Category: Sermons

“For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven
and giveth life unto the world”

“The Lord God,” it is said, “walk[ed] in the garden in the cool of the day”. Jesus, we are told, walked through a corn field on the Sabbath. So here we are in the cool of a corn field giving thanks to God. We shall be most thankful, I am sure, when our new heating system is fully installed and operational!

Thanksgiving is all about giving; indeed, it is life-giving. As such it is the strong counter to the entitlement culture of our world and day – to the idea that we are endlessly owed whatever we think we should have and want. That is all about getting. Thanksgiving is all about giving. It is a profoundly spiritual and intellectual activity which belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity.

Thanksgiving revolves around the power of prepositions, those little words which position words and ideas with other words and ideas, placing things in relation, as it were. The two prepositions essential to thanksgiving are ‘for’ and ‘to’. There are things for which to be thankful. Many, many things actually. But it takes a certain thoughtfulness, again a counter to the thoughtlessness of so much of our lives, to be thankful. Yet thanksgiving is also about giving thanks to others. It is especially about thanksgiving to God for all and everything. That perspective extends to our being thankful to others for whatever intermediate goods we have received from them. Yet, each and every good that we enjoy ultimately comes from God in and through the mediation of creation and human experience. Thanksgiving is our acknowledgement of that truth and understanding.

Thanksgiving cannot be forced. We can ask that people say ‘please and thank you’ and even require it as part and parcel of the courtesies of our lives together as a community but real thanksgiving can only come from the heart and the mind. Properly speaking it is a thoughtful and intentional act which extends from us towards God and others.

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“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”

“There was war in heaven,” we heard on The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels just past. It is a daunting prospect to hear about war in heaven. Surely the endless parade of wars on earth is more than enough to disturb us, let alone the thought of war in heaven. For however we conceive of heaven, war would not seem to be part of the picture. And yet, the idea of war in heaven connects wonderfully to the readings of this day. We are being taught about love in the face of all of the enmities and divisions, all of the wars of our world and day, and, above all, love in the face of the wars in our own hearts.

The Collect for today echoes the demands of the baptismal service wherein we “renounce the devil and all his works,” “the vain pomp and glory of the world,” and “the sinful desires of the flesh,” reminding us of the necessity of God’s grace for us in the living out of our lives in order “to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil.” These are the very things that have been renounced as the precondition for professing Christ and being baptised in the name of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Baptism is about the triumph of God’s love over and above the limits of all our human loves. That, in a way, is the point, a point which is easily overlooked and forgotten. We forget that our loves are incomplete. We forget about the easy animosities in our own hearts and souls, the wars within each of us. We forget about sin and evil.

Baptism is a strong reminder to all of us of our Christian identity and vocation. It is about the triumph of God’s love and goodness over all that stands against the truth of God, absolutely all, past, present and future in the whole of human history and experience. The ultimate expression of that principle of opposition to God is the devil, Satan, Lucifer, that ancient serpent, who embodies the contradiction of all and every sin. Think about it for just a moment. Lucifer means light-bearer. That is the meaning of his very creation and the very vocation of his being. But what happens when he denies his creatureliness and his calling? He becomes the prince of darkness and the prince of lies, a study in absolute contradiction. He exists in his own denial of his very being and the purpose of his being. Such is darkness rather than light. And such is the darkness in us and in our world, a world that abounds in no end of evil and sorrow and suffering.

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“And he arose and followed him”

The call of Matthew from “the receipt of custom” – what a wonderful phrase! – seems rather disturbing and disquieting. Jesus says “follow me” and “he arose and followed him.” It seems so abrupt and arbitrary.

It is a story of conversion but without the inner struggle and conflict displayed in the conversion of St. Paul. Somehow the external details suffice. He is a tax-collector and that is associated here with being a sinner. Why? Publicans, as the name suggests, have an immediate connection to the res publica, the public things, the things pertaining to the life of the political community especially in its natural and economic life. There is a certain necessity to taxes, unpleasant as they may seem to be. Why, then, the association with sin?

There are two reasons. The first has to do with the particular context. Matthew’s tax-collecting is seen as a kind of spiritual betrayal, a form of treason against the spiritual community to which he properly belongs. He is collaborating with the Roman overlords in collecting taxes for them from his own people while benefiting personally. Rome had outsourced tax collecting!

Unlike contemporary politics, “politics within the limits of economics” where the state exists for the markets, here there is no doubt that the economic is subordinate to the political and that the political is inescapably spiritual. It is a question of fundamental loyalties and identities. Matthew, like Zacchaeus, is despised by his own community for being a tax-collector.

The second reason is more universal and brings out the real problem with each and every form of economic determinism. It is signaled in the Collect. Matthew’s conversion applies to everyone. “Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires and inordinate love of riches.” It is a question of disordered love, of love in disarray, a question of fundamental loyalties and identities for each of us. We sense the gospel imperative, “ye cannot serve God and Mammon” – worldly riches – “for what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” The suggestion of the gospel is that we are more than our material acquisitions and more than our acquisitiveness. We are spiritual creatures who cannot, ultimately, be satisfied with anything less than the kingdom of God.

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“That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend … what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge…”

Paul’s words in Ephesians are powerfully and wonderfully illustrated in the Gospel (Luke 7.11-17). The raising of the only son of the widow of Nain reveals the love of Christ “which passeth knowledge,” the love which goes beyond what we can know and 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, the suggestion is, 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 understand – the wondrous extent of the divine love which goes beyond our human capacities. To be aware of this is to be awakened to an ethic of action rooted in compassion.

The last several Sundays of the Trinity season have presented us with this underlying concept: our human actions as rooted and grounded in God’s love. Compassion was the operative word in The Parable of the Good Samaritan. That compassion is ultimately 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 of Christ is the motivating force in the story of the one leper who “turned back, giving him thanks and he was a Samaritan,” too. Thanksgiving is ultimately rooted in the divine love which perfects our human loves. Thanksgiving is a form of love at work in us.

This morning we have the powerful story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain. It 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 elsewhere. And, indeed, what we see and hear transforms our thinking and our doing. The operative word here in the Gospel is once again, the word, compassion. “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” 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 feel her pain, to use a much abused expression. To put it better, 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 and feel her desolation, the utter emptiness of her being.

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“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”

The Cross is the meeting place of lovers. That “strange and uncouth thing,” as the poet George Herbert calls it, reveals the incompleteness of our human loves and the all-sufficiency of divine love. It is signaled in what might be called the erotic liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy which is shaped and governed by the Cross, the liturgy of eros redeemed, the liturgy of the redemption of desire, of love as forgiveness. But what does it mean?

I have often been struck with the coincidence of the early beginning of school term with the Feast of the Holy Cross, and especially with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks so profoundly and yet so paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise. Inventio crucis.

Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem and her so-called discovery of the Holy Cross in the early fourth century as well as the exposition or “Exaltation” of the supposed true cross in the seventh century. Inventio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure, in part our renewed discovery of our commitment to Christ in his Church.

In the Christian understanding of things, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual life. The cross is the meeting place of all lovers.

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“Ye see with what large letters I write unto you with my own hand”

Paul’s words have a kind of directness to them, a way of catching our attention, even as he catches our attention yet again when he tells us that he bears in his body “the marks of the Lord Jesus”. Remarkable words, large words, words written, as it were, in the body of our humanity.

The Epistle reading complements wonderfully the Gospel reading. Jesus, too, catches our attention by way of strong words – “behold”, “consider”, “seek” – words which are nestled around his equally arresting and thrice repeated command, “be not anxious”. This, too, captures our attention.

Yet our anxiety gets in the way of our paying attention to anything. It describes much about our present condition. We are quite simply anxious about a multitude of things which we are utterly uncertain about what to do. What to do about the refugee crisis? What to do about the global economy? What to do about fire protection service in our rural communities? What to do … the list goes on. And because it does we are utterly paralysed by our anxieties.

What is the problem? What Paul and Jesus are saying and saying quite strongly is that the problem is with us. We are too much with ourselves. We are anxious precisely because we cannot face ourselves. But that seems utterly paradoxical. We are too much with ourselves and yet we cannot face ourselves? Precisely.

That is why we need the strong, strong words of Christ in the Gospel and the witness to such strong words in Paul’s large letters and his claim to bear in his own body “the marks of the Lord Jesus.” This Gospel is a powerful affirmation of the only real counter to our self-imposed anxieties. Why and How? Because it reminds us that this is God’s world and that we are his creatures, made in his image, who only live when we live for his glory – not, notice, for our own self-aggrandisement; not, notice, for our own security and comforts, isolated from the problems of the world, as if that is all out there, far away, and a problem for others who, shall we say? are just not like us. No, says St. Paul, “I bear” and so must we bear in our own bodies “the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Suffering not anxiety should be what defines us. Precisely what we don’t want to hear and yet these are the large letters, the strong words written for us to read even in the very body of our humanity, “the marks of the Lord Jesus.”

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“And one … turned back …giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan.”

We are still on the road to Jerusalem with Jesus, it seems, at least in the logic of St. Luke’s Gospel. And, intriguingly, we have yet again a story that concerns a Samaritan, just as last Sunday’s Gospel presented us with the parable of the Good Samaritan. And once again, the Gospel is coupled with an epistle reading from Galatians. There are relatively few references to the Samaritans in the New Testament – mostly, these two Gospel stories read back-to-back on Trinity 13 and 14, and the powerful but long, long Gospel story in John’s Gospel about the woman at the well of Samaria, a story read appropriately enough as the second lesson at Morning Prayer on The First Sunday after Epiphany every other year. Why? Because it makes something known about Jesus and about human redemption.

We are made aware in that story about a tension between Jew and Samaritan best captured in the unnamed woman’s remark to Jesus, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.” And yet, we also see that such cultural and religious differences are transcended in a larger view of human redemption and divine compassion. “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” she says. The result of her witness is significant. “Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony.” Jesus stays there for two days, “and many more believed because of his word.” First, her word and then, his word. “They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of your words that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.” The whole scene is a powerful witness to Jesus as the Redeemer and about the compassionate and yet compelling nature of human redemption. We are actively drawn into the story in order to make it our own. We see, too, how the Samaritans are brought into the pageant of redemption.

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