Saturday, August 29, 2015
Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 15B ~ August
16, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Jesus is also an example of Godly life. In other words, He
shows us how to participate in His Liberating work. What did He do? Healed the
sick, forgave sins, raised the dead, and proclaimed good news to the poor. We
too, are called and empowered to do all those things –we being the Church as a
whole. Some of us will literally heal the sick, many more will contribute to
the steady increase in physical well-being of all creatures. Others raise people from the death of
ignorance and slavery, beginning with the proclamation of the Good News of
their supernatural dignity as Gods image. All of us will exercise the divine
power to forgive sins – anything unjust done against ourselves.
Forgivenesss means the obliteration of any rupture caused by
human will. Human beings cannot heal the breach, but God can. The Cross gives
us the power to do the same in His Blood. God gives us the divine power to
forgive so perfectly that it is
as though the acts themselves had
never been done. They are obliterated – forgotten by the omniscient God.
That is the godly
life of which Jesus is the
Example. It is not a question of practicing virtue or developing character, It
is a matter of joining Him in the completion of Creation.
This week, we rejoice in a particularly stellar list of
saints who did so:
Laurence the deacon and martyr
Clare of Assisi
Florence nightingale
Jeremy Taylor
Jonathan Daniels
The Bl. Virgin Mary
These examples of Godly life come from widely different
times and places. You will know their stories, so I can be brief:
Laurence was an early martyr, who joked with those who were
roasting him to death on a grate! For that reason, he has become the patron of
cooks and chefs …and comedians! Although the legend is probably the result of a
copying error, which turned the word suffered into roasted,
Laurence is still important because he personified the diaconal ministry of
active work on behalf of the poor. In fact, the reason the prefect roasted him
was that when he commanded Laurence to produce the Church’s riches, the Deacon
brought the poor and crippled. Laurence had given the poor as much as he could
to keep it from the State. He also hid the Church records, which has made him
the patron of archivists.
Clare was a contemplative, who lived a completely cloistered life – St. Francis other half in the sense that while he went out
into the world to sing about God, she stayed in the monastery.
Jeremy Taylor was a faithful royalist, known for his
unsurpassed English prose and for his advocacy of tolerance in theological
matters. He was imprisoned, briefly, by the Puritans but made a Bishop in his
native Northern Ireland after the restoration. He authored one of our most
exquisite prayers: O God Whose
days are without end and Whose mercies cannot be numbered, make us deeply
sensible of the shortness and uncertainty of human life….
Florence Nightingale was a devout Anglican. Unorthodox only
in that she rejected the class prejudices of Victorian England, including those
of the established church, she was considered eccentric by her
fellow-aristocrats. But she believed her calling to serve the poor was from
God. Her active work on behalf of the sick and wounded, and later on behalf of
women’s rights, is well known. Less so is her contemplative side. She studied
and wrote about the Christian mystical tradition, as well as those of other
cultures, to whom she extended Taylor’s Anglican tolerance. Non-Christian
religions could also lead to God. Her openness in this matter seems
unremarkable to us, but in her time it was another mark of eccentricity or
worse. Florence Nightingale – one of the most famous activists in history – was
also a mystic.
Next Thursday is the 50th anniversary of the martyrdom of
Jonathan Daniels. (We observe August 14, the day his group was jailed in
Alabama, as the commemoration of civil rights marytrs). Upon learning of Daniels' murder, Martin Luther King, Jr.
said that "one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in
my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels". The teenager he
died to save, Ruby Sales, went on to Episcopal Divinity School. She later
worked as a human rights advocate in Washington D.C.
Finally, August 15
is the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin. Her Son is the Firstfruits of the
Resurrection of the Dead, but He is not alone in His bodily glory. The
Assumption of the BVM is an impenetrable mystery, which we can only adore. We
Anglicans do not speak of it officially, even though it is a widely held belief
from ancient times. It points to our hope for every human being and for all
creation: corporeal transfiguration and glorification. What happened to
Christ’s Body happened also to his Mother’s, as it will happen to ours. So that
the Godly Life of which
Jesus and the Saints are examples, will be achieved as actual participation in
the Life of God.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME,
LORD JESUS!
