Saturday, September 05, 2015
Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 18B ~ September
6, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
…you never forsake those
who make their boast of your mercy
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
A strange
way of putting it. Usually boasting is considered bad form. But the Collect
refers to St. Paul’s boasting about the Cross. (Galatians 6:14). Boasting is public self-congra-tulation – public
proclamation of one's own virtue. The
Apostle says, the only thing we have to boast about is the Cross. In other words, our own total helplessness. God Incarnate was totally helpless on the Cross,
from the World’s point of view. Yet from
that apparent helplessness He spoke the most powerful words ever heard on Earth:
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Our public boast is the invincible power of
mercy. How, exactly, do we boast of
divine mercy? Keep that in mind.
In many accounts of Jesus' miracles, we find two features: privacy
and the faith of the one healed. Although He does not praise the Syro-Phoenician
woman precisely in this way, He does link the healing to her own inner state, expressed
by her daring interchange with Him. In
many places, Jesus simply says "your faith has saved you."
But James seems to say the opposite, asking the rhetorical
question "Can faith save you?" James observes that faith without works is
not faith at all, a truth the woman exemplifies, because she didn't just sit
around waiting for God to heal her child, she went to the Lord and insisted on
it. Her trust motivated her action, but
without her action nothing would've happened. I suppose the point is that, as
the Collect says, what heals us is not our own inner strength, but trust in
God's mercy. If we rely on our own
strength, we’re sunk. Nevertheless, what little we actually can do, we must do in order for there to be real trust.
The Collect prays for spiritual perfection: to "trust in
God with all our hearts." ALL our
hearts. That means with our whole
being. Complete trust. No room for any reliance on our own efforts
at all. Spiritual perfection is
increasing reliance on God's mercy only and not on our own strength. Paradoxically,
that doesn't mean that we make no effort — just that we don't expect our effort
to produce anything by itself. To trust in God's mercy is, in fact, to act as
the woman acted: not to sit at home waiting for God to do it, but to take action
rooted in the faith that God will do it.
To "trust in God's mercy."
Mercy is essential, because we are free. All of God's dealings with us, from start to
finish, are merciful. To create us in
the first place is an act of mercy. To
create us in the divine image is the ultimate mercy. To bear God's image means to be free. As parents must turn their children loose, if
they love them, so God turns us loose. That
is also mercy. A parent who loves a child wants the child to be independent. A
parent gradually relinquishes control and authority. But to be really free means running the risk of
hurting ourselves. And we do.
From the beginning, God suffers for us: first by a voluntary
limitation of divine omnipotence and even omniscience. In creating us, God limits Himself by
creating another who is free as God is free.
“God waited to see what Adam would name the creatures.” Even God dpesn’t
know what Adam would do, because God had made Adam free. God suffers further in watching us hurt ourselves.
What is God to do? Keep
us from hurting ourselves? That would be
to destroy His own image in us. By the
way, I think that is why so many of the healing miracles happen in private. Jesus is not some kind of sorcerer seeking to
compel belief by working wonders. The ancient
world has plenty of those; Jesus is not among them. That's why the miracles are private — almost
secret. They happen to people who already trust Him. He does not heal people in order to make them trust Him; He heals people
who already trust Him enough to ask Him,
and He heals them mostly in private. But the secret is impossible the keep.
There is a fine paradox in today's account, which may be a
sly allusion to this fact: Jesus restores the faculty of speech, and then
commands the healed person not to use it! “Tell no one.” That’s impossible. He
would tell them just by talking. Should he pretend to remain mute? No. But by saying
anything at all, he publicizes the healing – in a sense, he boasts of it just by speaking.
Likewise, God announces universal mercy from the Cross: “Father,
forgive them…” Henceforth, human beings can do the same. Like the deaf-mute, God
has given us a capacity we didn’t have before; by using it, we boast of it. Now
we can show mercy, like God. We boast of God’s mercy, publicly, by forgiving
others.
The Cross shows us that judgment and mercy are identical. To insist otherwise is the only way we can go
wrong, by imagining in our deepest hearts that God cannot or will not save, that
someone cannot be forgiven. That is to
turn away from God's mercy. We are free
to do that, in which case we find exactly what we expect to find: judgment — merciless
judgment — not because it is God’s will, but because it is all we are willing to recognize. Salvation is
trust in God's mercy. Perfection is to
trust God's mercy with all our hearts, and to boast of it by displaying it. God
will never forsake those who thus make their boast of His mercy.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
