Category: Sermons

“Blessed are you”

The soft autumnal colours of October give way to the sombre grey of November. There is a meditative and contemplative quality to this time of year “when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” as Shakespeare so memorably puts it.

His whole sonnet (#73) applies the imagery of the dying of nature’s year to human mortality, seeing in ourselves “that time of year,” “the twilight of such day as after sunset fadeth in the west,” and “the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie, as the death-bed whereon it must expire, consum’d with what which it was nourish’d by.” Though beautifully put, such observations are rather commonplace in the poetic, philosophic and biblical traditions. “Lord, what is man,” the Psalmist asks “that thou hast such respect unto him, or the son of man, that thou so regardest him?” and answers that “man is like a thing of nought: his time passeth away as a shadow” (Ps. 144, 3-4). There is no escaping the reality of human mortality.

The sonnet ends on a different note that suggests a deeper sensibility about the perceptions of mortality pointing to something greater. “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long.” These poetic reflections “make [our] love more strong” and challenge us “to love that well which [we] must leave ere long.” That the world, ourselves, and others are to be loved well even in the face of mortality indicates that they are worthy of love. That can only be so, because they are known and loved in God’s eternal knowing and loving of all things. Things mortal are seen in relation to what is immortal.

This belongs to ancient wisdom and truth albeit in a number of registers. “There is no permanence,” the hero Gilgamesh is told on his quest for understanding in one of the oldest literary works of our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, regarded by the German poet Rilke, shortly after its being discovered five thousand years later in the 19th century, as the great Epic of the Fear of Death; mortality, in other words. But there is a wonderful paradox. Gilgamesh is told this by Utnapishtim, a mortal who has been granted immortality (along with his wife) after the great flood by the arbitrary and capricious gods of ancient Sumeria. Utnapishtim is the precursor to Noah and the flood. But what kind of immortality are they granted? Not one in company or communion with others or even the gods but just the two of them in the Land of Dilmun, an imaginary place beyond the imaginary ends of the world. A kind of no place.

Shakespeare’s sonnet connects to the readings that belong to the great Feast of All Saints and its Octave. Yesterday was All Saints’ Day and today is both The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity and The Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, better known as All Souls’ Day (transferred to Monday). In the season of scattered leaves, themselves an apt image of the dying of nature’s year, and in the culture of scattered souls, another apt image of things passing and falling away, there is a gathering into something more. This is shown in the readings that belong to All Saints’.

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“Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee”

It is a remarkable Gospel. What does Jesus want us to know? That he is the forgiveness of sins. “That you may know,” Jesus says to the sceptical scribes whose inner thoughts he knows, it seems. Wow. But what does forgiveness mean and what does it look like?

If you say, “I forgive you, but I can’t forget,” then you haven’t forgiven the sin. You have merely put away the penalty that you might have exacted, your ‘pound of flesh’, as it were. But the original wrong isn’t made right between you. It isn’t forgiven. Forgiveness cannot be mere words.

Or if you despise the one who has offended you so that it is a matter of repugnance or a matter of indifference to have anything further to do with him, then you haven’t forgiven him so much as tried to forget him; in short, to erase him from the horizon of your mind as if he didn’t exist.

If you say, “I will forgive, because if I don’t, God won’t forgive me,” then perhaps you come a little closer to true forgiveness, though standing still a long way off. At least the common basis of our sinful humanity is recognised – a common need, a ground of sympathy, is acknowledged. It points to the radical meaning of what we pray. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” That acknowledges a sense of reciprocity between God and us.

Forgiveness means the removal of sin and the restoration of the good. Forsaking means the actual turning away from sin so as to turn to the active loving of the true and absolute good, God. It means the desire or pursuit of righteousness. The forgiveness of sins enables the forsaking of sins, the following after righteousness only through the restoration of righteousness in us.

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“Well, Master, thou hast said the truth”

There are two ways of turning back to God, the one in thanksgiving, which we saw last Sunday, the other in repentance. Both are an acknowledgment of the truth of God which measures us and not the other way around; both are a kind of redire ad principia, a return to a principle. That measure redeems and sanctifies our loves and our experiences. How? By bringing them to the truth of God without which “most loving [is] mere folly,” as Shakespeare notes in As You Like It (Act 2, sc. 7).

Paul in the Epistle gives thanks to God on behalf of the people of Corinth for the grace of God which has been given them which enriches them “in all utterance – speech – and in all knowledge.” In the Gospel, we see the idea of repentance as the turning of our minds to the truth upon which our thinking and being ultimately depend. In both readings, love and understanding are interrelated and speak to the truth of our humanity as intellectual and spiritual beings; in short, to the interplay between knowing and loving that belongs to “follow[ing] thee the only God, with pure hearts and minds” over and against the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil”, as the Collect puts it, reminding us of the baptismal renunciations.

The Gospel comprises two parts: first, an intriguing dialogue between Jesus and one of the scribes and, secondly, Jesus’ powerful teaching about the Christ, the anointed one, or Messiah as more than just a son of David, that is to say of the royal Davidic lineage and therefore more than a political saviour. Drawing on the Psalms of David, he points to what David himself says about the Lord by the Holy Spirit, calling God his Lord therefore acknowledging God’s transcendent and eternal nature, ultimately just as we say in the Creed that Christ is “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God.”

Two things are intriguing about the first part of the Gospel: first, it is a positive and not a negative encounter between Jesus and one of the scribes, and secondly, here in Mark’s account we have Jesus himself proclaiming the Summary of the Law, unlike what we heard five Sundays ago in the lead-up to the Parable of the Good Samaritan where the cynical lawyer who tried to put Jesus to the test was compelled by the truth itself to pronounce the love of God and the love of neighbour, and through the parable, its meaning. Here it is given by Jesus: Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord. In our liturgy, Matthew’s ending rather than Mark’s is added that “on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Here Jesus himself sums up the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, and at least hints that the commandment of twofold love is summed up in himself. This is what Paul will recognize and proclaim: love as the fulfilling of the Law in Christ. Something of the transcendent truth of God is being made known through conversation and dialogue and debate. It is made known through scriptural interpretation that is itself proto-credal in shape and substance.

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“One turned back … giving him thanks”

It is the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel that embraces all the forms of thanksgiving, both harvest thanksgiving and national thanksgivings. It does so in the face of poor harvests and trying political, social, and economic times. Thanksgiving is profoundly spiritual. As the Gospel shows, in returning and giving thanks, we are made whole. Here is the deeper meaning of thanksgiving for it is about the greater gathering of all things to God, from the lowly zucchini to the mighty pumpkin, and of our humanity to its truth in God. This is signalled in the Eucharist, which means thanksgiving, thanksgiving as rooted and grounded in the love of Christ for us and for our world.

Thanksgiving is the freest thing that we can do. Like learning and religion, it can’t be forced. It has to come freely from our hearts and minds. We constantly remind children to say ‘thank-you’, but real thanksgiving can’t be coerced. It belongs to the intellectual and spiritual freedom of our humanity as embodied spiritual and intellectual beings. It counters all and every aspect of the entitlement culture in the assumption that we are owed whatever we want and think we deserve. Its significance is captured in the power of prepositions. Prepositions?! Why prepositions? Because we can’t make any sense of thanksgiving without giving serious consideration to prepositions, particularly three prepositions, namely ‘for’, ‘to’, and ‘with’.

What is so special about prepositions? What are they? They are one of the parts of speech. They are those little words which carry a great weight of meaning and are often so hard to master when learning a new language. They position nouns and verbs in relation to one another to indicate meaning and purpose. Theology is really all about prepositions in the idea of the gathering of all things into unity in God: the God from whom all things come, the God to whom all things return, and the God in whom all things have their being, especially our being with God – to use but a few. Paul in Ephesians, the Epistle for Trinity 17, recalls our vocation to “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all;” more prepositions that complement the thanksgiving theme of the gathering of all things to their truth and fullness in God.

First, thanksgiving is for something or other acknowledged as good. Rather than taking all the good things of life for granted and/or thinking that we deserve what we enjoy, we give thanks for the good things we have as a gift. Secondly, there can be no thanksgiving without the idea of giving thanks to someone; ultimately, in the religious and spiritual traditions, to God, the ultimate source of all and every good. We give thanks to God for what we recognise that we have received through the labours, the care, the thought and the actions of ourselves and others. At harvest thanksgiving, those labours and the fruits of the earth in their season are only conceivable by human labour working with the good order of creation. And all because of the providential care and love of the author of all that is, God.

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“That you, being rooted and grounded in love [may] know the love of Christ”

The powerful story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain is one of three stories where Jesus meets us as mourners and each time something happens that is transformative. “Be ye transformed in the renewing of your minds,” as Paul says. What we see and hear transforms our thinking and our doing. The operative word in the Gospel is the word, compassion. “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” It is the operative word and expression, too, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

That compassion is the love of Christ, the Son of God who became man for us and who engages us in our brokenness and hurt to heal and restore and to set us in motion towards one another. That compassion is the motivating force in the story of the one leper who “turned back, giving him thanks and he was a Samaritan,” which is also the traditional Thanksgiving Day Gospel as well as the Gospel for Trinity 14 which we didn’t hear this year because of the Feast of St. Matthew. All these things mark the recurring theme of our “being rooted and grounded in love,” as Paul puts in the Epistle and which is movingly illustrated in the Gospel story of the widow of Nain.

Compassion is deep love, the deep love of God in Jesus Christ which reaches out to our humanity, at once to the sorrow and loss of the widow, and to the death of her only son. We are meant to empathise with her loss and to feel its depth. She is utterly bereft – a widow who has lost her husband and now a mother who has lost her only son. We sense her desolation, the utter emptiness and forlornness of her life.

What happens? We see compassion at work. The active love of God which creates now recreates. Why is there anything at all? Why creation? The best and only answer is love, the love which manifests love, to paraphrase Jacob Boehme. And that love is so powerful, so great, that it extends to the restoration and redemption of all that is broken and dead, empty and bereft.

But it is wanted that we learn and know this love. The raising of the only son of the widow of Nain reveals the love of Christ “which passeth knowledge,” not unlike “the peace of God which passeth all understanding” in the liturgy. What does this mean? It is the love which goes beyond what we can know humanly speaking and beyond what we can do simply on our own. Something is being shown to us that belongs to the deeper truth of our humanity; a truth found in our engagement with God. Without the love of God, we are utterly incomplete, bereft, and empty.

What Paul seeks for us is what Christ provides for us, namely our being “rooted and grounded in love” and being able to comprehend, to know or understand something of the wondrous extent and nature of the divine love which goes beyond our own devices and desires. To be aware of this is to be awakened to an ethic of action rooted in compassion.

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“Be not anxious about your life”

“Be not anxious,” Jesus tells us three times; the word itself appears six times in in today’s Gospel. Anxious about what? About our life, about “what we shall eat, what we shall drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed.” These are all the things about which our humanity has always worried. Thus these anxieties or “cares,” to be more precise, belong to the long, long story of what it means to be human.

Our anxieties, ancient and modern, are about how we think about ourselves and our world. What Jesus says in this Gospel belongs to that story and offers a fuller view of what it means to be human. If we are anxious about our life, as Jesus says, it is because we have become disconnected from the very source of life itself. Yet this is all part of the biblical story of creation, fall and redemption, of our being restored to the truth and purpose of our humanity as made for God and for one another, made in God’s image. Our anxieties are us in our separation from ourselves, from creation and above all, from God. Our anxieties are us in the disorder and disarray of ourselves.

To be not anxious is to be recalled to ourselves. Why? Because in Christ Jesus we are “a new creation,” as Paul puts it in Galatians. This is wonderfully illustrated for us in the baptisms of Samuel and Mary this morning. They make visible for us in “large letters,” as it were, who we are in Christ. They remind us of our own calling and vocation that is the true antidote to the pressing anxieties of our anxious age. How? By being born again, as John makes clear in the Gospel reading for the Holy Baptism for those of Riper Years, namely those who can answer for themselves in the vows that express the true nature of human agency in responding to God’s grace received.

To be born again is to be born anew, born upward into the things of God; literally, born from above (γεννηθη ανωθεν). That being born anew is the counter to all our anxieties and concerns. Why? Because it is about ourselves in Christ and Christ in us and that makes all the difference. We are given a new way to look at life by being gathered back to the source and end of all life in God. It means death and resurrection; the radical new life in Christ. This is given to us through revelation in the witness of the Scriptures and the life of the apostolic Church. It does not negate or destroy nature and human experience but perfects and restores all that belongs to our humanity.

It belongs to the theological task of the recapitulation or gathering of all things back to God from whom all things come. Baptism is the sign and the thing signified of that gathering of ourselves to God. The Gospel teaches us that this is cosmic in its scope; it concerns the whole created order and our place in it, a strong reminder of our connection to everything in the good order of God’s creation and, above all, to our place in that order. And what is that? It is about how we are loved by God as being uniquely and especially made in his image as rational and spiritual beings.

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“We preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves
your servants for Jesus’ sake.”

Once again we have an Apostolic Feast day on a Sunday. In late August it was Bartholomew the Apostle. Today it is Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist as the BCP calendar makes clear. At first glance, it seems so black and white, rather arbitrary. Jesus sees “a man named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom” and says to him, “Follow me. And he arose, and followed him.” Without question, without any hesitation, without any background information, it seems. And yet, both the Gospel and the Epistle provide us with a logic and meaning to the call of Matthew.

The ancient wisdom of the Church sees the saints essentially in the light of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection. This is highlighted for us in the Epistle which underscores the Apostolic ministry in terms of Apostolic doctrine and in the Gospel where the call of Matthew is seen in terms of the mercy that calls sinners to repentance. It is not about calling attention to ourselves but to Christ and in images that recall John’s Prologue about Christ as the Word and Light of God. It all has to do with who Christ is.

“We preach not ourselves,” Paul says, but Christ, in whom “the light of God shines out of darkness” For what purpose? That it may “shine in our hearts,” not simply for ourselves but for our life with one another, in short, “to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ.” Light is given so that we may be light for others. How do we know any of this? Only through the Gospel which illuminates our understanding of God naturally and supernaturally, by grace, we might say, in the concurrence of things natural and supernatural.

Matthew is called from “the receipt of custom,” in other words, a tax collector, like the publican several Sundays ago viewed in contrast to the Pharisee. Here, too, the Pharisees associate publicans with sinners and use that association to attack Jesus. “Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?” The conversation brings out the meaning of Matthew’s call to follow Jesus. It is a call to the ministry of repentance, a ministry of mercy received that gives mercy in turn. As such, it is a call to wholeness or better, to holiness which is really about the gathering of all things back to God from whom all things come.

That it seems so black and white might seem to suggest that collecting taxes or business and economics in general is evil. Kathleen Stock, observes that “black and white thinking and a lack of tolerance for ambiguity” is a feature of the social and therapeutic culture of our times. There is “a splitting of the world into good or bad objects, … [and] a failure to distinguish fervent wants from real needs.” She calls it “toddler logic,” meaning “I should get what I desperately want, and never mind whether it might be actually best for me, or what will happen afterwards.” Is that the case with the Feast of Matthew? I think not but in place of ambiguity there is a depth and wisdom that speaks to who and what we really are and need in Christ.

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“How readest thou?”

This is one of my favourite texts, I have to admit, though not simply for personal reasons, but because it speaks so strongly to the nature of the theological enterprise in itself and certainly in our times of uncertainty. The gathering of all things into the unity of God is the summary of the law and belongs to the highest dignity of our humanity; that gathering is our thinking and our doing as shaped by God’s thinking and loving at work in us. It means theology as prayer and sacrifice in service and compassion; in short, the harmony of intellect and will, of mind and heart. Our living to and for God necessitates our living to and for one another. How we read is about how we think and act. It is quite telling that the Gospel story that follows is about Martha and Mary understood in their complementary relation; contemplation and action go together.

Today marks a kind of mid-point in the pageant of sanctification. They show the unity of the love of God and the love of neighbour most fully in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It is an illustration of the fruits of the Spirit manifest in our lives with one another. Yet, at first glance, the Epistle and the Gospel seem opposed. Paul says that “if we are led by the Spirit, we are not under the law,” whereas the Gospel argues for the law as summed up in the love of God and the love of neighbour and as essential to life. But Paul is not an antinominian, someone who believes they are freed by grace from the moral law. Quite the opposite. He is arguing for our being freed from the condemnation of the law by grace, our being freed for our life in the Spirit. Love is the fulfilling of the law not its negation. This is the real meaning of our being Christ’s, namely, those who: ”have crucified the flesh.” Love is sacrifice precisely in terms of the Cross. Today too marks the Feast of the Holy Cross.

The works of the flesh are not the moral law but precisely its opposite, works of immorality, rather summarily and clearly laid out in a list that comprehends the various disorders and misdirections of human desire that ultimately harm ourselves and one another. In a way, the works of the flesh counter the good that the law seeks: adultery for instance, which betrays the law and the good of marriage, or fornication which is lust for lust’s sake, idolatry which confuses God with the things of creation, witchcraft which is a misuse of power for other ends than the good, and so on. They are negative and life-destroying and stand in stark contrast to the fruits of the Spirit that are positive, life-fulfilling and life-enhancing. They are the qualities of grace that belong to the good and perfection of our humanity for ourselves and for one another and that overcome through love as forgiveness all our failings and short-comings, all of which belong to desires of the flesh.

In other words, it has more to do with our relation to the world and the flesh in terms of our relation to God. In baptism there is the renunciation of “the world and the flesh and the devil” in order to affirm the things of the Spirit. But that affirmation is really about entering into the redemption of our desires through the gathering and ordering of all things to God, the proper task of theology as prayer.

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“He hath done all things well;
he maketh both the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak”

Mark does not tell us who “they” were that made this comment about the healing of the one that was deaf and dumb. Yet we can reasonably assume that they are those who lived in the region of Decapolis, an area in eastern Palestine circumscribed by ten (or more) cities established in league with one another under Roman rule following Pompey’s conquest in 63 BC, and distinguished by a rich and vibrant Hellenistic culture. This Gospel story follows immediately upon Mark’s account of Christ’s healing of the Syrophoenician’s daughter who was “possessed by an unclean spirit.” These stories belong to the convergence of Hellenistic culture, Roman rule, and Hebrew religion out of which Christianity emerges; in short, to the abundance of God’s mercy which is “more than we either desire or deserve,” as the Collect puts it.

These stories belong to the theological concept of making known what is universal in and through the particularities of culture and human experience. This is not about reducing theology to the historical and cultural, a common tendency, but its opposite, the gathering together into the unity of God of all that belongs to the truth of our common humanity. Simply put, we are more though not less than the historical, cultural, social, and ethnic aspects of our embodied being. These stories signal the restoration of our humanity; the healing of mind, hearing, and speech are all part of the healing and perfection of our humanity.

The Gospel illustrates Paul’s great insight that “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” That awakening to spiritual life is an essential feature of Christ’s ministry of teaching and healing. It happens in and through his encounters with our wounded and broken humanity. As such it is not about a flight from the particularities of human experience into some vague abstraction of indeterminacy but the redemption of our humanity by its being gathered into its truth and perfection as found in God. This theological point counters all forms of relativism and reductionism and highlights the overarching theme of the sanctification of human life through its being transformed by God’s grace that is made known or opened out to us in Christ.

Paul alludes to the story of Moses whose face shone from his talking with God in the giving of the Law. This was so frightening for the people of Israel that he had to veil his face from them. Paul is suggesting the greater transformation from fear to joy and wonder for us in the encounter with Christ. Quod Moses velat, Christus revelat; What was veiled in Moses, is unveiled or revealed in Christ. My point is that this does not negate the particularities of cultures and experience but redeems them. They are all gathered into the mystery of God in the unity of the spirit. Something happens in and through the divine engagement with our humanity.

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“His grace …was not in vain.”

“I am the least of the Apostles,” St. Paul famously declares, and goes on to say, just as famously, that “by the grace of God, I am what I am.” The phrase complements, I suggest, the prayer of the humble Publican, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” It is the very opposite of our culture of self-obsession which is endlessly self-referential; the culture of ‘look at me looking at you looking at me;’ all rather like the proud Pharisee.

But what does Paul mean? Is it by the grace of God that Paul is a sinner? No. But by the grace of God Paul knows that he is a sinner. Why is he the least of the Apostles? In his eyes and in his words, “because I persecuted the Church of God,” he confesses.

Do we do much better or any less when in our pride and arrogance, in our folly and deceit, we deny the very truth of God upon whom our life depends? Are we not also persecutors, when like the proud Pharisee, we do nothing more than pray with ourselves in despising the real prayers of others, giving mere lip service to the presence of God by calling attention to ourselves? The empty words of our empty selves?

Jesus names the quintessential nature of pride in the figure of the Pharisee. “He prayed thus with himself,” not to God. What that means is made clear in the content of his ‘prayer.’ He claims to be better than everyone else. “I thank God that I am not like them.” Who? “Other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers,” and if that was not enough, “or even as this Publican.” He goes on to boast of his good works. None of this is prayer. It is really all about calling attention to oneself in stark contrast to others.

There can be no prayer when we are not open to the omnipresence of God and so to one another. There can be no prayer when we are closed in upon ourselves, standing upon the ground of our own self-righteousness. There can be no prayer without humility which alone is the counter to all pride.

Dante prescribes the antidote to pride. It is the prayer at the heart of all prayer, the Lord’s Prayer. On the cornice of the proud in his Purgatorio are engraved “the image[s] of the great humilities”: Mary’s Annunciation, King David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant, and, strikingly, the Emperor Trajan in the story of his promise of justice to a grieving mother – understood as an act of mercy; power not as domination but as “mercy and pity,” as the Collect puts it. The images are visibile parlare, visible speech; things seen and heard. But most significantly, the proud whose heads were held high in the world are here bent down towards the dust of our common humanity. They pray the Lord’s Prayer while contemplating the examples of humility, not the least of which is Mary. She is defined not by self-assertion but by God’s grace. “Be it unto me according to thy word,” saying in effect what Jesus himself prays in Gethsemane to the Father, “not my will but thine be done.” Is this not in turn what we are given to pray, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? Significantly, the petitions, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” are prayed not for themselves but importantly and symbolically for others, for all of us.

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