Category: Sermons

“Be not anxious”

What is Jesus saying here? He wants us to look at the world with new eyes. “Behold, the fowls of the air”. “Consider the lilies of the field”. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God”. It makes a difference for us in our lives. To behold what he wants us to behold, to consider what he wants us to consider, to seek what he wants us to seek counters the paralysis of our fears, the terror of our anxieties and even our anxieties about our anxieties.

Jesus says “be not anxious” more than once in this gospel. He knows our anxieties and how prone we are to being anxious, quite literally, about “a multitude of things”. It is what we might call “The Martha Syndrome” as diagnosed elsewhere by Jesus: “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things” (Luke 10.41). We all have our fears and our worries, our troubles and our concerns, our heart-aches and our despairs. And we can worry ourselves, quite literally, to death about them. What are we anxious about? What are our anxieties? Quite simply, they are our cares, the things which, quite literally, occupy our thoughts; indeed, they can actually possess us.

Our anxieties are the cares which choke and oppress us, the cares which give us great anguish of soul. 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. The cares of this world beset us and overwhelm us. Jesus would have us view the world and its cares in a new way.

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“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”

The Cross is the meeting place of lovers. That “strange and uncouth thing”, as the poet George Herbert calls it, reveals the incompleteness of our human loves and the all-sufficiency of divine love. It signals what might be called the erotic liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy which is shaped and governed by the Cross, the liturgy of eros redeemed, the liturgy of the redemption of desire. But what does it mean?

I have often been struck with the coincidence of the early beginning of Fall with the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14^th) and especially with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks so profoundly and yet so paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise. Inventio crucis.

Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem and her so-called discovery of the Holy Cross in the early fourth century as well as the exposition or “Exaltation” of the supposed true cross in the seventh century. Inventio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.

In the Christian understanding of things, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual life. The cross is the meeting place of such lovers, too.

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“[He] fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks”

This is actually a thanksgiving gospel story. It appears twice in our Prayer Book; once as the Gospel for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity (BCP, p. 240), and as the Gospel appointed for Thanksgiving Day (BCP, p. 308). For us in Canada, Thanksgiving day and Harvest Thanksgiving are often observed at the same time; thanksgiving for the fruits of creation and human labour, on the one hand, and thanksgiving for the rational and spiritual freedoms that we have politically, on the other hand. When thanksgiving for the harvest is being emphasized then readings for Harvest Thanksgiving are often used that focus on the harvest gathering of the fruits of creation. But it is instructive to realize that this Gospel plays such an important role in our learning a very hard and necessary thing; the hard and necessary activity of thanksgiving itself.

We learn from this gospel that being grateful is both healthy for you and it makes you whole! Here is the gospel story, we might say, that teaches us most fully about the spiritual nature of the activity of thanksgiving. And once again, it is a Samaritan who provides the telling illustration.

Last week, we heard the parable of the Good Samaritan, so-called, and we commented on how what makes it possible to “go and do likewise”, going and doing good works and reaching out and helping others, is really nothing less than the grace of Christ in us. The grace which comes from God to our humanity is the meaning of our life in the body of Christ; left to ourselves, it seems, we can only “look and pass by,” conflicted and implicated in all of the confusions of our broken and wounded world. The parable, in its context of the unity of the love of God and the love of neighbour, points us strongly to the grace of Christ in his Incarnation. He has “c[o]me to where [we] are”, and the grace of human redemption is signaled in the healing and care of the one whom we have come to call the Good Samaritan. The Good Samaritan, I suggested, is Christ and Christ in us.

Here, too, it is a Samaritan, the one out of the ten lepers, outcasts and rejects standing afar off as Jesus enters a certain village, who returned and gave thanks. What moved him? It is at once the highest freedom of the human soul and the grace of God in him. “When he saw that he was healed, [he] turned back” and then does a most remarkable thing, a strange and extravagant thing. “With a loud voice [he] glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks.” Only at this point does Luke add simply and pointedly, “and he was a Samaritan.” For us, hearing this story after last week’s gospel story of the Good Samaritan, there is a powerful echo effect. Once again, we are presented with the conjunction between the Samaritan, a kind of cultural outsider, and Christ, the God who is utterly other than us who has come near to us. And here, the context is about a further aspect of healing and salvation. It is found in the simple yet powerful activity of being thankful.

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“How readest thou?”

There are several great lines for homilies in this Gospel passage. “Who is my neighbour?” “When he saw him he had compassion on him.” “Go, and do thou likewise.” Powerful stuff and yet, in a way, they all hang upon this rather unique question, a question which Jesus asks, a question which illumines all of the great questions of the Scriptures, the great questions of religion itself. “How do you read?”

We might think that the real question is ‘what do you read?’ Certainly, that is an important question. What we read will, it goes without saying, influence how we think about things. It is not a matter of indifference about what students and children read; what the curriculum is, as it were. And there are, as well, the more disturbing issues of censorship and political correctness that attempt to circumscribe what we read, what we hear and what we say. These obscure the bigger question which is about how we read.

We are too familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan. A powerful story, to be sure, and one which impels us powerfully to good works, what we often overlook is the extraordinary significance of the context in which Jesus tells this story. As such, I think, we miss its deeper meaning. It ends with the precise and positive exhortation to “go and do thou likewise”, but the possibility of that actually depends not on ourselves, but on the movement of God’s grace in us accomplishing what we could not and cannot do on our own. This is the message that we do not want to hear.

We conveniently overlook the faith basis of the action that we bidden to do. The Gospel provides an amazingly radical faith statement. We know it in the Prayer Book liturgy as the Summary of the Law, proclaimed and heard at the beginning of the Communion Service. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul; and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.” Here, Jesus draws this out of “a certain lawyer” who tempted him with a question. His question, raised not for the purposes of understanding but for sophistic entrapment, was “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ response was, in perfect Socratic fashion, to ask two related questions, “what is written in the law?” and “how readest thou?” Beautiful. It is in response to ‘the what and the how’ that the Lawyer speaks about the love of God and the love of neighbour, concentrating in a marvelous fashion the whole of the Torah, the Law.

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“Ephphatha, that is, Be opened”

Closed book, closed mind; open book, open mind. It seems simple and straightforward, almost obvious. But, of course, you might say that it depends on what you read; to which, I would add, and how you read.

We are only too well aware of the so-called fundamentalist approach to what are regarded as sacred texts that makes us altogether skeptical of religion in general and suspicious of sacred writings in particular. Sadly, we are largely ignorant of them as well. So open books seem to create closed minds while supposedly open minds are closed to those same books and ignorantly dismissive of them! Curious!

Allan Bloom’s provocative book, The Closing of the American Mind, written in 1987, brings out a further aspect of our paradoxical uncertainties. A cry against the moral and intellectual relativism then and now pervasive in the universities, he saw that the supposed openness of such relativism was really a closing of the mind to the formative and foundational texts of our intellectual culture. A closing of the mind to both the letter and the spirit.

St. Paul, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, points out the dilemma. “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.” What is at issue is what and how we read and, for the digito agitato culture, to coin a phrase, the culture of the digitally agitated that flits from one image to another with barely a pause to think, there is the further issue of whether we are really reading at all. The task, of course, lies in reading with the spirit, the spirit of understanding.

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“God be merciful to me, a sinner”

God’s “almighty power,” today’s Collect avers, is declared “most chiefly in showing mercy and pity.” Think about how radical a statement that is! It, quite literally, turns the world on its head. It, quite literally, inverts the power dynamic of human lives politically, ecclesiastically, institutionally. God’s power is shown “most chiefly” in the acts of mercy and pity. This is the remarkable counter to the power politics of every age.

But mercy also shapes a world and a culture, something which Shakespeare knew. Mercy, he has Portia declaim in his play, The Merchant of Venice, is “mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes/ the thronèd monarch better than his crown.” Temporal power is one thing – something we encounter every day. It is wielded by kings, CEOs and bishops, politicians and tyrants, priests and police. It is signaled in the symbols and emblems of power; for instance, crown and scepter, mitre and staff. “But mercy,” she points out, “is above this sceptered sway.” Divine mercy is greater than all the panoply and machinations of human power. Portia makes the wonderful point that it is to be “enthronèd in the hearts of kings,” meaning that it is a necessary quality for what it means to be a good ruler. Why? Because, as she says, “it is an attribute to God himself.” Mercy has a divine quality. Her final point is the great teaching that our collect along with the scripture readings suggests. “Earthly power doth then show likest God’s/When mercy seasons justice.”

Mercy seasons justice. In other words, mercy perfects justice. When we forget this fundamental aspect of the Christian faith, we are worse than the worst and pervert justice itself. The task of the Church is to proclaim mercy as the fundamental principle for our lives precisely out of an awareness of the limits of human justice and out of an awareness of human sin.

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“Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”

“No-one can say Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit”. This is one of the earliest credal statements from within the Scriptures themselves. It is a Trinitarian statement really, the nucleus of what we proclaim more fully in the great Catholic Creeds of the Church which come out of the Scriptures – out of such words as these – and which return us to the Scriptures within a way of understanding. And such clarifying proclamations give shape to our lives in grace. “Concerning spiritual gifts, … I would not have you ignorant”, says St. Paul. “Now there are diversities of gifts…” and he goes on to list some of them. But they are gifts which arise out of this fundamental proclamation – out of what we have been given to say about God by God himself. “No one can say Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit”.

The diversity of gifts belongs to our life with God in the communion of God – the Trinity. The different gifts are about his grace in our lives. To esteem them is to honour him. This is something communicated to us by the grace of God with us – Jesus Christ – God’s Word and Son. To confess Jesus as Lord acknowledges him as “I am who I am”, as God with us, God in the very flesh of our humanity, God made man. Only so can he be Lord. In Jesus the Old Testament mystery of God’s name – “I am who I am” – is opened to view and explicated in terms of the spiritual relation of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. God’s relation to us radically depends upon his self-relation, upon the communion of God with God in God, the communion of the Trinity.

This is the burden of our proclamation in which we are privileged to participate. For if we cannot proclaim with clarity the God of our salvation, then we cannot participate with charity in the divine life which has been opened to view through the sacrifice of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit.

Something of this underlies the strong scene in today’s Gospel with St. Luke’s account of Christ’s cleansing the temple. What is it about really, except a recalling of the true purpose of the Temple, a reminder to us of the true purpose of this holy place? This is to be the place where we attend to the high things of God, to the things which Jesus wants us to know. This is to be a place of teaching. This is to be a place of our abiding in the love of God revealed and proclaimed.

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“Because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation”

“Concerning spiritual gifts, … I would not have you ignorant,” St. Paul tells us in this morning’s epistle. But we are ignorant of spiritual gifts and know not the time of God’s visitation upon us. The consequence is suffering and destruction, enemies that surround us and seek our hurt, the harm of families and home for “they shall not leave one stone upon another.” Wow.

It is not a pretty picture. And Jesus weeps over Jerusalem because of our ignorance of spiritual matters that, in one way or another, have always to do with the quality of our being with God, with the degree of our awareness about the presence of God in human lives and in the life of the world. When we forget or ignore that, then we leave ourselves open to suffering and destruction and death, he is suggesting.

Sometimes this gospel story is taken as a prophecy about the Fall of Jerusalem in 70AD at the hands of Titus who, subsequently, became Emperor. Sometimes, too, it is taken as an indication that the Gospel, in this case, The Gospel According to St. Luke, was written after the Roman occupation and destruction of the Temple. Perhaps. But such speculations are entirely secondary to the spiritual intention of the passage, I think. It is, after all, a recurring theme in the Old Testament. Time and time again, Israel is defeated and destroyed politically but the prophets keep on calling attention to the spiritual conditions of Israel herself rather than just to point at enemies “out there.” The problems are profoundly within. The problems are fundamentally spiritual.

Jesus weeps and accuses us of our ignorance. Then he enters the Temple, “casting out them that sold therein and them that bought”, pointing out, in strong and graphic language, that the holy place has been misused. It is exists as “a house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.” What is the point?

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The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon at All Saints’, Leminster, 7:00pm service, Trinity IX.

“Thou art the man!”

‘You da man’, Nathan says, at least in contemporary street-talk! But what really is this story all about?

The story of David and Nathan suggests the interplay of two metaphors of understanding that belong to a theology of revelation. Scripture, we might say, is both a mirror and a window: a mirror in which we are allowed to see the truth of ourselves and a window through which we are privileged to glimpse something of the glory of God. A mirror and a window.

The story of David is not only one of the great narrative sequences in the Scriptures; it is also, as John Donne suggests, the story of Everyman. “His Person includes all states, between a shepherd and a King”, a poet and a warrior, too, we might add, one who sings and one who acts. In a way, David epitomises the whole of Israel and by extension the whole of humanity. That is partly why the Davidic lineage of Jesus is so important in the New Testament. But David epitomises the whole of Israel and the whole of our humanity, not only in its truth but also in its untruth. “His sinne includes all sinne”, Donne remarks, “we need no other Example to discover to us the slippery wayes into sin, or the penitential wayes out of sin, than …. David”.

We do not have windows into one another’s souls, as that wise woman theologian, Queen Elizabeth the First observed long ago. We hardly know ourselves. Those prerogatives belong to God and to God alone. “The Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart”, it is famously said. It is actually said about David. In the story of David we are given to see the heart of David which God sees and in it we are given to see something about ourselves. In this lesson from the story of David we are given to see the mirror in which David confronts himself in his sinfulness and the window through which he sees God in his chastening mercy. The mirror which Nathan holds up is the parable which he tells the King, the parable which challenges and convicts. What has David done? Well, everything and more.

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