Category: Sermons

“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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“Now these things were our examples”

The Collect captures wonderfully the complementary nature of today’s Epistle and Gospel readings about the practice of Christian life. We pray for “the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful; that we, who cannot do any thing that is good without thee, may by thee be enabled to live according to thy will.”

Our thinking and our doing are intimately related. What we think, what we believe, and what we know are to be realized in what we do. Our actions reveal our intentions. We are to be what we believe. We are pilgrims who know, in some fashion or other, our own incompleteness but acknowledge, too, our completeness in God through Jesus Christ. Our purpose lies in the Son’s love for the Father in the embrace of the Holy Spirit. Such an understanding impels an activity of purpose in our everyday lives. It is the note which the Gospel sounds.

The Gospel exhorts us to be prudent, not unrighteous. To be prudent means to discern the good, “such things as be rightful”, and to pursue it, “living according to thy will”. It means thinking and doing the right thing at the right time in the right way and for the right reason. It is, we may say, a tall order. The challenge is to get all those things together.

The unrighteous steward in the Gospel is simply all of us. We are all stewards – those to whom things are entrusted. It is a profoundly biblical view. Nothing we have is our own. We can only enter into what God has provided for us. Our wills and our actions apart from the will of God are never right. My ways and your ways, considered in themselves, are at best ways of self-righteousness, tinged and coloured by our own agendas and motives whether known or unknown to ourselves and to others. They are always less than the full righteousness of God; in short, they are ways of unrighteousness. I know, it seems so judgmental and negative but in our reformed understanding of things it is actually altogether positive. Why? Because it throws us into the mercies of God’s redemptive grace.

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“By their fruits ye shall know them”

Actions reveal intentions and purposes. Nothing could seem more obvious and more necessary to modern freedom. But is what is revealed good or evil? Are we good or bad? Is it simply fated? The Gospel is very clear that there is often a discrepancy between what is and what seems to be, between appearance and reality. Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing, not to mention “ravening wolves” in shepherd’s cloaks! Such warnings are not just with respect to others but also ourselves. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” In a way, it is what we constantly pray in the Lord’s Prayer: “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Margaret Visser’s 2002 Massey Lecture series was entitled “Beyond Fate”. In it she speaks of modern freedom as freedom from constraint and argues for the ways in which that freedom is increasingly circumscribed in contemporary culture, noting the different metaphors that speak about the forms of the inevitable, to what is somehow fated in our world and day. In the face of the various determinisms that are inherently fatalistic, we need a deeper understanding that sees human freedom as found within the order of creation and the divine will; beyond fate, perhaps, but certainly under Providence. As St. Paul suggests in his Letter to the Romans, human freedom has to do with our spiritual identity as “the children of God” in Christ and through union with him in his sufferings and glory. Who we are is very much about what we are called to be, hence the necessary correlation between the inward and the outward aspects of our lives.

Fate and destiny are not always or necessarily negative terms, terms that limit or determine human action, making us unfree. The recent movie, “Slum Dog Millionaire,” set in an Indian and Muslim context, graphically illustrates the theme of destiny in the touching and disturbing story of Jamal and Latika, a destiny that is worked out through hardship and suffering and certainly not without its dark side of great evil and corruption, cruelty and death. Central to the movie is the sense of destiny, of fate, but in a way that is more positive and not simply negative, not merely fatalistic.

A different word belongs to our meditations today. It is signaled in the Collect: “O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth.” Providence. What do we mean by it? How does it relate to our sense of personal identity and freedom? Is it the same as fate and destiny? Or does the term itself imply something more?

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“A certain man made a great supper, and bade many”

There is more to the Christian religion that mere good manners. And yet good manners have in them more, perhaps, than we realize. More than just an aspect of civilization in the form of considerate behaviour, “manners maketh the man” and reveal something of our intrinsic character and nature; in other words, there is something of the charity of Christ at work in our dealings with one another.

And that is, of course, a central theme in the Trinity season. To put it bluntly, we participate in what is proclaimed. “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him,” as we heard last week from this same Epistle of St. John. There is a necessary, inescapable and intimate relation between the making known of God in Jesus Christ and the form of our life in Christ. St. John, in the Epistle reading for today, drives home a very hard lesson that follows from that understanding. It is about our love towards even our brother towards whom we may feel anything but love and affection, kindliness and concern. There may be things about our brother or sister (let’s not be gender exclusive!) that is quite unlovely, even hateful.

What, then, are we called to love in those whom, quite frankly, we can’t stand? Simply this, we honour their being made in the image of God as we are, howsoever much that image has been obscured, denied and derided, or howsoever much we ourselves may be confused and deluded in our judgment. This provokes the equally salutary thought. Our awareness of our judgmentalism leads to self-judgment. That can be quite destructive; self-condemnation leading to despair. In relation to that, there is the strong teaching that “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” In every way, we are being encouraged, if not actually catapulted into the mystery of God which we have been privileged to hear and receive.

It belongs to the joy of the Trinity season to place us in the intimacy of the Blessed Trinity. Trinity season is about going through the open door or, at the very least, standing on the threshold of that open door of the kingdom of heaven. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, but we don’t always see it, do we? Yet, the realities of the kingdom are here and now, present in our quotidian lives. This Sunday, like last Sunday, we have a parable about the kingdom told by Jesus: “A certain man made a great supper and bade many.”

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“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love”

We are confronted with a challenge and a refusal. There is the challenge to act out of what we have been given to see of the majesty of God. Such is the vision of the Trinity. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” as we heard last Sunday. It is a door, not a window, a door through which we are invited to enter. We are invited into the vision so that the charity of God may shape our lives into holiness.

But then, there is our refusal to will that order and truth, preferring, instead, the vanity of ourselves that blinds us to the real needs and even the very presence of others. We ignore Lazarus at our feet. What has he to do with us? we may think. But in so neglecting Lazarus, we are really neglecting God. We deny the love of God made visible in Jesus Christ. In denying the poor man at our feet, we deny the God in whose image we are all made.

The love that is shown is the love that is to be lived. The Epistle teaches us that love is of God because God is love. That love is manifested in Jesus Christ so that we might live in love through him. The only question is whether we will live the vision.

And so the Epistle sounds the theme and the Gospel gives the crucial illustration about our relationship to the vision of God revealed as Trinity. The Epistle is St. John’s treatise about that love. The Gospel is St. Luke’s powerful story of the Rich Man (Dives) and Lazarus.

What does it come down to? Simply this. The love of God compels us to love one another. This is not a may-be, but a must-be for our salvation. We are commanded and compelled to love out of the vision of love which has been shown to us. When we ignore the stranger in our midst or neglect the beggar at our door, then we deny the God who “became poor for [our] sakes” and who “came into our midst”. When we are consumed by envy at the good fortune of others, when we filled with hatred and wrath for hurts and injuries inflicted upon us, whether real or perceived, then we place ourselves very far from God and do great harm to ourselves. To put it in terms of the parable, there is a great gulf fixed between us and God when we ignore the poor man at our gate, the neighbour close at hand, and, by extension, the stranger far away. Then we place ourselves in torment, the torment of our self-willed distance from God. We create the abyss that separates us from God and from one another.

The problem is not that we don’t know better. The problem is that we do not act upon what we do know. (more…)

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