Collect
O God, you declare your almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity: mercifully grant to us such a measure of your grace, that we, running the way of your commandments, may receive your gracious promises, and be made partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
or
Lord of all mercy, we your faithful people have celebrated that one true sacrifice which takes away our sins and brings pardon and peace: by our communion keep us firm on the foundation of the gospel and preserve us from all sin; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Post Communion
God of glory, the end of our searching, help us to lay aside all that prevents us from seeking your kingdom, and to give all that we have to gain the pearl beyond all price, through our Saviour Jesus Christ.
Readings
Old Testament – 2 Samuel 18.5–9, 15, 31–33
The king gave orders to Joab and Abishai and Ittai, saying, ‘Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom.’ And all the people heard when the king gave orders to all the commanders concerning Absalom.
So the army went out into the field against Israel; and the battle was fought in the forest of Ephraim. The men of Israel were defeated there by the servants of David, and the slaughter there was great on that day, twenty thousand men. The battle spread over the face of all the country; and the forest claimed more victims that day than the sword.
Absalom happened to meet the servants of David. Absalom was riding on his mule, and the mule went under the thick branches of a great oak. His head caught fast in the oak, and he was left hanging between heaven and earth, while the mule that was under him went on. And ten young men, Joab’s armour-bearers, surrounded Absalom and struck him, and killed him.
Then the Cushite came; and the Cushite said, ‘Good tidings for my lord the king! For the Lord has vindicated you this day, delivering you from the power of all who rose up against you.’ The king said to the Cushite, ‘Is it well with the young man Absalom?’ The Cushite answered, ‘May the enemies of my lord the king, and all who rise up to do you harm, be like that young man.’
The king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!’
Psalm 130
1 Out of the depths have I cried to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice; ♦
let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication.
2 If you, Lord, were to mark what is done amiss, ♦
O Lord, who could stand?
3 But there is forgiveness with you, ♦
so that you shall be feared.
4 I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; ♦
in his word is my hope.
5 My soul waits for the Lord, more than the night watch for the morning, ♦
more than the night watch for the morning.
6 O Israel, wait for the Lord, ♦
for with the Lord there is mercy;
7 With him is plenteous redemption ♦
and he shall redeem Israel from all their sins.
Ephesians 4.25 – 5.2
So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Gospel – John 6.35, 41–51
Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They were saying, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I have come down from heaven”?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, “And they shall all be taught by God.” Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’
Sermon on Trinity 11
Last week I spoke about Paul’s words concerning, humility, gentleness and patience, “bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
Paul continues this theme of living well in this part of his letter. He writes that loving one another through truth is the root of life. We heard, “Putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another.”
What have we seen in the last few weeks? We have seen people take on, rather than eschewing, falsehood. I would want to ask – How have we behaved toward our own neighbours? Have we thought of them as members of our family? – or, even more radically, have we thought of our neighbours as if they were part of ourselves? Is my neighbour as precious to me as my very own self?
I don’t think anyone considers this moral stance as their own. Paul is offering a very different way of thinking about our lives than we usually have. If we look at the bane of our lives – social media, which used to be called gossip – we find that we accept opinions which are not really reasonable, and certainly not truthful and loving. If we think about what the influencers are saying, we have to confess that we can not really repeat those opinions as our own. On social media we find a great many opinions which do not foster efforts to “bear with one another in love”. Rather those opinions tear us apart and there is no possibility of establishing a bond of peace between anyone, and they may even cause each one of us to fall to pieces, let alone society in general.
Even families are breaking down. It seems that children and parents do not talk with one another – they would rather disappear into the silence of their smart phones even while they sit in the same room together. No one is visible to anyone else. Everything and everyone is hidden behind screens. We have lost the value every person represents. We have lost our grasp of truth – we have even forgotten that we have to speak with one another openly and with love. The truth is no longer the content of any of our communication. It would seem that self-promotion, callousness and intolerance are the marks of life in the twenty-first century. Can we afford to let this be the case in the future?
We can all look to the past in order to see what the disregard of truth and love have produced. The most clear example is that of slavery. Slaves were treated as chattel, goods which could be exchanged without any regard for their true worth. Slaves were not considered as people who loved and could be loved in their own right. Then we can look at the concentration camps of WWII both German and Japanese, or the gulag system of Stalin’s Soviet Union, or even the prison camps in Viet Nam of the 1960s and 1970s. There are even more recent historical examples of this devaluation of humanity. There is the reality of current, modern slavery, the trafficking of people as commodities with no personal value in themselves. Today we can also see people disregarding others through sending people out into the channel in unseaworthy boats and the murder of children, cutting out parents’ hearts with the slash of a knife.
What can possibly foster such behaviour? I think we let others do our thinking for us. We do not consider the moral values others reveal through constant dialogue, whether it is on line or in person. Screens hide us from one another and we do not value them in the same way as when we look them in the eye as we talk with them.
If we are going to hide behind those screens, we need to be able to understand just what is being said by the bloggers, the influencers, the spin doctors and the outright liars. We must be able to see what they put up on their pages for what it is. – We have to look at what is being said as they do on that television program, “Would I lie to you?”
I would like to suggest that academic studies – in fact biblical studies – can help us in our everyday life. When I was a student, I was asked to read articles about the same incident from three different newspapers. They were radically different accounts but about the same incident. We began to discuss how this could possibly be the case. We started by discussing the sources, where did the substance of the story come from and how did they agree. We then saw there might be factual differences, certainly there were judgements made which differentiated them. Then we were asked to read three passages from the gospels. They revealed three different ways of handling the same event. We then began to wonder the sources and about how the same incident about Jesus could be dealt with so differently.
This was my introduction to biblical hermeneutics, the art of the interpretation of the bible.
There is a type of biblical scholarship which identifies different forms of speech. This morning’s section of the epistle is an exhortation, a form of speech we all know. Our parents, our teachers, our bosses – they all have tried to encourage and exhort us to do better. Depending on who was speaking to us, we understood the underlying message. They wanted us to have some control in our lives – by either promoting their own stifling control over us or encouraging our own self control liberating us for righteousness. We saw that exhortation can take negative and positive forms, like so much in life.
Exhortation is one of the forms which are to be found throughout the letters of Paul. You can also find it in the prophets of the OT as well. It is a universal way of speaking with a group of people. It is used to change behaviour.
However, Paul encourages us to “Speak the truth in love”. Haven’t our teachers and parents also exhorted us to behave in the same way? They have asked us to exercise a discipline we don’t often see among our contemporaries. We needn’t go into details from the many examples around us. I think we can agree that many do not behave well, that there is deceit and wickedness all around us, just as Paul is writing about it in this letter to the Ephesians. We can all agree that truth and love would elevate life into something in which there is a fullness, where we can find joy. When we exhort each other to truth and love, I am convinced we are not offering a vain hope, that deceit is not our aim. Rather we are describing an ideal which does have very real consequences for all of us – just as being blown about by the latest thing has its own aftermath, like the results of a hurricane. However, let us find the gentle breeze of truth which bears love in its wings. I think in that way everyone can become part of one another as Paul suggests.