Category: Sermons

“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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“God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”

The Epistle and Gospel reading this morning not only complement each other but provide a strong encouragement to enter into what is made known to us in Jesus Christ. To put it in another way, our excuses are absolutely nothing when it comes to the heavenly banquet, itself an image of the soul’s enjoyment and fellowship with God. Our relationship with God cannot be simply what and when and if we please. What kind of God would that be? A God of our own devising, which is to say, no God. But God is greater than us, greater than our hearts in disarray, indeed, as Anselm so memorably put it, “God is that than which nothing greater can be thought,” to which we might add, and loved. Nothing greater.

Our excuses do not excuse us. This is a tough but obvious truth. Worship has priority. It is as simple as that. Yet to say this misses the greater reason. Worship cannot be coerced; it cannot be forced. It is about more than mere duty. It is about what we love. It is about our loving worship of God whose love defines us. It is so easy to miss the essential point. You can’t sell the Gospel. It isn’t a market commodity. God is not for sale.

The proclamation of the Gospel is the repeated invitation to enter into life with God. Today’s Gospel story is about the invitation to the kingdom of God’s blessedness. What launches the parable is the Gospel proclamation that “blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” That is, to be sure, a blessing. As such it is not a right. But the refusal of the invitation is the refusal of the blessing.

What is Jesus saying by way of a parable about our threefold refusal of the invitation? He is convicting our hearts about our indifference to the things of God and about the distractions in our lives. He is reminding us of the priority of God’s grace and the importance of entering into what God provides for us. We can only be moved by our hearts and minds. The parable convicts our hearts and our minds about our neglect of the things of God because of our indifference and our preoccupation with land, property, and personal affairs. I have bought a piece of ground; I have brought five yoke of oxen; I have married a wife.

Interesting and provocative excuses. Does the third imply that wives are like ground to be inspected, or oxen to be proved? But then again, is there not an even deeper critique implied in the ownership of land and the use of domestic animals? Is the land really ours? Are the oxen simply there for our use and pleasure? And then by extension, are we here simply to be used by one another, and then to be cast off into the dustbin of history? In a way, these excuses open us out to a larger view of the spiritual nature of our everyday lives.

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

The Gospel story of Lazarus and Dives, the rich man, is a profound illustration of the teaching of the Epistle reading from the 1st Letter of St. John. God is love is the meaning of the mystery of God as Trinity, the essential doctrine of the Christian Faith. It is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be adored. Neither is it a human construct but the making known of God to us by God with us. What we behold in that door opened in heaven last week is what is to be lived in our lives. Thus we enter into the Trinity season, as it has come to be known, which presents a constellation of patterns, patterns upon patterns that circle around and into the mystery of God as Trinity, not unlike the circles of the Heavens in Dante’s Paradiso. “The love that moves the sun and the other stars” is the divine love which joins the varied forms of our humanity to God himself. The Trinity season emphasizes the connection between what is made known through revelation and how that it is to be lived in our lives.

The Epistle reading underscores for us the radical doctrine of the Trinity. The passage contains the core teaching that “God is love; and he that abideth or dwelleth in love abideth or dwelleth in God, and God in him.” This is a strong statement of living faith, our living in the mystery of God revealed. This love is not a transitory moment, here today and gone tomorrow; it is not about God tenting with us, as it were, but more emphatically dwelling or abiding in us, and thus, our abiding in God’s essential life. The simple point is that what is revealed is to be lived out in our lives; “because as he is, so are we in this world.” That, of course, is the great challenge and the real meaning of our spiritual pilgrimage. It is not just to God but with God and in God through the very motions of God himself alive in us. But how? Only by our attention to what is revealed and made known to us.

This is where the Gospel comes into play. It is an effective and powerful illustration of the importance and necessity of our attention to the things of God which if neglected result in our indifference and neglect of one another.

How we think about the world, as we have seen, changes how we think and deal with one another. As we have seen, the Passion and Resurrection of Christ is about the redemption of the world as gathered to God as opposed to seeing the world as something alien, something indifferent, something nauseating, and even something hostile or evil. That, in turn, changes how we see one another. The recurring theme has been about a change from fear and resentment of the world and one another to our joy and care towards one another. But this is equally true about how we think (or don’t think) about God; it affects how we think and deal with one another.

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“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

It is a lovely image that belongs to our meeting together in the glory of God revealed, the glory of the Trinity. All our beginnings and all our endings, all our comings and goings, and all the comings and goings of God with us in Word and Spirit, have their place of meeting and meaning in the Trinity. It is, we may say, the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor.12.3). To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement.

The Athanasian Creed is really an explication of the fuller meaning of that phrase. It sets before us the wonder and the mystery of God in terms of the interplay of positive and negative ways of thinking about God, kataphatic and apophatic theology, respectively. God is properly nothing, meaning no thing and thus all analogies that make God like this or that thing or concept have to be strongly qualified by the way of negative theology that distinguishes God absolutely from everything else. God is, as John Donne puts, “only and divinely most like himself,” while at one and the same time the principle of all that is. Revelation is about an understanding of the essential mystery of God made known through word and metaphor, through images and their meaning but without reducing God to the world and to the limits of finite thought. Only by staying close to the images of Scripture and thought can we begin to enter into what is revealed; in short, to enter into what we are given to behold.

Trinity Sunday signals an ending and marks a beginning. There is an ending of all that we have gone through from Advent to this day, an ending that is a kind of gathering, a threefold gathering: first, there is a gathering of all the history of salvation into this fullness of revelation; secondly, there is a gathering of all religion into this fullness of meaning (following Hegel’s insight that the world’s religions adumbrate the Trinity); and, thirdly, there is a gathering of all the substantial moments in the life of Christ into this fullness of understanding. Everything belongs to the mystery of God.

Trinity Sunday marks a beginning for us as well. There is our entry by grace, year by year, into the fullness of revelation, the fullness of meaning and understanding which is opened to view. “Behold a door was opened in heaven.” We are given to behold and enter into what we behold. What we behold are the highest things of the Spirit; in short, the spiritual reality of the living God. Such is the pageant of grace at work in us through the project of the Trinity Season. Having run through the Creeds in the sequence of Advent to Pentecost in the comings and goings of God, now the Creeds are meant to run through and live in us; such is our life in God.

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“He shall teach you all things”

Wind and fire. The most intangible of all tangible things. Such are the paradoxes of this day. Who has seen the wind? Who can touch the fire? But such metaphors open us out to the mystery of God as Trinity, the mystery which we can only think and adore. We cannot take the mystery of God captive to our understanding. That is the essence of idolatry, the idea that God is made in our image.

Something of the spiritual reality of God is wonderfully signified in the Feast of Pentecost, in the coming down of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the Spirit who signifies the essential nature of God and whose descent upon the Apostles establishes the spiritual community that is the Church. We are raised up into the mystery of God by God’s embracing us in the vision of his glory. God engages our imaginations. God engages the cultural and linguistic distinctives of our humanity but without being reduced to the cultural, the linguistic and the experiential. God engages the whole of our humanity. It is all God and all us at one and the same time.

Pentecost gathers us into the whole pageant of God’s dealings with our humanity, the whole pageant of revelation laid out in the Scriptures. There is creation. “In the beginning God created … the Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters,” bringing all things into order and being. This is the strong sense of creation as the spiritual act of the Creator. In the Christian understanding, creation is the spiritual act of the Trinity. The Spirit moving over the waters brings order and unity to the inchoate forms of the created and material world. God breathes his Spirit into the dust of humanity and we are made living beings, made in the image of God as spiritual creatures.

There is redemption – the pageant of God’s dealing with his wayward, recalcitrant and disobedient people, all who seek to have things their way. God speaks to prophet and people, constantly and steadfastly recalling them and us to his law, to his word and will for his people delivered on the mount of glory in a cloud of majesty and awe. God leads his people in the wilderness journeys despite our persistent sinfulness, “a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of light by night.” Once again, these contrasting and elusive images of things seen and heard open us out to the transcendent mystery of the glory of God. Jesus breathes on the disciples on “the same day at evening,” the evening of the day of his Resurrection. He bestows upon them the grace and power of the forgiveness of sins consummated on the cross and extended to us in the life of the Church. The eternal mystery of God is shown to us through the God-given created differences of what belongs to the unity of creation: through the word and metaphor, even wind and fire, and through the languages and cultures of the world, equally God-given. Such is revelation.

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“He sitteth on the right hand of the Father”

Not quite a scriptural text per se but a scriptural digest of many passages in their interrelation. In a way, it is all about understanding the interplay of images. The text is creedal – from the Nicene Creed. The Creeds are themselves a distillation of the images of scripture that provide a critical interpretive principle for thinking the scriptures. This is especially important in relation to the doctrine of the Ascension. It is not about a flight from the world but the redemption of the world; in short, finding the meaning and purpose of our lives in God and the world in God.

There is the religion of Jesus in the heart, the religion of sentiment and feeling which remains very much with us in a host of contradictory forms, largely in terms of the dominance of the therapeutic culture. There is, too, the religion of Jesus the moral policeman, the religion of outward conformity to the shifting demands of social and political correctness, also very much with us in terms of the ideologies and concerns about social justice and identitarian politics. While there is something true in each of these, neither of them is the religion of the risen and ascended Christ who “sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty,” as the Apostles’ Creed puts it. But without the risen and ascended Christ, the religions of sentiment and moralism are altogether empty and destructive, the religions of empty hearts and whitened sepulchres. For that is really all about us and not about God and us with God.

This is what happens when we try to reduce God to where we are rather than to be lifted up to where he is, to speak in the language of the images of scripture. Our lives are to be found in the comings and goings of God, not God in our comings and goings. There is all the difference in the world between these two perspectives: the one would make God subject to us; the other would place us with God in the revelation of his truth and love. These images about the comings and goings of God are the spiritual and eternal motions of God himself, on the one hand, and our circling around and into that mystery of eternal life, on the other hand. In other words, the metaphors point us to an understanding of God and to our relationship with God.

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“God has gone up with a merry noise”

The Psalms, more often than not, strike the right tone of approach to our liturgical observances. In this case, the high note of rejoicing and delight that belongs to the Feast of the Ascension is nicely captured by the words of the psalmist. “God has gone up with a merry noise/ the Lord with the sound of the trumpet” (Psalm 47.5).

The Ascension of Christ, as Acts suggests, marks the fortieth day of Easter. It marks the end, in the sense of the completion, of the Easter season. One of the creedal mysteries of the Christian Faith, the Ascension is often overlooked, perhaps because it doesn’t fall on a Sunday, but on a Thursday. And yet, it provides some very important and powerful teaching about the priority of things spiritual into which is gathered all things material and physical. In other words, the world finds its meaning in God and not the other way around.

What is the Ascension about? It is the homecoming of the Son to the Father and thus it is our homecoming too. Jesus on Rogation Sunday just past told us: “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again, I leave the world and go to the Father.” There is the sense of ‘mission accomplished!’ And that mission concerns our good and the good of the world. In other words, the Ascension brings to a certain completion and fullness the redemption of the world and the redemption of our humanity. The Son returns to the Father, not in flight from the world, as if matter or the physical world were inherently evil, but having accomplished the redemption of the world.

“God’s going up with a merry noise” is the lovely and exaltant metaphor that opens us out to the reality of God’s eternal life into which we are gathered. It is literally about our lives spiritually that embraces the physical and natural world without collapsing the spiritual into it. The Ascension signals the radical meaning of the redemption of the world and our humanity.

This is where the Ascension speaks so profoundly to our present-day concerns, fears, and worries. The Ascension means that the world and our humanity have an end in God, an end in God in the sense that the meaning and purpose of the world and the meaning and the purpose of our human lives is found in our relation to God in Jesus Christ. Against the perversity and folly of thinking that the world is just there for us to manipulate, exploit, or destroy, the Ascension reminds us that the world is God’s world. It exists for his will and purpose. And so do we. Ascension is about the sense that we have an end and a place with God. “I go to prepare a place for you,” as Jesus says. It is the counter to all of the forms of material determinism, to the “dialectical materialism” of Marxism and of capitalist consumer culture which reduces everything to material production and consumption. It changes how we see things.

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“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again,
I leave the world, and go to the Father.”

All our comings and goings find their meaning and truth in the comings and goings of God made visible in Christ, the Word and Son of the Father. Prayer is our life as ordered to God and with God. The pilgrimage of our souls is gathered into the pilgrimage of the life of God in the going forth and return of God in creation and redemption; this makes visible the eternal love of God in himself. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in today’s Gospel for Rogation Sunday.

Rogation means asking. Prayer, in its most fundamental sense, is asking. Asking for what? For this or that commodity or thing? For privilege and prestige, power and domination over others? No. Prayer is our participation in God’s own gathering of all things to himself. It is our seeking or desiring but seeking and desiring what? It is not our seeking and desiring this or that thing in the false infinity of things which never satisfies. It is our seeking and desiring what is the absolute good and our seeking and desiring to do what is right; ultimately the justice of God. That presupposes a world that is not random and arbitrary, chaotic and aimless; it presupposes the goodness of creation as God’s creation and our place within that world as ordered to God. Prayer is nothing less than that complete orientation of ourselves to the will and truth of God. In the Christian understanding, as shown to us in this Gospel, prayer is nothing less than our asking the Father in the name of the Son and in the Spirit of their mutual love. It is Trinitarian.

Richard Hooker notes that “prayer signifies all the service that ever we do unto God.” It is our seeking and desiring what God seeks and desires and as such, in God, as Peter Abelard’s great hymn, O Quanta Qualia, puts it, “wish and fulfillment can severed be ne’er, /Nor the thing prayed for come short of the prayer.” It is a commentary on what Jesus means when he tells us that “the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God.” Prayer “testifies,” as Hooker says, “that we acknowledge him as our sovereign good.” But up to now, “hitherto,” as Jesus says, “have you asked nothing in my name.” Prayer in the Christian sense is about asking the Father in the name of the Son in the Spirit of their eternal love: “ask,” Jesus says, “and ye shall receive that your joy may be full.” Peace and joy flow out of the Resurrection of Christ which makes visible what is present in the Passion; the “vision of peace, that brings joy evermore.”

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“Now I go my way to him that sent me”

The Passion and the Resurrection reveal the radical meaning of the life of God for us and with us. The purpose of the last three Sundays after Easter is to make visible the very nature of God as eternal life and love in the mutual relationship of God as Trinity. That is, we might say, the burden of these readings from the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel, read for centuries upon centuries on these Sundays. The task is to stay close to the images in order to begin to grasp the understanding which they convey to us.

Here Jesus tells us that “now I go my way to him that sent me.” It is a telling remark but, as he immediately says to the disciples, “none of you asks me, Where are you going?” The idea of the Scriptures and their proclamation in the liturgy is that our encounter with the words of Christ should awaken in us questions of inquiry. We are meant to be intellectually alert to what it means. We saw that last week as well when the disciples were perplexed and puzzled about what Jesus was saying. Here in this passage which actually precedes last week’s reading from John 16, Jesus is at pains to teach us about the radical meaning of his Passion and Resurrection. It opens out to us the radical life of God.

The Epistle reading from The Letter of James complements this teaching. It refers us to “the Father of lights,” “from whom every good gift and every perfect gift” comes to us. It mentions as well what was once a commonplace idea, perhaps now largely forgotten, of God as unchangeable and constant, an eternal presence. What derives from the eternal blessedness of God is by definition something good and perfect. To glimpse something of that is to be brought to birth – again the birthing imagery such as we saw last week – “brought to birth by the word of truth.” This helps us to understand how we come to life and live in the motions of God’s own life.

Once again, too, we find that, like the disciples, we are in sorrow at the words of Christ about his going from us. Here he explains what it means. In the context of the whole chapter in its sequence, the point is that we don’t always immediately get it. We hear but don’t fully understand; in part, because we are not asking or seeking for its meaning. This speaks, I think, to an important aspect of our humanity. We are intellectual and spiritual beings who are created for knowledge and love. Ultimately those essential aspects of our humanity find their truth and meaning in what Christ makes known to us; namely, the will of him that sent him.

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