelation artistically as forming a kind of triptych of divine grace in which the centre panel would be the parable of the prodigal son framed by the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. We only come to its central message through those two parables which stress the priority of divine grace in our restoration. What is emphasised is God’s reaching down to us in the gravity of our sins which separate us from God and from the community of divine love. There is, after all, a kind of passivity to sheep and coins, but this only serves to heighten the activity of God’s grace. Yet the effects of that grace are to be realised in us which is what we are given to see in the parable of the prodigal son. In him we see the motions of God’s grace in us that cause our restoration to grace, our establishment in grace, and our being strengthened by grace.

The parable of the prodigal son completes the illustration of the teaching about God’s redemptive grace. It signifies the strong and exultant note of God’s mercy towards us. What, after all, is the recurring theme here except the theme of rejoicing? More joy in heaven in the presence of the angels over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just persons.

God seeks the lost and God accepts the penitent who makes some motion of return to him for that motion is the motion of God’s grace in him. The first two parables make this point unmistakably clear. The sheep and the coins are utterly incapable of moving towards God. God’s grace literally picks them up and carries them, gathers them up to himself and to the community which his love alone creates. We are reminded that our joy is to be found in the free gift of God towards us in the giving of his Son.

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