Saturday, July 08, 2017

Pentecost 5


Sermon for Pentecost 5
Sermon for Pentecost 5
Proper 9, Year July 9 , 2017

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar


Love God and do as you please.
In the Name of  God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

Thus St. Augustine summarized Christian ethics in a remark that serves as a charter for what is called the sovereignty of conscience. It is, in a way, a paraphrase of our Lord’s own Summary of the Law, to which today’s Collect refers, saying that God has taught us to fulfill the whole law by loving God and our neighbor. If we love God, we cannot help but love our neighbor, because our neighbor is like God.
And yet we all fall short of this simple standard. It may be simple but it’s not easy. Because loving God with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength means not only refraining from the worst kinds of outward offenses, but it also means never thinking about anything but God, which means forgetting ourselves entirely. Like Paul, in his famous lament and to the Romans, we find that we cannot do that, however much we may wish to:

The good that I would that I do not,
and the evil that I would not that I do!

Whenever I read this passage, I remember the great Krister Stendhal, the Dean of Harvard Divinity school and later the Bishop of Stockholm, who came to our Episcopal clergy conference here in Minnesota in the early 70s. He had a terrific sense of humor even though, as he explained, he had been prepared for confirmation by Ingmar Bergman’s father! Stendhal was a noted Pauline scholar and he argued that this passage we heard today is not really the anguished cry of a tormented soul, but a rhetorical trope of the kind commonly found in classical literature. “There is no way out of my conundrum, but look! Surprise! There is a way out after all.”
This form may also be detected in today’s Gospel – a kind of bad news/good news joke. What we heard today was a series of sayings of Jesus — so-called “unattached logoi”, or sayings that seem to have been collected individually and piled up on the evangelist’s desk, and then selected seemingly at random, to be tacked on wherever there was room:
I piped in you did not dance &c,
John came fasting and you said he had a demon, I came eating and drinking and you said I was a glutton, there’s no pleasing you!
Thank God that all this is hidden from the wisdom of this world, and revealed to the simple. The Father is unknown to all but the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal the Father.
My yoke is easy and my burden is light.

It is a challenge to find any common theme here, but I’ll try! Maybe a key to interpretation can be found in Paul’s diatribe about feeling trapped, and the Collect’s reference to the Summary of the Law, which Augustine paraphrased as “love God and do as you please.” At first glance, Augustine’s advice seems to contradict St. Paul’s. Even with the best of will, Paul finds that his propensity to forget God is always close at hand — ready to pounce, as it were. Krister Stendhal’s studies led him to observe that Western European Christians are way too quick to identify this kind of expression with Luther and his famous spiritual struggles.

But there is little evidence that Paul’s temperament was much like Luther’s. The famous passage we heard today is not a cry of existential, Teutonic anguish, but a rather cheerful and humorous thanksgiving for liberation from this kind of pagan trap. When he wrote this, Paul was most likely smiling, not beating his breast! Sure, our condition is absurd, but thanks be to God, because of Jesus Christ there is humor in that condition, instead of despair.

So, we are like the little children: on the one hand, there is no pleasing us —
We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.

While on the other hand, the Good News is hidden from the sophisticated, and revealed to us infants. The Good News is that in Christ, God has overcome sin, and freed us from its death-house. Our decrepit will to do the right thing is not our only weapon in this struggle: thanks be to God who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ.

The “body of death” in which we are imprisoned is not our physical body, but rather the sense of separation in our individual consciousness. This is the “law of sin in my members" which Paul laments, and ridicules. But Jesus Christ has overcome that separation — Thanks be to God. He has overcome it for everyone, although He had revealed the fact, for now, only to a few: to us whom He has commissioned to spread the Good News. No one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.

This open secret, which we now shout from the rooftops, is hard to hear. Even public proclamation doesn’t necessarily reveal the secret. People can hear the words and not get it. Part of the secret is that the “yoke is easy and the burden is light.” Just the opposite of the anguish that Paul ridiculed. God knows that He is calling those who are weary and heavy laden. All God asks is that we love Him. God also knows that His adorability is infinitely greater than our capacity for love.

“Don’t worry about that,” He says, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  In other words, do your best to love Me. I will gradually increase your capacity to love. My easy burden and light yoke will gradually form your conscience — the secret place within your inner consciousness where you know Me and I know you. As for everything else, as My servant, Bishop Augustine of Hippo, put it: do as you please!

AMEN
MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS

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