Sunday, Trinity 6

Collect

Merciful God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as pass our understanding: pour into our hearts such love toward you that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; 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

Creator God, you made us all in your image: may we discern you in all that we see, and serve you in all that we do; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Post Communion

God of our pilgrimage, you have led us to the living water: refresh and sustain us as we go forward on our journey, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Readings 

Old Testament 

The LORD said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”

The men turned away and went towards Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the LORD. Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?"

The LORD said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city because of five people?” “If I find forty-five there,” he said, “I will not destroy it.” Once again he spoke to him, “What if only forty are found there?” He said, “For the sake of forty, I will not do it.”

Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only thirty can be found there?” He answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.” Abraham said, “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there?” He said, “For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it.”

Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?” He answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.“

Genesis 18.20-32

Psalm

1    I will give thanks to you, O Lord, with my whole heart;
before the gods will I sing praise to you.

2    I will bow down towards your holy temple and praise your name,
because of your love and faithfulness;
for you have glorified your name
and your word above all things. 

3    In the day that I called to you, you answered me;
you put new strength in my soul.

4    All the kings of the earth shall praise you, O Lord,
for they have heard the words of your mouth.

5    They shall sing of the ways of the Lord,
that great is the glory of the Lord.

6    Though the Lord be high, he watches over the lowly;
as for the proud, he regards them from afar.

7    Though I walk in the midst of trouble,
you will preserve me;
you will stretch forth your hand against the fury of my enemies;
your right hand will save me.

8    The Lord shall make good his purpose for me;
your loving-kindness, O Lord, endures for ever;
forsake not the work of your hands.

Psalm 138

Epistle

Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.

See to it that no-one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.

For in Christ all the fulness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fulness in Christ, who is the Head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you for the prize. Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen, and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions. He has lost connection with the Head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.

Colossians 2.6-15(16-19) 

Gospel 

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”

He said to them, “When you pray, say: “‘Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation.‘” Then he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.’

“Then the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs.

“So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.

“Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"

Luke 11.1–13

Sermon on Sunday, Trinity 6

“See to it that no-one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.”

This is a rather hard saying from Paul, isn’t it? How many of us do just rely on Christ for all of our day-to-day decisions? More significantly, how many of us base our very important choices on Jesus?

What does Paul mean by a philosophy which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world? The dualism inherent in this thinking is alien to most people today. We live in one world, the world of neighbours. We do not see a spiritual world and a physical world in direct opposition to one another, do we? Well, I don’t think so. We certainly don’t act so. We need only look around us at the shenanigans of politics. There are many other examples of the singularity of life, where we do not act as if we are spiritual beings against this fleshly body. All of our advertising speaks to a culture of creature comfort, the highest good being my own personal pleasure. So many of our novels and films tell of this. Again, I say that we have no total opposites in our lives, just more or less of something. We do not divide the world into good or evil, like those sheep and goats Jesus talks about in another parable. The division between the spiritual and the physical has been lost. Today, I would say, no one speaks of a spiritual dimension to life as we know it, or as we live it. If they do, they are rare – and people in church, where they do speak of the spiritual, are very rare – we need only look at the polls of numbers of people who attend church regularly. Rarely do we hear of that great division in our lives that Paul speaks of in all of his letters to the young churches.

Come to think about it, no one really speaks about what is right or good anymore. It is all about what is convenient, what will cause least offence, or at worst, “what we can get away with”.  This is not a new dilemma. Moses asks the question “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” when the destruction of Sodom is on the cards.

Paul’s rhetoric is not really accessible to the majority of people today, as they never hear it in everyday life. When was the last time you heard a public figure say, “We should do this, because it is the right and good thing to do” or the courts say, “Let  right be done”? I cannot honestly say that I remember anyone saying that at all. Nor can I remember saying it aloud myself.

How can we make sense of Paul’s argument dividing the spheres of life into the flesh and the spirit today? If this example of Paul’s language is not understood, how can the language of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church be comprehensible to people in general?

Perhaps we should go back to the sayings of Jesus as captured in our Gospel for today.

“Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"

This saying is quite harsh, isn’t it? Here Jesus is condemning everyone – he is calling everyone who is listening to him “evil”. Jesus has made us question our own value with his judgement about us, hasn’t he? We normally think of ourselves as being good people – after all we don’t offer our children scorpions instead of eggs. We do know what would be good for our children, don’t we?

But when we hear Jesus in this saying, it knocks us back quite a way. Jesus has made it very difficult for us to go on in our usual way, when we think of no one but ourselves, and at the same time we begin to wonder about good and evil in the world. We begin to think about a moral dualism at the very least.

This thought should be with us at all times, “What is the good thing to do?” When I do something, will it be like giving my child a snake when he or she asked for a fish? Here we come to Hamlet’s “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.” However, having a conscience should be a good thing, don’t you think? Conscience allows us, even though we are evil, to do what is right, but we have to listen to it, and that is the problem today, when we are bombarded by all the tantalising, distracting voices of “this world” – the chattering mass of humanity that has no sense of what might be righteous – even if they have appropriated that word for their own purposes.

However, Jesus also speaks about being wily as serpents and innocent as doves, just as he speaks here of us as evil, yet knowing what is right to do. So there is hope for all of us, isn’t there? Innocent people can see what is round about them clearly, and choose the good course of action, just like those evil people who can do the right thing for their children.

Here we are – evil serpents, but we are also innocent doves when it comes to serving our children. How can we be innocent yet evil both at the same time? After all, we know that a scorpion is not a very healthy gift for a child expecting an egg. We wouldn’t do that, would we?

Conscience keeps us on the straight and narrow, doesn’t it? Rather than being something that makes us fear a penalty, I think conscience causes us to reflect on what we are doing, being attentive to the world around us. This is straight from Hamlet and the Bible. We are not cowards who furtively skulk away from the punishment to come because we have behaved badly. – The fact is, conscience allows us to take the right road. We here don’t do things from fear, we do what is right because we have thought about it, and decided that the good thing is what we should do – just because it is good. Plain and simple, the way everyone likes things to be.

So we come back to Paul’s argument about not following human, worldly-based philosophy. Instead, he tells us that we should be following Christ at every moment. “Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him.” Christ is our conscience, I would say.

Paul speaks at length about this life in Christ, and the theologians of the Church have continued to teach about that life in Christ, a life that is founded upon the Word made flesh, the Saviour of the world, our rock on which we build the whole of our lives. So conscience, that calling of God, does allow us to see clearly what is right and good to do, especially when a child asks for some fish.

Amen