Category: Sermons

“And he opened his mouth and taught them”

It is, to be sure, “that time of year… when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” And yet in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering, a great and profound gathering. Christ the King strides across the barren fields of our humanity to gather us into glory. It is the glory of the Communion of Saints. It is his gathering, a kind of collecting together of all that is scattered and lost.

The image of human lives as scattered leaves goes back to the Sibylline Oracles of Roman Antiquity conveyed most wonderfully by Vergil and then used by Dante even more wondrously to capture our being gathered together into the Communion of Saints. The whole human story belongs to one book, divinely written, to be sure, but scattered about on the wind; the leaves of the pages, like the leaves of the trees, are scattered and blown about. But by God’s grace the scattered leaves are gathered together into one volume; the leaves of the autumn likened to the pages – the leaves – of a book.

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“For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will,
but the will of him who sent me”

The feast of St. Simon and St. Jude completes the parade of Apostolic Saints. With this feast, the holy band of twelve is gathered together in the unity of Jerusalem and in that gathering we glimpse something of the meaning of our eternal home. St. Simon and St. Jude complete the festal round of the Apostles and prepare us for the harvest festival of All Saints.

St. Simon and St. Jude, Apostles of Christ. Very little can be said about them. What can be said has simply to do with their apostleship. They are of the company of “twelve poor men, by Christ anointed,” as a hymn puts it. What more needs to be said than that? And how appropriate, too, on the eve of Nick Hatt’s deaconing in our diocese tomorrow night and whom we keep in our prayers this evening. Simon and Jude speak directly to the nature of the ministry.

They have, to be sure, lent their names to certain features of human life as patron saints, symbols, we might say, of some aspect or other of the virtues of Christ individually considered. St. Simon is the patron saint of zealots; St. Jude, more curiously, is the patron saint of lost causes, something with which I have more than a passing acquaintance! The zealous passion for a perfect political and social and spiritual righteousness readily complements the despair at lost causes that often accompanies such worthy and necessary aspirations. Ultimately, such zeal brings us to the true righteousness of Christ, realized in the city of heavenly Jerusalem. For what we have here is really “the unreal city” (T.S. Eliot), a lost cause.

“Zeal for thine house hath even consumed me,” the psalmist says, in a passage recalled by the disciples in John’s Gospel in relation to the cleansing of the temple. Through the myriad of lost causes, the deeper yearning for peace and righteousness is glimpsed, the deeper yearning which belongs to a peace, “not as the world giveth,” but as Christ gives.

The readings for this feast concentrate our attention on the Apostolic Foundation of the Church and the end of our humanity. Apostolic Foundation and Apostolic Fellowship; these are two things which we are badly in need of recovering and reclaiming. They belong to the truth of the ordained ministry. Without them, our parishes become little more than a club for seniors and a playground for children – we wish!. The church becomes a sect, championing one spiritual idea or quasi spiritual idea at the expense of all the rest, or trumpeting one of a myriad of the social and political agendas of the day while ignoring the larger vision of the whole of redeemed humanity that is hers to proclaim. We are too much with ourselves because we are not with God.

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“To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge…”

The raising of the only son of the widow of Nain reveals the love of Christ “which,” as Paul tells us, “passeth knowledge,” which goes beyond what we can know and do simply on our own. Without the love of God, we are utterly incomplete, bereft and empty. To be aware of this is to be awakened to an ethic of action rooted in compassion.

Compassion is 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. Christ’s compassion, too, is the motivating force in the story of the one leper who “turned back, giving him thanks and he was a Samaritan.” Thanksgiving is ultimately rooted in the divine love which perfects our human loves. Thanksgiving is a form of love at work in us.

We just heard 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. The operative word is 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 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 of her being.

What happens? We see compassion at work. The active love of God creates and now recreates. Why is there anything at all? Why creation? The best and only answer is love, the love which manifests love. 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.

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“Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”

In one way, it is a curious criticism. After all, the concept of Revelation begins with signs and wonders. God reveals himself to Moses in the Burning Bush, a sign and a wonder, to be sure, and one that catches our attention, a bush burns and is not consumed out of which God speaks his Name, “I am who I am.” It initiates the Exodus, the journey into the understanding of God’s will for our humanity. But there is a further question.

What is the effect of God’s Word on our minds? His Word is proclaimed in our presence. His story is told in our hearing. It is told for us. It is even written out for us to read in Jesus Christ. We hear it. We know it. But what effect does it have on our minds and in our lives?

“This is again the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judaea into Galilee,” John tells us. In telling us this, he reminds us of the first sign, the first miracle, which Jesus did. Moreover, it is the second time that he is in the same place. What is that place? It is Cana of Galilee. It seems to have been the place of signs. At the very least what happens here in Cana of Galilee signifies something of the effect of God’s Word on human minds.

God’s Word causes delight. God’s Word causes healing. God’s Word creates new life and new birth. Such are the desired effects of God’s Word upon our minds.

What was the first sign that Jesus did in this place of signs, Cana of Galilee? It was at the Wedding-feast in Cana of Galilee that Jesus turned the water into wine, a story which we hear every year during Epiphany. The effect was to cause delight and wonderment. They who heard the word “receive[d] the word with joy”. Christ gives not only wine but the best wine. Wine, as the psalmist says, “makes glad the heart of man”. That most excellent wine belongs to the abundant life which he would give us – our joy and our blessedness in his presence with the Father and with one another in the fellowship of faith. The effect of God’s Word is our joy. Such is the purpose of God’s Word in the first sign that Jesus did in Cana of Galilee.

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“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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