Category: Sermons

“Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him”

Friends and enemies. Life and death. Peter and Paul. There is richness to our reflections this morning. The Sixth Sunday after Trinity falls this year within the Octave of the great feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, a feast which reminds us ever so strongly of the apostolical and catholic character of the Christian church, her very being, we might say. And yet we seem to confront a series of opposites. There could be, it seems, no greater contrast than between Peter and Paul, the one a poor fisherman, the other, a proud scholar. And yet, as Augustine argues, “they were as one”. What unites them? Christ Jesus. What does that mean? It means that Christ Jesus has overcome all the oppositions, enmities and animosities that are present in the world and in our souls. Such is the strong and rather special teaching of the Gospel. “Love your enemies”, Jesus says, commanding us to do what seems to be utterly impossible especially in a world increasingly defined by strife and tension, uncertainty and conflict, a world of many, many hates. How can we love our enemies? Because Christ loves us.

The truth and unity of the church is found in the confession of Christ and that makes all the difference. “No one can say, Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit”, Paul will say, even as Peter famously confesses to Jesus, “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God”. “Flesh and blood”, Jesus will say, “has not revealed this to you but my Father who is in heaven”. One of the most dominant metaphors for God in the Old Testament is God as the Rock, the rock which like a father has begotten you, the rock which like a mother has brought you to birth, as the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy puts it. “That rock was Christ”, Paul proclaims, having in mind the wilderness journey of Israel and the stricken rock out of which comes life-giving water. The image is at once static and solid and dynamic and life-giving. Christ, too, is the stricken rock out of whose wounded side water and blood pour forth, the symbols of the sacraments by which we live from him who died and lived again. Jesus will say to Simon Peter, “you are the rock upon which I shall build my church”.

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“Master we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing”

Nada, nothing, nihil, ouden. Simon Peter’s word captures the empty nothingness of our culture and our church. Nihilism is the default position of both. We have toiled or worked, everyone thinks and says. But to what end? Nothing. What does that mean? It means the discovery that our labours, our work, if measured in worldly, practical and economic terms, and in social and political terms, have really all come to nothing. There is only disappointment and uncertainty, fear and anxiety and a whole lot of anger and despair. Just consider the remarkable state of affairs politically, socially, and, economically, in England and the United States. Ask yourself what that is all about. Recognize that while there are many, many factors, much of the phenomenon in England about the European Union and in America about the presidential election is the profound disconnect between a great number of people and their ruling elites. I think that is a fairly obvious and rather banal observation, hardly controversial.

Take it one step further and ask why. The answer, equally obvious, is that there is an obscene concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few and no hope whatsoever especially for a younger generation or for anyone else for that matter. And no, they are not simply spoiled millennials. The folly of the entitlement culture is deeply entrenched and runs across generational lines whether it is about education or health care, to name but two concerns. The problem is a world caught between the largely unregulated market economy of neoliberal capitalism, on the one hand, and the leviathan of the modern market state, on the other hand. Either in collusion or in competition, they contribute to a world of vast inequalities of wealth and a denigration of human labour; in short, to a profound unease. We have begun, it seems, the summer of our discontent.

We face a world where humans increasingly do not matter and the more that people invest themselves in technology as the solution the more alienated and empty and inhuman our world becomes. There is literally nothing to live for in the dystopia that we have created and in which we are all implicated.

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“What went ye out for to see?”

He catches our attention. We are even drawn to him, attracted by something strange and yet compelling. “What went ye out for to see?” Jesus asks, highlighting the strange and yet compelling character of John the Baptist whose nativity we celebrate in the week of the summer solstice, the week of the longest day of nature’s year. His feast prepares us for our being with the one who comes to be with us everlastingly.

The figure of John the Baptist frames our summer sojourning; his nativity marks the beginning of summer, and his death, “The Beheading of John the Baptist”, coming at the end of August, marks the end of summer, at least in Maritime terms!

Birth and death. Summer and winter. This summer’s birth points us to the winter’s birth of Christ, whose greater nativity signals all the summer of our lives in the grace of God towards us. That is the point of John the Baptist. He points not to himself but to Christ. The Nativity of John the Baptist signals the preparations which God makes for his coming into our midst as the Incarnate Lord in the Nativity of Jesus Christ.

But beyond the reminder of God’s coming to us, there is the purpose of his coming in us – the motions of his grace taking shape in our lives. From that standpoint, the strange and compelling message of John the Baptist is constant and necessary; he points us to Christ, yes, but as well to Christ in us.

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“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”

It is a powerful and a familiar image, I think, that speaks rather profoundly to our current distresses within and without the institutional church, distresses which are really about our collective blindness about what it means to be the church as much as anything else.

The confessing church is, I think, what we are called to be regardless of the circumstances of each and every age and culture. What undermines our confidence in the Faith, however, is the overwhelming desire to accommodate the faith and the church to the prevailing winds of the contemporary culture. This means to forget that we have a teaching and a way of thinking and being that can speak to our world and day but not if we are taken captive to the underlying assumptions belonging to its agendas. It is after all a post-Christian and post-secular age. The institutional church is, I fear, completely compromised. For Anglicans in Canada, it seems, going along with majority opinion in the secular culture on the questions of the day appears to be the main concern and probably so for most of you.

I am not much interested in mere morality. That can only lead to the kind of dogmatic judgmentalism and hypocrisy so clearly indicated in today’s Gospel. On all of the moral questions of our day, the greater question is about the doctrine of God as grounded in the doctrine of revelation. This is always the question to some extent. But the church is in ruins because the scriptures have been reduced to a heap of broken images. It is an image from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land.

The first section of his poem is entitled, The Burial of the Dead, which intentionally recalls the Order for the Burial of the Dead in the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer. So, too, today’s epistle reading is familiar as being one of the traditional readings in the Burial Office.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

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“Above all, take the shield of faith”

Most of you came into the church through the main entrance as did their Honours, the Honourable J.J. Grant and her Honour, Mrs. Joan Grant. As you did you passed under an inscription just above the doors. “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God,” it reads. I wonder how many of you noticed it. But don’t worry. You are in good company. Hundreds and hundreds of parishioners over more than a hundred years haven’t noticed either!

A most curious phrase it comes from that most philosophical of all the books of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes. It speaks metaphorically and poetically about the spiritual purpose of the holy places, places which are to be entered upon intentionally, paying attention to where we are and what we are doing, especially here this morning. I wonder if the men of the 112^th took notice of it as they came here for Divine Service in the winter, spring and early summer of 1916, wondering if it was simply code for more marching, but perhaps wondering, too, about the war over there.

A tablet erected by the congregation of Christ Church commemorates those of the parish who gave their lives in the Great War. Placed on the other side of the font from where the Colours of the 112^th rest, it also commemorates “the placing in this Church of the Colours of the 112^th Battalion C.E.F whose Officers and Men were faithful attendants at the services of the Church previous to their Departure for overseas in Defense of the Empire, July 1916”. Today we celebrate that commemoration of the laying up of the Colours of the 112^th Battalion. You are sitting where the Officers and Men of the 112^th sat a hundred years ago in the months leading up to their embarkation to England and to the theatres of war on the continent of Europe.

The hymn which we sang was written by Mrs. Annie L. Pratt who also designed and executed the Colours. The hymn was composed from a poem which she wrote in 1915. The hymn captures something of the hopes and fears that defined the war generations both of the First World War and the Second. It draws upon the language of the scriptures about God’s providential care, “a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night”, images from the Exodus journey in the wilderness of the people of Israel. There are as well scriptural references to strength and wisdom, to justice and light, to life and peace. Throughout the hymn and in the story of the 112^th Battalion, there is the sense of being caught up into something momentous and all-defining. It was the war that changed all wars, the war that shattered civilisation. It had a profound impact upon rural and small town Nova Scotia.

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“Rejoice with me”

“There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance”, Jesus says in a series of three famous parables that comprise the 15^th Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke. The parables appear in response to the criticism of the Pharisees and Scribes – 1^st century Jewish religious authorities, as it were – who criticize Jesus for the company he keeps, the company of tax-collectors and sinners. Jesus response is to tell three parables two of which are before us in this morning’s Gospel: the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin.

The parables are all about repentance and joy, about being lost and found. They illustrate the deep love of God which seeks our restoration to wholeness in the community of spirit, the ekklesia of God, the Church universal. The return of the lost is the occasion of the greatest joy, a joy both in heaven and in earth. Redemption occasions a greater joy than the joy of creation itself, it seems. It is a powerful moral and intellectual idea.

What is so powerful is that there is something more precious and more important about our humanity and our individuality than just our wayward and sinful actions. Good news indeed! For if we are defined simply by our thoughts, words and deeds that we are utterly condemned. Our hearts condemn us but God we have learned in these early days of the Trinity season is greater than our hearts. Such is the divine mercy.

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“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart”

The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday complement each other and contribute to a way of thinking and doing, especially so for the Sundays in the Trinity season. Today’s Gospel is Christ’s parable about the kingdom of heaven being likened to a great supper to which those who were invited all made excuse. The consequence of our refusals would seem to mean “no feast” and all because of our refusals of God’s inviting grace, as if our convenience were to take priority over God’s will. But such arrogant indifference is simply our atheism, our denial of the will of God for us. No feast because there is no God.

But can it be that our excuses frustrate God’s will? Surely not. We can only frustrate ourselves. God will have his house filled with those whom he makes ready – bringing them in who could not come on their own, compelling them to come in who would not come any other way. The parable signals the strong love of God for our humanity, for what he seeks for us even in spite of ourselves.

But those whom God invites are those whom he would have come willingly and freely – out of love – those of whom it may truly be said, “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” To refuse the invitation is to deny that love. To be sure, our refusals of God’s grace belong also to the freedom of our will. But to be freed to our own pre-occupations is to be enslaved to ourselves – to the misery of our self-will, to the condemnation of our hearts. It is not what God wants for us nor what he wants us to want either.

The purpose of the parable is to convict our hearts of our folly and foolishness but only so that we will be thrown back more fully and more freely upon the goodness of God. In this way, the Gospel for today follows the same logic and purpose as last Sunday’s Gospel. These are Gospel parables of strong encouragement to take seriously our life with God. It is all about our faithful abiding in the love of God. The epistle, too, signals the further extension of the theme of forgiveness that the goodness of God presents: “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart”. God is neither indifferent to our predicaments nor is he captive to our concerns. At issue is how we are awakened to his presence and will for us in our lives.

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“We love him because he first loved us”

St. John’s Epistle is a treatise on love which complements and underscores with emphasis the love which his Gospel proclaims. It is, it seems to me, primarily through the eyes of John that we enter into the mystery of God. This epistle intends the application of the Gospel proclamation “God is love” to our lives. It is the underlying theme of the Trinity season. Love is of God and so we ought also to love one another. But what is that love?

That love is the communion of God with God in God – the communion of the Trinity. This is the love by which we have communion with God and so with one another. Our loves find their place and meaning in God’s love.

“God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” This is the recurring mantra of the Trinity season: This is the love which the Church is empowered and compelled to proclaim. But more than that, the Church is to be the place of the indwelling love of God, the place where God’s love is called to mind, and the place where that love takes shape in us. The Church is to be the place where we seek the perfection of our loves in the grace of Jesus Christ because the Church proclaims and confesses that love.

The Church, of course, refers to more than merely a building, just as the building, of course, points to so much more beyond itself, so much more beyond wood and stone, glass and tapestry. Our holy places signify a greater purpose and one which extends into the stuff of our daily lives with the intent that they should be holy lives. We are called to love out of the love which has been shown to us.

Four things are to be noted here as arising out of what we see through the eyes of John. First, that the love which is of God has been revealed to us as the communion of the Trinity; secondly, that our lives find their place and meaning in the Trinitarian love of God; thirdly, that our loves are expressed in the concrete realities of our everyday lives; and fourthly, that in seeking the perfection of our loves in the grace of Christ, we acknowledge that our loves are imperfect and disordered. It is only in the communion of the Trinity that we begin to find the proper expression and the true meaning of our loves and our lives.

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