Saturday, July 08, 2017
Pentecost 5
Sermon for Pentecost 5
Sermon for Pentecost 5
Proper 9, Year A July 9 , 2017
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Holy
Trinity & St. Anskar
+ 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
