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The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Grant, we beseech thee, merciful God, that thy Church, being gathered together in unity by thy Holy Spirit, may manifest thy power among all peoples, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen. (Proper 16)
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The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Isaiah 58:9-14; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17
A Sermon by
The Rev. Canon Carl Turner
on
Isaiah 58:9-14; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17
✛
Our Mission is to worship, love, and serve Our Lord Jesus Christ.
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On Friday at mass we read the account from Matthew of the Pharisees trying to trap Jesus with a question: “What is the greatest commandment”. Jesus responded without hesitation and repeated the words that every Jewish person in history and to this day has learned off by heart –– the words that begin Jewish prayers each morning and evening: “Here, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” to which he added the commandment to love one’s neighbor as the summary of the Law.
Loving God and loving neighbor are like walking with God – step by step – they are the means by which we come closer to God and recognize that we are made in his likeness. In fact, it is precisely because we are made in God’s likeness that we are to love our neighbor – not because it makes us a better person but because it helps us love God more!
In the Gospel story we heard today we heard of the frustration of Jesus at the religiosity of the leader of the synagogue where he was teaching. In the middle of his teaching, Jesus called over to the crippled woman and laid his hands on her – an act of compassionate love. He noticed her, he showed respect towards her, and he changed her life. And he did this in the synagogue, whose worship began with that same call to love God with all of one’s heart, and soul, and might. Jesus simply put into practice what he taught – that God was love, and to love God meant to love one’s neighbor as oneself. But he did this on the Sabbath; immediately there is tension – between those who rejoiced at the miracle and the leader of the synagogue who could not get his mind off the fact that it seemed as if Jesus had broken the Sabbath law. However, Jesus was embodying the law – helping others to love God with all their heart and soul and might – in what better place and on what better day could he perform such a healing and put love of God and love of neighbor into practice!
The Old Testament lesson today also gives us a sharp contrast between those who are more concerned about the state of someone else’s life than their own – the people who ‘point the finger and speak of evil’. Isaiah made it clear that the Sabbath was not a day for thinking about oneself but for thinking about God, furthermore, he linked care for the hungry and the afflicted directly with true observance of the Sabbath.
This was brought home to me very visibly last week when I was with the soup kitchen volunteers on Saturday and then in Church for Mary’s feast on the Sunday. There was a huge contrast between walking down 9th avenue pushing a shopping cart filled with sandwiches and meeting scores of people who were, quite literarily, hungry and the glorious liturgy of Sunday’s mass. There was, for me, a wonderful parable that was being lived out, and is lived out here at Saint Thomas Church. Week in and week out we attempt to live by those two great commandments – to love God to the very best of our ability, and extravagantly so – and to love our neighbor also – which is sometimes hard. Dear friends, we are called to do both extravagantly and I see it in the care that I witness in our soup kitchen volunteers; the way that the food is prepared and packed so carefully, and distributed with kindness and respect, the same kind of love and care given to the liturgy by our Altar Guild members who prepare the altar for us here in Church.
To live the Sabbath is to allow it to change and challenge our comfortable lives. The Sabbath is not a day of rest as in ‘I don’t have to do anything or think about anything today.’ The Sabbath is quite the opposite – it is a means to help us live the Gospel and live Christ-like lives the rest of the week.
My friends, we worship in a very catholic way – our ‘high church’ ways are beautiful and rich – full of symbolism and meaning – they are a means to loving God with all our heart, soul and might. But as we follow Jesus we are called to make connections with the world around us – to love our neighbor as ourselves -and, therefore, our worship has to change us. It is significant, I believe, that the Anglo-Catholic revival, which began with the Oxford movement in 1833, very quickly found itself immersed in the deprivation and poverty of British cities. As that movement spread throughout the Anglican Communion it inspired others to put into practice the summary of the law – to love God and to love neighbor. The religious communities that emerged in the United States and other parts of the Anglican World at that time found ways of bringing together prayer and action – faith and compassion – worship and service. They remain an inspiration to us now and we, the inheritors of that tradition, have that same tension and struggle – to love God and to love our neighbor, and to do both extravagantly. We are not a church of only Sunday observance – the Sabbath changes us and, as one of the dismissals in our prayer book puts it, we are called to ‘go in peace to love and serve the Lord.’
When I was 18 years old and exploring my own vocation to be a priest, Archbishop Oscar Romero said these words: “Some want to keep a Gospel so disembodied that it doesn’t get involved at all in the world it must save. Christ is now in history. Christ is in the womb of his people. Christ is now bringing about the new heaven and the new earth.” (Sermon – December 3, 1978)
May our worship – an extravagant offering to God help us this week to make equally extravagant offerings to the ones who live with us, near us, and even those that we are yet to meet, so that we can put into practice the beautiful words written on the church steps and on your Sunday bulletin – Our Mission is to worship, love and serve Our Lord Jesus Christ.
