Category: Sermons

“How readest thou?”

How do you read? Jesus asks the certain lawyer who had asked him about eternal life. Jesus responded with two questions: first, “What is written in the Law?” and then, secondly, “how do you read?” He means, I think, how do you understand or discern what is written in the Law, in the Scriptures more generally speaking.

This exchange serves as the introduction to one of the most familiar and, perhaps, most powerful of the Gospel parables, the parable of the so-called Good Samaritan (so-called because ‘good’ is not stated in the text; it belongs, and rightly so to the interpretation). The parable complements wonderfully Paul’s command in today’s Epistle (Gal. 5.16-24) to “walk in the Spirit” as against “the desire of the flesh”; it is really an illustration of “the fruit of the Spirit” alive and at work in us in our care and concern not only for one another, the neighbour whom we know, but also and importantly towards the stranger, the outsider, the neighbour whom we do not know. Somehow the stranger, too, is neighbour because the stranger, too, is human. This is quite radical and yet at the same time part and parcel of an older Jewish understanding about dealing with the sojourner, the stranger in your midst, reminding the people of Israel that they, too, were once strangers in the land. But in every way the exchange and the parable speak profoundly to what it means to be human by opening us out to a more explicit and more universal view of our humanity.

This gospel opens us out to the largest dimensions of love, the divine love which shapes and moves our human loves. Its radical message is that the love of neighbour, the possibility of our love for our fellow human beings, depends upon the love of God alive in us.

And yet that concept really all depends upon our how we read, especially how we read the Scriptures! Now there is a thought which must give us pause. Somehow our thoughts shape our actions; our thoughts are not simply afterthoughts but the very principle or living force of our actions. To put it another way, our actions are to be thoughtful actions. They arise out of our sense of humanity and of God. That is why the exchange which precedes the parable is so important. Jesus is at once countering and correcting the lawyer whose intent is actually to tempt Jesus, to put him to the test. But what about? Perhaps about this deeper understanding of the universality of our humanity which turns upon the primacy of the love of God. Somehow that love enables what otherwise seems hard and impossible, the point of view, it seems, of the lawyer who answering Jesus’ question rightly about the Law and its interpretation, then seems altogether sceptical about the possibility of doing the Law in his apparently dismissive question “and who is my neighbour?”

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“Ye shall know them by their fruits”

Actions, it seems, speak louder than words; at times, actions even seem to invalidate our thoughts and words. Such is hypocrisy – the gap between our expressed intentions and our actions, our saying one thing and doing another. This morning’s Gospel seems to affirm the priority of action. Not only shall we be known by our fruits but it might even seem that our words are empty and meaningless. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.”

But that would be an incomplete view of what is set before us in these readings. The Gospel is really calling us to act according to who we are in Christ. Who we are in Christ is signaled profoundly in the Epistle reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. “You have received a spirit of sonship … we are the children of God,” he claims, “and if children, then heirs; heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ: if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” This is powerful. Our actions should reveal our identity in Christ. We should be known by our fruits, our actions in accord with our vocation and identity as Christians.

This is the constant theme of the Trinity season illustrated constantly in the relationship between the Collects, Epistles and Gospels. It is all about acting upon what we have been given to see about our humanity as redeemed in Christ. It is all about actions in accord with words and not the divisions between them. For if we are simply what we do – if who we are resides simply in our actions – then we are doomed to despair.

Actions have consequences. This is a truism. Of course, actions have consequences and, of course, actions can be seen to reveal intentions and thoughts. But think about it for a moment. If you are defined simply by your actions then who are you? Shall we tally up the score? How many good things versus how many not so good things? Meanness versus kindness? Harm versus helpfulness? “The good that I would do, I do not do,” Paul famously reminds us, “the evil that I would not do is what I do.” On this score, our actions condemn us. They are not always in accord with what we know and want to do that is right and good and true. Such are “the devices and the desires of our own hearts”.

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“I have compassion on the multitude”

It must seem strange in the sultry heat of the quiet summer and in the lush richness of nature’s bounty in the beauty and peace of the valley, to hear about sin and death and about being in the wilderness with nothing to eat. Perhaps, such things merely confirm our current prejudices and biases about religion as something negative and threatening, judgmental and hateful.

To the contrary, it seems to me, these rich and wonderful lessons open out to us things that we need to hear and to hear in the context of the Eucharist, things which have to do with a larger, more complete and more honest view about human life. Ultimately, it is about life with God in Jesus Christ, something of lasting worth and meaning in which we participate here and now. To put it more simply, there is a spiritual and scriptural wisdom here which challenges the all-too-easy complacencies and certainties of our ordinary lives. The culture of full bellies and empty souls faces the deep and great question about what it means to be human. The spiritual and biblical view is that it has altogether to do with the dynamic of our life with God. This is wonderfully illustrated in the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for today.

“The free gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ,” St. Paul tells us. “I have compassion on the multitude,” Jesus says. These are the strong positives of our spiritual life that speak directly and profoundly to the human condition and to the primacy of thanksgiving “at all times and in all places,” as our liturgy puts it, emphasizing in a phrase the freest and truest aspect of redeemed humanity. They are profoundly suggestive of the dynamic of our spiritual life expressed sacramentally in terms of Baptism, on the one hand, and Communion, on the other hand, that capture the distinctive interplay between the theological themes of justification and sanctification; or more simply put, Christ for us and Christ in us. As Richard Hooker notes: “we receive Christ Jesus in baptism once as the first beginner, in the eucharist often as being by continual degrees the finisher of our life” (Lawes, Bk.V, ch. LVII), suggesting exactly how Christ is “Alpha and Omega,” something which even the architecture of our churches often reveals. You need only look up and marvel at the Alpha and Omega beams of Christ Church and of many other Maritime Churches in the Carpenter Gothic style. The idea belongs to a basic and universal or catholic Christian understanding. Again, as Hooker notes: “nevertheless touching Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, we may with consent of the whole Christian world conclude they are necessary, the one to initiate or begin, the other to consummate or make perfect our life in Christ” (Lawes, Bk.V, ch. LXVII).

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“Be ye merciful, as your Father also is merciful”

These are words we have heard before only two weeks ago in the Gospel reading for Trinity IV: there at the beginning and setting for the parable of the blind leading the blind; here at the end of an extraordinary passage about loving your enemies. The first suggests how mercy is the counter to our hypocrisy and self-righteousness; the second, the deeper reality of mercy itself is on display. Love your enemies is mercy indeed!

We live in a world of conflicts and divisions, of hatreds and animosities, of bullies and cowards. How do we deal with such things? The tendenz of our age is to assert our various senses of entitlement, our claims to what we are owed, to a sense of justice or more accurately, self-righteousness. We think we deserve certain things and if we can’t get them it is someone else’s fault and, of course, there are always things which offend us. What we assert as a culture is the right not to be offended and endlessly to demand redress. There is no mercy, no toleration, no compassion in this; only a sense of injury, the world of the perpetually aggrieved and the endlessly resentful. All because we think we are better than others.

Today’s collect counters the entitlement culture. God has “prepared for them that love” him, “such good things as pass man’s understanding” – something more. What God seeks for us “exceeds” – goes beyond – “all that we can desire.” This is the great mercy of God that is the true and only counter to the divisions and tensions in our hearts and culture. It is precisely the something more of God’s love for our humanity that transcends our hearts of hatred and enmity, of hurt and injury, of endless cries of entitlement about what we think we are owed.

Mercy is precisely what we are not owed. It is precisely what is given in spite of ourselves, in spite of our claims to certain rights. The contemporary ‘rights culture’ pits us against one another; it creates enmities. Mercy counters and transcends our hatreds. It is about deep love. “Love – and you shall be loved” as one character says to another in David Adams Richards’ novel, “Crimes Against My Brother.”

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“It came to pass that as the people pressed upon him to hear the word of God,
Jesus stood by the lake of Gennesaret”

“It came to pass.” Something happened. It seems almost like the beginning of a fairy tale ‘long ago and far away,’ or ‘once upon a time,’ as it were. Yet this is no ordinary event but something extraordinary communicated through the quotidian, every day events of human lives. This story speaks wonderfully and directly to the deepest concerns of our contemporary world and day, namely, the sense of nothingness, the meaninglessness of our lives, what is properly called nihilism. The nothingness of life.

“If you live today, you breathe in nihilism,” the American writer Flannery O’Connor observed. It is “the very gas you breath,” whether you are “religious” or “secular” as the publishing venture “Interventions” notes in promoting works aimed at providing an alternative to the nihilisms of our day theologically and philosophically through a thorough-going and “genuinely interdisciplinary” approach. The challenge and the task is about rethinking everything, we might say.

Such an approach might be said to have a kind of Scriptural beginning with this Gospel story along with the Epistle from 1 Peter. We read these anciently appointed readings this year in what is traditionally and anciently known as Petertide, referring to the Feast of St. Peter to which is also added the figure of St. Paul. Both were martyred in Rome albeit at different times and buried originally at different places. Their common commemoration arises from the translation of their remains to a common place of burial during a time of persecution in 258; subsequently, their remains were returned to what is thought to have been their original places of burial.

As Fr. Park reminded us at his 30^th anniversary celebration of his ordination to the Priesthood this week, both Peter and Paul were missionaries and both Peter and Paul spoke to both Jew and Gentile communities alike. There is an intercultural engagement that belongs to the emergence and the development of the Christian Faith. Add to the picture that their joint commemoration has very much to do with Rome, with the way in which, through both, the Gospel of Jesus Christ engages the Graeco-Roman world of law and philosophy, and one begins to see the necessary nature of the interdisciplinary and intercultural aspects of our thinking and believing.

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“And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest”

And yet “more than a prophet,” Jesus himself will say. There are two nativities that belong to the major and scripturally based festivals of the Christian Church: The Nativity of Christ, of course, and the feast of The Nativity of St. John the Baptist on June 24^th, a celebration which coincides with the week of the summer solstice and so points us even in the measuring of time to Christ’s holy birth, itself the source and origin of Christian life and faith.

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. In a way, 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. The summer solstice is just past; the long march to winter, yes, even to Christmas, begins! And yet, it is all about Christ within us.

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

This morning’s reading continue the underlying theme of the Trinity season which is about the relation between knowing and doing, between things intellectual and matters moral. Jesus commands us to “be merciful as your Father also is merciful”. But what happens if and when we turn our backs on the mercy of God revealed in Jesus? What happens if we fail to act upon what we have been given to see in Jesus? “And he spake a parable unto them,” the parable of the blind leading the blind.

I cannot hear this parable without being reminded of Brueghel’s marvelous painting of a troupe of blind beggars all in the process of falling into a ditch, the leader having his cap pulled down over his eyes, not only blind but doubly blind, almost willfully blind. And in the center of the painting there is the image of a church from which we have turned away. It suggests the disconnect between what we are given to know and what we do which goes to the issue of hypocrisy signaled in the Gospel. Such forms of blindness belong to a wisdom that is both ancient and modern.

In Sophocles’ great tragedy, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus thought that he knew who he was and thought that his form of reasoning, that of the being a solver of riddles, of problems, was the only form of knowing. He comes to learn, paradoxically through his reason, that the blind prophet, Teiresias, actually knew the truth of Oedipus even when Oedipus didn’t; in other words, there are other ways of knowing. Oedipus comes to know who he is, namely, the man who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. He learns that he didn’t know what he thought he knew. He was blind to the truth about himself. He had eyes but saw not. But Teiresias, who was blind, knew. He had no eyes and yet he saw. Oedipus, in this moment of realizing who he is, puts out his eyes. He is now literally blind and yet now he knows. For the Greeks, he is “the paradigm of fate”. The one who didn’t know who he is provides the example of the importance of knowing yourself and your place in the world. The forms of his blindness, first, the presumption of thinking he knew what he didn’t know and thinking his form of knowing the only form of knowing, and, secondly, his becoming literally blind, are lessons for the culture. At the end of the play, he is no longer king and is led out of the city, no longer its leader, no longer the blind leading the blind.

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“And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest”

And yet “more than a prophet,” Jesus himself will say. There are two nativities that belong to the major and scripturally based festivals of the Christian Church: The Nativity of Christ, of course, and this feast, The Nativity of St. John the Baptist, a celebration which coincides with the week of the summer solstice and so points us even in the measuring of time to Christ’s holy birth, itself the fons et origo of Christian life and faith.

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. In a way, 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. The summer solstice is just past; the long march to winter, yes, even to Christmas, begins! And yet, it is all about Christ within.

For 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.

There is a kind of miracle of nature in the conception and birth of John the Baptist to the elderly and skeptical Zechariah and Elizabeth. Indeed, Zechariah’s scoffing will be rebuked by his being silenced and unable to speak until the birth of John. His challenge to the angel, “how shall I know this?” contrasts with Mary’s question, “how shall this be?” The difference is between a doubting that denies possibilities and the intellectual inquiry open to their realization.

What is wanted to be grasped is how the birth and ministry of the one prepares us for the coming of the other, a miracle of nature preparing us for the miracle of grace. Everything is preparatory for the coming of Christ.

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“Rejoice with me”

The parables in today’s gospel are powerful illustrations of the teaching in the epistle: not only does “God resist the proud and give grace to the humble”, but that grace conveys us unto glory, for God “himself shall restore, stablish and strengthen you … after that ye have suffered a while”. God is “the God of all grace” and here is a wonderful illustration of the nature and the immensity of God’s grace.

The parables come as a response to an accusation. Christ is accused of receiving sinners and eating with them, thereby identifying himself with sinners, being made sin himself, as it were. But Christ’s response shows that he does, not so as to be defined by sin, “him who knew no sin”, but for the sake of our redemption “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”. He tells three parables, two of which comprise today’s gospel: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin. Beyond them, but as the fulfilling of them, is the parable of the lost son, the so-called prodigal son.

Sheep, coins, sons. There is a progression to these images. The first two which we have this morning stress the priority of divine grace in our restoration. What is emphasized is God’s reaching down to us in the gravity of our sins which separate us from God and from the community of divine love. There is, after all, a kind of passivity to sheep and coins, but this only serves to heighten the priority of God’s grace. Yet the effects of that grace are to be realized in us which is what we are given to see in the parable of the prodigal son. In him we see the motions of God’s grace in us effecting our restoration to grace, our establishment in grace and our being strengthened by grace.

The parable of the prodigal son completes the illustration of the teaching about God’s redemptive grace. It signifies the strong and exultant note of God’s mercy towards us. What, after all, is the recurring theme here except the theme of rejoicing? “I once was lost but now am found.” Here is the illustration of the “amazing grace” of God that “saved a wretch like me.”

God seeks the lost and God accepts the penitent who makes some motion of return to him for that motion is the motion of God’s grace in him. The first two parables make this point unmistakably clear. The sheep and the coins are utterly unable of themselves to move towards God. It is God’s grace which literally picks them up and carries them, gathers them up to himself and to the community which his love alone creates. We are reminded that our joy is to be found in the free gift of God towards us in the giving of his son.

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“My little children, Let us not love in word, neither in tongue;
but in deed, and in truth”

The readings in these early days of the Trinity Season offer a kind of holy seminar about the necessary connection between seeing and doing, thinking and acting. There is a kind of interplay between the readings taken from the writings of John and Luke which shows us this. On Trinity Sunday we had not only the reading from John’s Gospel but also a reading from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. And last Sunday and today we have epistle readings from 1 John and gospel readings, two parables, from Luke’s Gospel.

These readings underscore a basic feature of the Christian faith: namely, the necessity to act out of what we have been given to see through the life of God opened to view through Jesus Christ. It means that there is an inescapable doctrinal character to the living out of the Christian Faith. There has to be that constant attention to the primacy of doctrine which informs our practical activities in lives of service and sacrifice. John is constantly making this point in one way or another even as Luke is constantly providing us with examples and illustrations of just what it looks like on the ground, as it were.

“Hereby we know love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” These are strong words. “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God,” we heard on The First Sunday after Trinity and then we were given to see how absolutely necessary it is to attend to the teachings of the Scripture and to act out of what we have been given to see in the story of Lazarus and Dives. Our indifference to one another arises out of our indifference to the things which really matter, the things of God. Today, John again emphasizes the conditions of our love in the face of the world’s animosities and hatreds and even our own failings, pointing out that love is not simply about us but, more fundamentally, it is about Christ’s transforming love in us. “This is his commandment,” John tells us, “That we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another,” emphasizing the main point that “he that keepeth his commandments dwelleth in him, and he in him.” Luke indicates how we refuse that love through our excuses which are all about a refusal to think the things of God that have been revealed to us. We turn to the ground of our everyday affairs, a thinking downwards that denies what has been opened to view in our thinking upwards.

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