Category: Sermons

“He had answered them well”

An intriguing and difficult Gospel, it signals the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the one who is the fulfillment of the Law, the one in whom the love of God and the love of neighbour is perfectly realized. But that turns on another important point, namely, the idea of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the anointed one of God. Both are the strong truth claims of the Gospel about Jesus as Lord. It is worth unpacking them a bit in relation to one of the scribes who engages with Jesus respectfully and intelligently, so much so that Jesus will say that “thou art not far from the kingdom of God.”

One of the scribes “having heard them reasoning together” perceives that Jesus “had answered them well.” Who was reasoning together about what and with whom? The “reasoning together” is really a disputation, an examination of matters of contention. Jesus is engaged in a dispute with the Sadducees about marriage and resurrection. The idea of resurrection was a matter of debate within late Judaism. The Sadducees were a group within Israel who, as Mark puts it, “say that there is no resurrection.” They undertake to entrap Jesus about the law regarding “levirate marriage” in the Law of Moses: the idea that the brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his brother’s widow and raise up children for him. The term “levirate” simply means ‘a husband’s brother.’ The concern, I think, is about a way of providing for the care of the widow and for the continuation of the family line. The Sadducees manufacture a complicated ‘what-if’ scenario of a series of seven brothers who one by one take the first brother’s wife after his death only for each of them to die without a child. The question they put to Jesus is “whose wife will she be in the resurrection since the seven had her as wife?”

At issue is an understanding of the Law and a question about the resurrection. Jesus’ response catches the attention of one of the scribes who has overheard the exchange. Jesus says rather bluntly the Sadducees are wrong because they “neither know the scriptures nor the power of God.” He points out that in heaven they “neither marry nor are given in marriage” so the whole scenario is moot. He reminds them about the burning bush where God says to Moses that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, patriarchs whose lives and deaths are noted in Genesis. His point is that the revelation of God to Moses assumes that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are raised up and are alive. “He is not God of the dead but of the living” Jesus says and, once again, adds “you are quite wrong.”

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“Only Luke is with me.”

It is a poignant phrase. “Only Luke is with me,” Paul says. And yet that seems significant. For Luke, too, has been very much with us during the Trinity season. He is, we might say, the Church’s great and primary spiritual director especially in the Trinity season. There is a certain quality to his writings in his Gospel and in The Book of The Acts of the Apostles, which work is generally attributed to him. Dante has captured best, I think, the special quality of Luke’s approach to the mystery of God in Christ, the mystery of human redemption. Luke, he says in a memorable phrase, is “scriba mansuetudinis Christi,” the scribe of the gentleness of Christ.

I have often been struck by that phrase. It seems to capture the real meaning and truth of our spiritual pilgrimage, the journey of the soul to God with God in Jesus Christ. It highlights a special quality to that pilgrimage – gentleness. Not our gentleness but the gentleness of Christ, which at once provides a profound insight into God’s engagement with our wounded and broken humanity and a strong corrective to the negative views of divine judgment.

The powerful teachings of the Trinity season largely focus on the idea of an ethic of action rooted in compassion. Not surprisingly, Luke has been our principal instructor about such an ethic which speaks so profoundly to the confusions and idiocies of our day where either profit or the self is God which neither can possibly be. In the absence of any kind of principled ethical discourse there is only the tyranny of global corporatism, the ideological vacuum of contemporary politics, or the subjective tyranny of the self. But here, almost as a kind of counter to those totalizing concepts, we are reminded that “only Luke is with [us]”. That seems to make a difference.

The Gospel reading for The Feast of St. Luke speaks directly about the purpose of our prayerful reading of the Scriptures in the ordered liturgy of the Church. What is it all about? “Then opened he their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures.” In the opening of the Scriptures, a phrase that Luke uses about Christ in relation to the disciples and, by extension, to us, we are gathered into the gentleness of Christ, into the compassionate love of God for our wounded and broken humanity. We are being healed and even more than healed. Once again, in Luke’s insightful account of the healing of the ten lepers of whom only one, and he a Samaritan, “returned to give thanks,” we are being made whole. Luke opens us out to the deeper meaning of Christ’s being with us. It is about our being made whole and complete, but not through anything in ourselves.

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So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth:
it shall not return to me empty

The custom in our maritime communities has been to keep Harvest Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving Day weekend. It is a gathering together of different thanksgivings. The idea of thanksgiving for the harvest is ancient and universal, especially in rural and agricultural communities. The idea of national thanksgiving is more recent and focuses on the political and the social. We would do well to recall the inner spirit of both so I want to try to say something about the spiritual significance of Harvest Thanksgiving in the face of our current anxieties and concerns.

I have always been moved by Harvest Thanksgiving as it has traditionally been celebrated in our maritime communities, especially in our rural farmlands. There is something quite wonderful about gathering the fruits of field and orchard into the churches, something at once aesthetically pleasing and spiritually symbolic. At Christ Church for years sheaves of corn-stalks marked the pews. I always had the sense of preaching in a corn-field! Not a bad biblical image and precedent!

Harvest Thanksgiving has always a sensual and aesthetic quality to it; things seen, and touched, smelled and tasted. But therein lies the danger, the danger of reducing Harvest Thanksgiving to self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption, to a sensual feast of the belly at the expense of the mind and the soul More stuffed than the turkey. Who are we thanking and for what if it is simply about the sensual pleasures of appetite? In our rural and agricultural communities, there is always the danger of losing sight of the more profound meaning of Harvest Thanksgiving. It is not about thanking ourselves for what we have been able to achieve and accomplish. It is not about what we think we deserve, or worse, about what we think we are entitled.

This year the annual Pumpkin Regatta in Windsor will be a much diminished affair because the number of giant pumpkins is much so greatly reduced, owing to the cold spring, the dry summer, and the effects of Hurricane Dorian, which also blasted the cornfields. The world knows but ignores the humanitarian disaster of the continuing famine in Yemen. The current discourse on global climate change is increasingly paralyzing and dispiriting but contributes to the way in which events on the global stage, in which we are all implicated, play out locally, what some have called ‘glocalization.’ All these things challenge us to think more deeply about the radical meaning of thanksgiving. At the very least they remind us that the harvest cannot be taken for granted.

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

Compassion. Such a rich and powerful word, and, however much it has been hi-jacked by the therapy culture and greatly reduced in its meaning and  truth, it still retains a hold on our hearts and minds. Its deeper meaning is here for us to reclaim without which it becomes the kindness that kills.

Today’s Gospel shows us that compassion belongs to the spiritual pattern of death and resurrection. This Gospel story, along with the passage from Ephesians, makes it clear that compassion is nothing less than Christ in us. It is about our being “strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.” It is nothing less than our “being rooted and grounded in love,” knowing nothing less than “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” This is deep love.

The word compassion in Greek refers to the innermost being of a person, to the core of our being as it were, “the inner man,” the inner you. Luke uses the construction of ‘he saw, he had compassion’ three times: first, here in the story of the Widow of Nain; secondly, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan; and, thirdly, in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Both the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Parable of the Prodigal Son in his return to the Father are really about the movement of Christ’s love in us. But here we have an event where the Lord sees and has compassion. Matthew and Mark use it too in relation to Jesus “seeing the crowds and having compassion on them” because “they are like sheep without a shepherd.” The compassion of Christ, too, is used about Jesus seeing the crowd in the wilderness without food. Seeing them and having compassion on them leads to feeding them. The deeper theological sensibility is about our inward relation to God in Christ and through that to our care for one another. Without the first, our relation to God in Christ, I fear the second risks becoming the cover for the agendas of expediency and convenience; the kindness that kills, quite literally in terms of the so-called right to die via the complicity and agency of the medical profession, for example.

We may all want to die someday. There is nothing wrong in wanting to die especially in the Christian understanding of things. But it is quite another thing to cause one’s death or to be the agent of another’s death. These are some of the ethical dilemmas which arise in our technocratic culture where we have the means and power to do many things but lack the ethical wisdom to know when and where not to exercise such power. The larger question is about the good which is rooted and grounded in God and in his goodness.

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“And one … turned back”

Metanoia, as we have suggested on occasion, literally means a thinking after, though it is usually translated simply as repentance. Repentance is a turning back to the one from whom we have turned away. It signals the profound nature of our relation to God, a kind of constant circling around the principle of our being and knowing, a retire ad principia, as Lancelot Andrewes puts it, that marks our going to and from God in understanding and love.

Last Sunday and this Sunday present us with two Gospel stories both of which center on a Samaritan: the parable of the so-called Good Samaritan, and the one who “turned back,” “glorify[ing] God,” and “giving him thanks,” who was “a Samaritan.” In both accounts from Luke’s Gospel, it is Jesus who tells us that it was “a certain Samaritan” who “had compassion” and “showed mercy” on the one who was “wounded” and “half-dead,” and that the one who “fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks” was “a Samaritan.” In one way, Jesus is providing a critique of what we might call denominational chauvinism where one group denigrates another and asserts their own superiority. But in another way, Jesus is teaching us something more radical about ethical teaching and ethical living. It has very much to do with our encounter with the other, what Jesus calls here the “stranger.”

“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.” It is, to be sure, an indictment of Israel. Ten lepers were healed; only one returned to give glory, but “he was a Samaritan”, a kind of outsider or stranger. The Samaritans were a sect within Judaism but despised by the Jews. At issue is their view of the Law and the place of the giving of the Law. But Jesus is not simply pitting Jews against Samaritans and choosing sides. He is not saying that the Samaritans are right on these questions about the Torah and the giving of the Law. In fact, quite the opposite. What then is the significance of these two back-to-back Gospels about Samaritans?

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And who is my neighbour?

In 2014, Grace Gelder, a middle-aged English photographer, married herself. In 2015, performance artist Tracey Emin, best known for her art exhibit “messy bed”, married a rock, a stone in her garden in France; the perfect husband in terms of stability, quiet, comfort and calm. To be sure, it’s not going anywhere. There are those who have ‘married’ bridges, the Eiffel tower (and subsequently divorced), a Ferris wheel named Bruce, a warehouse, and other objects, inanimate and otherwise. Such is the nature of our commitments to various things, I suppose. Yet, rather than immediately and completely dismissing such things as narcissistic nonsense, the philosopher and cultural critic, Slavoj Zizek, suggests that we should consider the moment of truth in such things. To marry oneself suggests that one is not simply identical with oneself and raises the further question, ‘which self are you marrying?’

Your happy self? Your grumpy, catty self? Your anxious, nervous self? Who are you? What is your self? By extension, the same applies to these other ‘marriages’ which are about forms of attachment which reveal aspects of ourselves as well. But even more, they reveal a profound contradiction in our contemporary world. We are autonomous selves and yet utterly unclear and uncertain about ourselves. How can we love anything or anyone given such radical uncertainty about ourselves?

One might at this point opt for the classical Buddhist approach and simply deny that there is any you at all. There is no self. This is indeed a remarkable concept in relation to getting utterly free of all and every form of attraction, of desire, of possession. You are an illusion and so is the world. But the kind of boutique Western Buddhism popular in the west, is neither western nor buddhist. For, on the one hand, it affirms what Buddhism most emphatically denies, namely, the self, and, on the other hand, denies what western culture in general firmly embraces, namely, that there is a world which is in some sense knowable; in short, there is God. I am not sure that these are real options, since classical Buddhism negates the question, while faux western buddhism persists in the same confusions. What then shall we do? Well, we might consider thinking more deeply the familiar and yet unfamiliar parable of the so-called Good Samaritan in today’s Gospel. We know it but overlook its profounder meaning.

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“Ephphatha”… “Be opened”

Hearing and seeing are the biblical senses of the understanding. It might seem, at first, that they are simply about what is received, that they are, as it were, merely passive senses, the senses of reception. Something seen is received by the eye; something heard is received by the ear. But there is an activity as well, the activity of seeing and the activity of hearing.

What is seen and heard is there for the understanding. There is something communicated, the meaning of which we enter into through the activity of understanding. For it is not just the words which are heard or the vision which is seen that is received. What the words signify, what the vision reveals, is given to be understood.

Our understanding is our wrestling with the significance of things. It is a profoundly spiritual activity. It speaks to who we are in the sight of God – those to whom God reveals himself and into whose presence he would have us come. Hearing and seeing as the senses of understanding mean that there is an acting upon what is received. There is a similar double-sidedness to our “being opened.”

In the Gospel for today, “they bring unto [Jesus] one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech”. They beseech the healing touch of Jesus upon someone who is deaf and, if not altogether dumb, at least impeded in his speech to the point that others must speak for him. In response to their request, Jesus puts his fingers into his ears, spits upon the ground, and touches his tongue – all outward, tangible and physical acts – but, as well, and just as remarkably, Jesus’ “look[s] up to heaven”, “he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, be opened”. There is, in short, a healing: “and straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.”

As with all the healing miracles of the gospels, they signify the restoration of our humanity. What is wanted by God is not the deformity of our being but the perfection of our humanity. What is wanted is our being made totally and completely adequate to the truth of God; in short, our being opened to God signals our willingness to will what God wills for us.

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“By the grace of God, I am what I am”

“Standing on the promises” is an old evangelical hymn composed by Russell Kelso Carter, professor of chemistry, natural science, civil engineering and mathematics at the Pennsylvania Military Academy in 1886, just four years after the building of this Church. Some of you may know it. “Standing, standing/ standing on the promises of Christ my Saviour,/ Standing, standing,/ I’m standing on the promises of God.” It refers to the promises of God and signals the sure, rock-fast nature of those promises even in the face of “the howling storms of doubt and fear.” How? “By the living word of God.” It belongs, I think, to Paul’s message in today’s epistle.

But how do we stand? There are the things which God wants and promises for us and then there is our relation to such things. Paul talks about our standing on the gospel which has been preached to us and which has been received by us “by which also ye are saved,” he says. But he adds a conditional clause; “if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.” At issue is the living word of God in us.

The promises are not to be taken for granted. They are given, to be sure. Paul goes on to talk about the Faith in more-or-less creedal terms and about his own early relation to the proclamation of the gospel – “I persecuted the Church of God,” he says in an honest and confessional way. How then does he now stand in relation to the gospel? As “the least of the Apostles,” he suggests, but nonetheless an Apostle – one who is sent. Such a standing and such a sending are nothing less than acts of grace: for it is “such a measure of thy grace” that allows us to “run the way of thy commandments” so that we “may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure” as today’s Collect puts it. Something is required on our part, to be sure, and yet, what is wanted has its source solely, utterly, and completely in God. Grace is what comes from God to us, but we are not merely the passive recipients of God’s grace; we have to run with it that it may define and shape us. “By the grace of God, I am what I am,” Paul states, aware of the transition and transformation from persecutor to follower and even more, to being an Apostle, to being who he is solely by the grace of God.

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