Collect
Almighty God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you: pour your love into our hearts and draw us to yourself, and so bring us at last to your heavenly city where we shall see you face to face; 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
Gracious God, you call us to fullness of life: deliver us from unbelief and banish our anxieties with the liberating love of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Post Communion
Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Readings
Old Testament
These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
Jeremiah 29:1,4–7
Psalm
1 Be joyful in God, all the earth; sing the glory of his name;
sing the glory of his praise.
2 Say to God, ‘How awesome are your deeds!
Because of your great strength your enemies shall bow before you.
3 ‘All the earth shall worship you,
sing to you, sing praise to your name.’
4 Come now and behold the works of God,
how wonderful he is in his dealings with humankind.
5 He turned the sea into dry land; the river they passed through on foot;
there we rejoiced in him.
6 In his might he rules for ever; his eyes keep watch over the nations;
let no rebel rise up against him.
7 Bless our God, O you peoples;
make the voice of his praise to be heard,
8 Who holds our souls in life
and suffers not our feet to slip.
9 For you, O God, have proved us;
you have tried us as silver is tried.
10 You brought us into the snare;
you laid heavy burdens upon our backs.
11 You let enemies ride over our heads; we went through fire and water;
but you brought us out into a place of liberty.
Psalm
Epistle
Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David – that is my gospel, for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained. Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. The saying is sure:
If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he will also deny us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful –
for he cannot deny himself.
Remind them of this, and warn them before God that they are to avoid wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.
2 Timothy 2:8–15
Gospel
On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’ When he saw them, he said to them, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, ‘Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’ Then he said to him, ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.’
Luke 17:11–19
Sermon on Sunday, Trinity 17
Here are the words of the alternate collect for today:
Gracious God, you call us to fullness of life: deliver us from unbelief and banish our anxieties with the liberating love of Jesus Christ our Lord.
I would like to consider these words because there are so many ideas and longings expressed in them. Let us start at the beginning, when we call upon God. Here we describe God as “gracious” – but just what do we mean by a gracious God? How does grace enter our lives? Is it as amazing as the hymn has it? Does grace enter our dark lives with resplendent light? Does grace embolden us in our fear? Does grace strengthen the weary? Does grace bring about the reversal of all things at the final trumpet call when the beatitudes are realised? – when the poor become rich, the low lifted high, the sorrowful made glad? Is this grace more than we can expect in our lives, when everyone becomes blessed? I think all those hopes and fears are called to mind as we address our “Gracious God”, don’t you?
Amongst the maelstrom of grace, we see that we are called to “the fullness of life” – the heart of the bishop’s call to “LIFE” in her vision for the diocese and the church here in this place. We proclaim this gracious God has taken us over wholly and fills us completely. This call from God to the fullness of life is like calling upon our gracious God, isn’t it? Isn’t the call of our gracious God fraught with more difficult things than comfortable? Don’t we begin to question the excesses of our everyday expectations when we start to delve into the fullness of life? Even our celebrations of harvest last week were double edged, weren’t they? Didn’t we wonder about greed amongst plenty as we offered to God from our bounty which we donated to charity?
The fullness of life is not just about the things we have gathered around ourselves physically, is it? No, it is also the fullness of our mental life, wherein we appreciate the riches of a developed sense of self, where generosity and kindness evolve, where each of us comes to appreciate the other as the completion of him or her self. The sense of the world in which we live is more than an egocentric self, the mental health of the individual finds expression in the sociality of the person, of all the others round about each of us. This health can be seen in both negative and positive expressions. Covid and lockdown propelled our understanding of the extremes of good and ill mental health, haven’t they?
The fullness of life gives us our mental health but fullness of life, more importantly, is about the spirit. The Church has taken up the spirit as its own preserve, hasn’t it? The Church uses an extensive language of the spirit.
However, saying that the Church has its own spiritual vocabulary is not enough, is it? – We have to ask ourselves, what is ‘the spirit’ for us? For the moment, let us say the spirit is the expression of the whole of the individual. Body and mind are united in this transcendence which we call ‘the spirit’. In our prayers for others we often pray for their health in body, mind and spirit, don’t we? We are ever finding fulfilment in those intentions we have, as we hope and plan, as we enter the future, whether it be just a moment ahead or generations hence. Those intentions speak of that spirit within us, but we also find them in our recollections of the past as we knit the whole of time together in our consciousness. The spirit is our transcendent self, the self which retains and intends to make sense of life in all its fullness in time and space.
With the address to the gracious God and the acknowledgement of our final cause, if I may use that philosophical language, we have stated our hope – that life will be perfected in fullness. Then we move to the second part of the prayer, the petition – ‘deliver us from unbelief and banish our anxieties’. This is the hardest part of our prayer.
Normally we might say that we are calling for complete certainty. But I don’t think that is the case. Unbelief is not doubt, it is the opposite of belief, its negation. Even though I believe my dog loves me, there are moments when I wonder, especially when he takes off after an interesting sniff. I still believe, but there is a doubt when a treat from a stranger is more engaging than me.
It is not unbelief, is it? My belief underlies all my actions, even when there are moments which are pretty tricky. There are moments when my belief is confused, but never is there UNbelief, rather there is distraction and doubt. I am sure we have all experienced that, haven’t we? Yet still we return to the bedrock of our belief.
In our journey back we are anxious, though, aren’t we? Don’t the shadows stretch into our minds? Don’t we feel it is all too much for such a poor sinner who is awaiting the approach of that amazing grace? Anxiety is nothing new, we have lived with it since we became adults. We have been confronted with wars, cold and hot. We have been thrust into a world of ambiguity where anxiety rules. (Just think of everything we should be praying about and influencing with those petitions to God.) At the edge of the abyss, where we find ourselves all too often, especially when we have glimpsed grace in our lives, on that limit of life in all its fullness, we experience everything in a whirl, don’t we? We are in the midst of anxiety before it resolves itself into salvation and our vision of the divine.
How does this anxiety become amazing grace in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye? We are in a state of discomposure, for that maelstrom of our experience lifts us up out of banality and into a very living world. Nothing can prepare us for it. Nothing ever will. We are excited, brought to life ‘with the liberating love of Jesus Christ our Lord’. As in the first embrace of your beloved, the world is transformed, unbelief and anxiety are banished. All strain, physical and mental, dissipate. We have become ‘spiritual’ beings in that moment of love. We are free from all those awful additives of everyday life which the crowd forces upon us. We stand alone invigorated, and willing and able to transform all around us.
‘The liberating love of Jesus Christ our Lord’ brings us into the orbit of our gracious God where we are saved from the absence of belief and the void of anxiety, where fullness of life is the whole of our experience.
And so our prayer begins and ends in the loving grace of God within the great congregation – with that great
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