Category: Sermons

“Walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called”

So Paul bids us and so Luke shows us. What is that vocation? It is about our life in Christ. “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling,” we are told. And what is that calling? That there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” Paul in Ephesians gives us a clear and objective statement of faith. But how does it become our faith? That too is stated: “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

This counters all of the empty assertions and personal faith or identity claims that beset an anxious and fearful world in which we are increasingly isolated and alone, separated and divided from all that makes us human. This is the antithesis of the culture of “look at me looking at you looking at me,’ a culture which is essentially narcissistic and empty, in other words, nihilistic, even as it seeks for meaning in belonging to whatever seems to offer self-affirmation. Belonging not believing. Paul is talking about both. And believing, not as some form of personal assertion or opinion, but as holding onto what is transcendent, true, and God-given, is the condition of our belonging. We belong to what is greater than ourselves. To know that is the saving grace which counters our self-pretension and self-righteousness. We are known in the loving embrace of God.

“Friend, go up higher.” This too is our calling in Christ. Not on the basis of our presumption and claims to greatness. Based on what? Our sense of self-importance which is really about our claims to entitlement and privilege over others? That is to miss the whole point of our calling. The Gospel shows us the great misreading and misunderstanding about the Law, particularly the fourth commandment about the Sabbath. As Jesus famously says, drawing upon the example of King David, “the sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath,” for the sabbath is given not as burden but as a blessing. It belongs to what God seeks for our humanity; our wholeness and completeness as found in Him, signaled in Paul’s words about our life in Christ.

The sabbath is given as a time for prayerful reflection and meditation upon the truth of God and his creation and our place within it without which our thoughts and actions become deceptive, delusional, self-seeking and thus divisive and destructive. “Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath?”, Jesus asks rhetorically to the Lawyers and Pharisees who have watched him with critical and judgemental eyes. He names their hypocrisy. For if is not lawful then we would be justified in ignoring the needs of one another; holding to the letter of the law while denying its truth and spirit. Such is the evil of self-righteousness and hypocrisy as Jesus shows. “Which of you shall have an ass, or an ox, fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day?” One cannot miss the irony of his question in preferring our animal possessions to the care of human beings. “And they could not answer him again to these things.” They are convicted in their consciences and so are we.

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“They overcame him”

We are in the company of angels. How to think about angels? The simple point is that you can only think them. You can’t see them. The visual imaginary, the way in which angels are depicted in art, is only useful if it contributes to our intellectual and spiritual understanding of the angels.

Michaelmas is a splendid reminder to us of the nature and the reality of the spiritual without which we have no way to think anything. The greatest and most important things in our lives are the things we cannot see, only think and feel, the things of intellect and spirit. You cannot see love. You cannot literally see a number, only the representations of number; you can only think them for they are mental realities. You cannot see a quark or a neutrino or any of the many other features of quantum physics. You cannot see words which are thoughts before they are spoken or written, only then can you see or hear them, sensibly as it were. Think of the magic and wonder of reading. Black marks on a white background that somehow entrance and engage our minds with the thoughts and ideas they represent. There is a constant dialectic between what is seen and unseen.

The angels are pure intellectual beings. They have no bodies. They are beyond number. Unlike the bits and bytes of our cyberspace world they occupy no space whatsoever. They are the pure thoughts of God, the intellectual principles that shape and “move our imaginations and strengthen the light of understanding,” as Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelic Doctor puts it. They are precisely about the truth and the nature of intellection, that more profound principle of thought upon which our more prosaic and linear ways of thinking ultimately depend. They remind us of a kind of unitive thinking as opposed to our divided thinking. When we reduce reason to a tool, to a means of problem-solving, we can at best only discover that we are the problem as in Oedipus Rex.

Intellection is the gathering of everything into unity. It is to see things as a whole and not simply in the division and dissolution of things; of the endlessness of ‘this and that’. Michaelmas presents a cosmic vision that complements the cosmic vision of Genesis 1. The first chapter of Genesis unfolds the pageant of creation not as a prosaic temporal affair but as an orderly and intellectual process in which one thing is distinguished from another within an ordered whole.

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“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.”

Today’s Gospel is a powerful and moving illustration of what Paul means by our “being rooted and grounded in love.” The compassion of Christ is the deep love of God in himself and for us. Thus these readings illuminate the theme of the Trinity season captured in the Scripture phrase for the Trinity season: “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” In a way, the entire project and purpose of the Trinity season is about our circling around and into the divine mystery of God’s love, seeking that love as the moving principle in us.

To understand the compassion of Christ shown in the Gospel story of the widow of Nain is “to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” It might seem paradoxical: to know what is beyond our knowing. Yet that is the great philosophical insight: our knowing is always about what is greater than us. Our knowing is finite and partial but belongs to the greater knowing of God. Knowing and loving go together which is itself another challenge for us: to see the connection between knowledge and love is to be awakened to the deeper and greater reality of God in his ultimate being, ultimate knowing and ultimate loving. Such is the mercy that never ends and as such it is the “continual pity” of God which alone can “cleanse and defend” God’s Church. That “continual pity” is the compassion of God made visible in Christ.

Luke provides the greatest number of Gospel readings in the Trinity season. Dante, in a wonderful phrase, identifies Luke as scriba manseutudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. That gentleness is the compassion of Christ. Thus, Luke’s Gospel is sometimes called the “Gospel of Compassion” because of the touching and compelling scenes and stories which his Gospel highlights. Luke alone, for example, gives us the stories of the Good Samaritan, the prodigal son, and the widow of Nain.

All three turn on the idea of seeing that leads to compassion. In the parable of the good Samaritan, the certain Samaritan “when he saw him [the certain man, the symbol of our humanity, lying wounded and half dead on the roadside], he had compassion on him.” In the story of the prodigal son, it is the father who when his son “was at a distance, saw him and had compassion.” And Jesus coming to the gate of the little city, Nain, meets the funeral procession of the only son of the widow of Nain as they proceed to the graveside. “And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.”

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“God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”

This Sunday comes just after the Feast of the Holy Cross this year, itself the marker for the Autumn Ember days this week. Holy Cross (Sept. 14th) reminds us of the centrality of the Passion of Christ and its meaning for us in our lives partly by recalling us to the purpose of the ordained ministry. The task of the Church through the priestly ministry is to recall all of us to our life and vocation in Christ. In a profound sense the concentration of our thoughts upon the Cross and Passion of Christ is the great counter to the anxieties that bedevil our current world and culture.

Louise Penny’s post-pandemic novel, “The Madness of Crowds” suggests that people “were tired of being afraid” with respect to Covid, the fear of sickness and death which quickly turns to the fear and hatred of others, to division and hostility. I would like to think that she was right that people are tired of being afraid, but I wonder. It sometimes seems that we have become acclimated to fear, finding in it the comfort of being a victim where responsibility and agency is directed away from ourselves and is placed on others. Our fears make us more manipulable to the agendas of others.

This is the opposite to what Paul is saying in Galatians and which Matthew illustrates in his “be not anxious” gospel, a phrase which Jesus repeats three times. “Be not anxious” complements Christ’s “be not afraid”. The Gospel puts its finger on what we are anxious about: “your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” How can we not be concerned with and even preoccupied with these material and physical realities? And especially when all of the assumptions of the middle-class about their future and that of their children seems less and less rosy? To be sure, and yet there is a great spiritual danger in attaching ourselves to expectations that cannot do justice to the radical truth and dignity of our humanity, something which, paradoxical as it may seem, is realized in Christ Crucified.

The Passion of Christ teaches us most profoundly about God and about ourselves in our essential humanity. What it means to be human cannot be measured by wealth and power, by the material and physical aspects of our lives. Not that such things don’t matter but they are not and cannot be everything. At best they provide the context in which our lives are lived but to what end? It is not simply about the comfortable life; it is about a life lived with purpose to what is greater than ourselves and in which we find a deeper truth about ourselves. We are, as Paul suggests, a new creation in Christ. We are not defined simply by the cultural contexts and experiences of our lives. Which is why, as he puts it, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matter at all.

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“One of them turned back, … giving him thanks. And he was a Samaritan.”

Thanksgiving belongs to our sanctification; in short, to “the increase of faith, hope and charity” or love in us, as the Collect prays. As such it is about our living and walking in the Spirit which, as Paul emphasizes in Galatians, is about “bearing one another’s burdens” as well as “bearing our own burdens.” Thanksgiving frees us to God and to one another in God.

The Gospel story for today illustrates the radical nature of thanksgiving as an integral and critical part of our life in the Spirit. There were ten lepers all of whom sought healing from Jesus. All ten were healed, restored to the human community from which they had been exiled and shut out, spurned because of their contagion. Only one returned to give thanks.

Our redemption is accomplished once and for all in Christ’s sacrifice and passion; hence all ten were healed. It is whole and complete in Christ. But our sanctification, itself an integral part of human redemption, is a continuing work in progress. It is about growing into who we are in Christ while in via ad patriam, in pilgrimage to God. Our sanctification is not complete and inherent in us. But to be whole is about that constant work of thanksgiving which turns entirely upon our participation in Christ’s sacrifice through “this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving”; in short, our constant attention to Christ wanting him to “make us love that which thou dost command” in order “that we may obtain that which thou dost promise.” What he promises is illustrated in the remarkable exchange between Jesus and the one who turned back.

“And he was a Samaritan,” Luke tells us, at the same time as being named by Jesus as “this stranger.” Once again we have a Gospel story which illustrates the qualities of our life in Christ by way of the example of a Samaritan. Last week we had the parable of the Good Samaritan, the great illustration of the Christian ethic of compassion. In the Evening Offices for this week, we had as well the story of Jesus at the well of Samaria; his encounter with the Samaritan woman in John’s Gospel.

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“Behold a voice out of the cloud”

“The glory of God is man alive [a living human being] and the life of man is the vision of God,” as the 2nd century theologian Irenaeus said. Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. It sets before us the vision of Christ transfigured, the vision of his divine majesty, and what that means for us, namely, the idea of our transformation. “That we, being purified and strengthened by thy grace, may be transformed into his likeness from glory to glory,” as the Collect puts it. What does that mean and how, we might ask? Well, it has to do with what we see and hear, in short, what we are learning through what is being taught.

On the Mount of Transfiguration we are told, “Behold a voice,” a voice that comes “out of the cloud”, the bright overshadowing cloud of God’s glory, the shekhinah of the Hebrew Scriptures that signifies God’s presence. What does it mean to see what is heard? It means an understanding – a divine understanding articulated through our human understanding. Hearing and seeing are the biblical senses of understanding, and they are, if I may put it this way, the most intellectual of the senses, meaning that they point us beyond a literal sense to something intellectual, to something understood. To behold a voice is the language of Revelation.

The Transfiguration is the summertime epiphany of the Trinity. It complements the wintertime epiphany in the Baptism of Christ. For both there is a beholding of what is heard. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matt.3.17) and again, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; Hear ye him” (Matt.17.5). The Baptism inaugurates the way of the obedience of Christ for us, our justification. The Transfiguration commands the way of the obedience of Christ in us, our sanctification; hence the added charge, “Hear ye him.”

The voice is the Father’s voice. To hear that voice in the biblical sense of acting faithfully upon what we hear is to enter into the way of understanding through the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The sequence of teaching which brings us to the Transfiguration (Matt.16.13-17.1) illustrates just how hard and yet how necessary that way is. “Who do men say that the Son of man is? Who do you say that I am?”, Jesus asks his disciples. Peter answers: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”.

Jesus’ response shows that what Peter understands, he understands from God. “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matt.16.7). It is not simply a finite human understanding, a human opinion or construct by us. It shares in something more. It is divinely human. Through this understanding Simon becomes Peter, πετρος, which means ‘rock’ And upon this understanding (and no other), Jesus says, “Upon this rock, I will build my church” against which nothing will prevail (Matt.16.18). But how well do we stand upon this rock of understanding? Again, Peter provides the paradigm.

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“Ye shall know them by their fruits”

“How came we ashore?” Miranda asks her father, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He was the Duke of Milan but preferred his books in the study of natural philosophy to the mundane duties of running his dukedom which he had delegated to his brother, Antonio.. Betrayed by his brother, who in cahoots with Alonzo, the King of Naples, usurped his dukedom, Prospero and Miranda are set adrift on the seas on a derelict raft. Never mind that Milan is not an Italian port city! They wash up on an island – “the Bermoothes” – Bermuda, as it turns out. Not such a bad place to come ashore, I suppose. The play is the only play of Shakespeare that is set outside the Euro-Mediterranean world. Miranda at the time in the play was three. Now at fifteen she learns who she is, the daughter of the Duke of Milan. Prospero’s answer to her question “how came we ashore?” is “by providence divine.”

The play explores the ambiguities of Prospero’s intent. His knowledge of nature in Renaissance eyes is a kind of magic – so-called ‘white magic’. It belongs to early modernity in different ways to see knowledge as conferring a power over nature. We should be only too well aware of the deadly consequences of such knowledge in our own times. Prospero conjures up a storm, a tempest, to bring his betrayers to the island and under his power. But to what end? Revenge? Or something more? Reconciliation?

There is a nice sense here of the interplay between natural and moral philosophy. On the ship are not only his betrayers but also the son of one of his betrayers, Ferdinand, the son of Alonso, King of Naples. As well there is the noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo, who gave Prospero his books as he was being set adrift. On the island, there is Caliban, the symbolic image of the indigenous cultures in their encounter with European culture. Shakespeare not only explores the complexity of that encounter but provides a Euro-critique of itself that derives from the indigenous cultures themselves.

The play unfolds the love theme between Ferdinand and Miranda that leads to forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness and reconciliation are extended even towards those who show no remorse, no change, such as Prospero’s brother, Antonio, and Alonzo’s brother, Sebastian, unrepentant scoundrels and miscreants both. Yet grace is greater than those who resist it; they are sustained by what they refuse to embrace but, at the same time, what they cannot enjoy. There’s the rub.

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“I have compassion on the multitude”

Today’s Collect is a loaded prayer that pulls together the central ideas of the Epistle and Gospel readings. Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, it gathers us into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial, that is to say, it concerns the quality of our lives with God as standing upon the truth of God revealed. The images of grafting, growing, nurturing and preserving are organic and agricultural – most fitting for our lives in the valley – but 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 inter-relation between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle unpacks, we might say, the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. And we pray that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel alludes to the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Communion. Our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things”, is through the compassion of Christ who feeds us in the wilderness and sets us upon our way, “he in us and we in him,” as the Prayer of Humble Access in our liturgy put it. Grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” as Paul teaches, we are meant to live from that Word of God revealed.

That we are grafted not simply into the name of God but into “the love of thy name” reminds us that Baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship which has its continuation in the Eucharist. The fruit of these organic, spiritual, substantial and sacramental relationships is holy lives and a holy end. “But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life”. Thus the interplay between the Epistle and the Gospel is like the connection between Baptism and Communion.

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