Category: Sermons

“Love your enemies”

The Collect which graces this day and the week following is one of the most beautiful and compelling in the Prayer Book. It captures profoundly the nature of our human longings and the reality of the human condition.

“O God, who hast prepared for them that love thee such good things as pass man’s understanding,” it begins, defining us in terms of God’s love; both our love for God and the love that is God himself. But what do we mean by love? Something of the radical nature of the love of God for us and in us is hinted at in the Collect. Not only does it belong to those “good things [that] pass man’s understanding,” but more significantly to “promises which exceed all that we can desire.” We are directed to something beyond our knowing and beyond our desiring and yet a something more that belongs to what God wants for us.

But is this something more merely something whimsical? A fantasy? An illusion? “Pie in the sky, by and by”? Unreal, unknowable and unattainable? If it is beyond our knowing and our wanting, then how can it have any meaning for us? Because it is something that has been prepared for us, something that has been made known to us. We can enter into it and struggle to know and love the things of God more dearly, more clearly and more freely. In other words “the good things [that] pass man’s understanding” are not of our own devising. They are not simply the products or the projections of ourselves. The promises of God always exceed our desiring precisely because we do not always know clearly what we want. This is part and parcel of our human condition. We confront the limits of our knowing and our desiring. We confront the incompleteness of our knowing and our willing.

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“Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts”

The passage from 1^st Peter, appointed for the epistle for today, begins with the phrase “be ye all of one mind.” It ends with our text “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” Everything in between is held together by these two phrases. And what is in between is an exhortation to a godly life against the forms of wickedness which so easily arise, not only in our hearts, but also in our common life together.

“Be ye all of one mind,” he tells us. But what is that one mind? Is it mere unanimity regardless of what one is agreed about? Surely not. Peter is talking about the mind of Christ for he goes on to describe the qualities of the love of Christ towards us which must become the form of his life within us. A group of people may be united in ways that are quite ungodly. They may arrive at a perfectly fine decision but the manner of their deciding may be perfectly disgraceful, regardless of the decision itself.  Or the process of decision making may be perfectly fine while the decision itself lacks intellectual, spiritual and moral integrity. We see this time after time in every aspect of our culture.  Mere consensus is no surety for truth; nor is pure process. For if “being of one mind” arises out of viciousness, personal abuse, willful ignorance, resentment, envy, paltry excuses, self interest, incompetence and dark prejudice, (and let us be honest, such things are all too evident and all too common), then it is not what Peter is talking about.

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“What went ye out for to see?”

He catches our attention, though not necessarily our affection, unlike St. Francis, the Hippie Saint of the sixties. He catches our attention and, yet, we are even drawn to him, attracted by something strange and yet compelling. “What went ye out for to see?” Jesus asks, highlighting the strange and yet compelling character of John the Baptist whose nativity is celebrated on June 24^th, and whose feast day marks the anniversary of the landing of John Cabot in Newfoundland in 1497. Thus he has become the patron saint of what has subsequently become Canada. His feast day also was the occasion for the baptism of Chief Membertou four hundred years ago in 1610, an event that marked the conversion of the Mi’kmaq to Christianity.

The figure of John the Baptist frames our summer sojourning; his nativity marks the beginning of summer, so close to the summer solstice; and his death, “The Beheading of John the Baptist,” coming at the end of August, marks the end of summer, being so close to the end of cottage season. We are talking about the Maritimes here!

Birth and death. Summer and winter. This birth points us to the winter’s birth of Christ, whose greater nativity signals all the summer of our lives in the grace of God towards us. In a way, that is the point of John the Baptist. He points not to himself but to Christ. The Nativity of John the Baptist signals the preparations which God makes for his coming into our midst as the Incarnate Lord in the Nativity of Jesus Christ. The summer solstice has just past; the long summer’s march to winter, yes, even to Christmas, dare I say, has begun!

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“What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you”

St. Paul’s sermon on the Areopagus is one of the most remarkable and influential sermons of all time. It illustrates wonderfully, I think, the contemplative theme of this Sunday, the theme of mercy, signaled in the Eucharistic Gospel. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” But what is the mercy? It is the mercy of revelation. What was unknown has been made known. We walk in the light of what has been revealed. If we do not, then we walk in the darkness and lead others astray as well; “shall they not both fall into the ditch?” Such is the import of the Gospel parable of “the blind leading the blind.” Our self-righteous judgments point accusing fingers at the minor faults of others while being blind to the major faults in ourselves.

The point of the reading of the Scriptures in the public and common life of the Church is to reveal God to us and us to God. We learn about “the good, the bad and the ugly” of ourselves in the light of God’s mercy and truth. This requires our openness to the Scriptures and our willingness to engage and think the Scriptures. The Old Testament lesson from 1^st Kings is particularly instructive, too, because it illustrates the theme of mercy over harsh judgments in the reign of King Rehoboam who ignores the wise counsel of the old men in favour of the rash advice of the young men. It is a supreme instance of an abusive authority that imposes impossible demands.

“To your tents, O Israel” is the only response, a fleeing from what is persecutory and destructive but only so as to recall ourselves to what is primary and definitive. Ultimately, God has tented among us. “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us;” literally, “tented among us,” a phrase which picks up on the Old Testament image of the tent of meeting between God and man, the tent of meeting where the glory of God is made known.

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“Forgive and ye shall be forgiven”

Forgiveness. It is the hardest thing and yet it is one of the most free things that we can ever do, perhaps even one of the simplest things, in our lives. It is connected to that most free of all things: the power of God’s praise which brings the walls of presumption tumbling to the ground, like the walls of Jericho, for example. It belongs as well to the power of God’s love which moves in human loves; for instance, the love of friendship seen in David and Jonathan which remains a strong and precious bond even in the face of the enmity of a father and a king, namely, Saul. It is the abundance of divine charity that alone can open our eyes and soften our hearts.

What makes forgiveness so hard? It is our hypocrisy. It is not just our saying one thing and our doing another, but also our doing one thing and thinking another. We are divided within ourselves against ourselves, against one another and against God. There is our blindness and there is our judgmentalism – both of which are eloquently illustrated in the Gospel for today. “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?…Cast out first the beam that is in thine own eye, then shall thou see clearly the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.” We presume to know what in fact we do not know. It is not just our ignorance but our arrogance that is the problem. It is a willful blindness, a kind of refusal to see what in fact we have been given to see and know, for instance, in the witness of the Scriptures. But then, again, we frequently refuse to act upon what we do know. It is not our knowing but our indifference or our stubbornness that is the problem.

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“For God resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble.”

The humility of God’s charity is all our theme on this day, and not for this day only, but also for the week that brings us to the celebration of the Nativity of John the Baptist. What is the humility of God’s charity? It is God’s reaching down to us so that his love may take shape in us.

The Nativity of John the Baptist signals the preparations which God himself makes for his coming into our midst as the Incarnate Lord in the Nativity of Jesus Christ. The summer solstice is upon us; the long summer’s march to winter is about to begin! Say it isn’t so! But, already, Christmas is in view! Yet, this summer’s feast, the Nativity of John the Baptist (on June 24) signals something more. Beyond the reminder of God’s coming to us, there is the purpose of his coming in us. The redemption of our humanity revealed in Christ is about the motions of his grace taking shape in our lives.  The humility of God’s charity in us means the “scattering of the proud in the imagination of their [our] hearts.” There are the practical lessons about the necessity of humility.

The humility of God’s charity calls us to humility against our pride. Pride is that grand delusion whereby we presume to be the center of everything either in our complacency or in our whining neediness. The self-giving love of God stands altogether opposed to the self-centeredness of our pride. Pride stands utterly opposed to God and to God’s ways with us.

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“Rejoice with me”

Humility is the condition of our rejoicing, the condition of our redemption in Christ. Nothing could go down harder in our contemporary world than such a concept. Yet, nothing could be truer to the imperative of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

“God resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble,” St. Peter tells us in his First Epistle General and certainly it is a lesson which he himself has learned. The Gospel reading from St. Luke complements it with a very powerful message about the nature of humility as the counter to human pride and about the paradoxical reality of the divine humility.

The context is animosity and hostility. Publicans and sinners draw near to Jesus; Pharisees and Scribes murmur because of the company which he keeps. They are scandalised and critical. Doesn’t he know with whom he is associating? How can he be a true religious teacher? Jesus response is revelatory and transforming. He tells two parables – actually, three. We have in the gospel for today two of the three, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. The third parable of this triptych of divine humility is the tremendous parable of the lost or prodigal son.

The fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke comprises these three parables, each told in sequence. It is a most powerful illustration of the message of the Epistle about God’s resisting pride and about his giving grace to the humble.

Humility is the counter to our pride which pretends to our self-sufficiency, on the one hand, and our self-centredness, on the other hand. Either we have it all and need nothing outside ourselves or we presume to think that we deserve what we presently don’t have but desire. The gospel of humility is precisely the counter to our pride.

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“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart”

In the early days of the Trinity season, St. John’s First Epistle is read in conjunction with some of the most convicting and compelling parables of Jesus as presented by St. Luke in his gospel.  Last Sunday, it was the story of Dives and Lazarus, a parable told to convict us about our indifference to God and to one another and to convince us about acting out of the vision of love that we have been given to see in the witness of the Scriptures. It means our care for one another out of God’s care for us.

Today’s Gospel is about an invitation – an invitation to a banquet, a great supper to which many are invited. The interest of the parable lies in the excuses which keep us from the banquet; in short, the ways in which we attempt to justify our absence from the divine feast of love. We are indifferent towards the needs of Lazarus lying at our gate because we are indifferent to the lessons of God in his Word, the Holy Scriptures. We refuse the invitation to the heavenly and divine banquet of love because we are pre-occupied with all the matters of our everyday life.

These two parables, seen in the light of the Epistle, speak profoundly, it seems to me, to our world and day. How? Because, let’s face it, in North America, at least, there is hardly a congregation that doesn’t want the sermon to be (a) entertaining and funny whether it is about God or not and preferably not; and (b) relevant to ourselves and the latest issue du jour which really means that Scripture and Sermon are meant to confirm or affirm some aspect or other of our quotidian lives, our everyday lives.

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“We love him because he first loved us”

St. John’s First Epistle is a treatise on love which complements and underscores the love which his Gospel proclaims. It cannot be emphasised enough, it seems to me, that we enter into the mystery of the life of God through the eyes of John. This epistle intends, as do so many of the epistles and lessons, the application of the Gospel message, particularly the Gospel proclamation that “God is love.” Love is of God and so we ought also to love one another. But what is that love?

That love is the communion of God with God in God – the communion of the Trinity. This is the love by which we have communion with God and so with one another. Our loves find their place and meaning in God’s love. “He that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.”

This is, as it were, the recurring refrain of the Trinity season: “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” This is the love which the Church is empowered and compelled to proclaim. But more than that, the Church is to be the place of the indwelling love of God, the place where God’s love is called to mind, and the place where that love takes shape in us. The Church is to be the place where we seek the perfection of our love in the grace of Jesus Christ.

The Church refers to more than merely a building, just as the building points beyond itself. These holy places signify a greater purpose and one which extends into the stuff of our daily lives with the intent that they should be holy lives. We are called to love out of the love which has been shown to us.

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