Ash Wednesday

Homily for Ash Wednesday

Preached at the Church of St Columba and All Hallows
9 March AD 2011

Matthew 6.1–6, 16–21

The Gospel we just heard has only one subject. It teaches us only one great principle : the new righteousness, the righteousness of the citizens of the kingdom, looks only towards God. God is its motive, God is its aim, God is its object; God, and nothing lower than God. No man is truly a citizen who is not in all his conduct and life looking directly God-ward. Christian righteousness, in all its departments, looks for divine praise; never for human praise. Jesus speaks first of righteousness in general, then of its different branches.
Our Lord applies the general principle of seeking only God's approval to the three great branches of human conduct. Christian, and indeed human conduct generally, looks in three directions. There is a duty to God, there is a duty to one's neighbour, and there is a duty to one's self. And each of these great departments of human conduct has one typical form of action, one form of action in which it specially expresses itself. Our duty to God expresses itself particularly in prayer. Our duty to man expresses itself in works of mercy, or alms. Our duty towards ourselves expresses itself in self-subdual, self-mastery that is, fasting. And so our Lord applies the general principle to each of these typical duties. In your prayers, in your alms, in your fastings, in each case you are to look to nothing lower than the praise of God.
As to alms, Our Lord is obviously using a metaphor. We don`t really think that the people of his day, when they went to give alms, literally blew their own trumpet; and in the same way, when he speaks of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, it is clearly a vividly descriptive metaphor, for what our Lord is here forbidding is obviously ostentation in doing good. This teaching makes us ask what our motive is. We are not to be troubled because, when we are trying to do good, we are tempted to think that people are looking at us. That will happen but the point is, what is our motive ? We can find that out. Do we stop doing the good action when people are not looking at us? When we cannot be seen, do we omit it? If not, let us not be worried about being tempted with thoughts of pride. An old saint once said to Satan : 'Not for thy sake did I begin this ; and not for thy sake shall I leave it off!' But on the other hand if you give a twenty-dollar bill when it can be seen and a five when it can’t, then you have grave cause to doubt your motive.
Our Lord applies same principle of seeking only divine praise to prayer and to fasting, and we need not go into detail. Two things only need to be noted. One is that our Lord is not public religious actions. He assumes that we are going to give alms, and pray, and fast. Indeed, that we should pray in secret does not mean that there should be no prayer of the community.
The other is that sentence repeated three times in this Gospel : they have their reward. Every kind of conduct gets its reward on the plane of its motive. If you look out for human praise, on the whole you get it. If you aim vigorously at getting on and winning a good position, the chances are you will succeed. On the whole, then, you get the reward that fits your motive. Our Lord recognizes these lower motives and their proper reward. So then if your motive is earthly, your reward is earthly. You 'have out’ your reward to the full, and must not imagine there is anything over and above which still appeals to God.
With this in mind we turn our thoughts to the season of Lent which we are entering into in this service. This is the season par excellence of devotion, of alms-giving, of prayer, of fasting. No matter what we do, if we keep the rule of Lent and strive seriously to use its disciplines to prepare for Easter, people are going to notice. My friends, do not let that worry you; for if you do you will not keep Lent at all. Only keep your mind fixed on God, for these devotions are only tools to help you seek to do his will. Stay fixed on God, and do your duty as quietly as you can.

Last Before Lent

This one didn't get any special comments, but I think it migt be appreciated ...

A Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after the Epiphany,
The Sunday called Quinquagesima

Preached at the Church of St Columba and All Hallows
6 March AD 2011

When I was an undergraduate, there was a professor living at Trinity College who was a priest of the Community of the Resurrection; he was a wonderful and moving preacher, one that most of us could hardly hope to be compared to. He was a man of wisdom and a sharp wit. I have heard it told that someone once greeted him after service with the customary complement on his sermon; he replied, What are you going to do about it?
That question underlies that first reading and the Gospel passage we just heard, as well as a whole mass of teaching in Scripture about the need not only to hear but also to so the word and will of God. In the first reading, Moses tells the people of Israel that the Law of God is so important that it must be kept in the mind and in the heart and obeyed. ‘And you shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise’. Then in the Gospel, our Lord adds the element of doing the words, the commandment. It is not enough just to hear. We find this again in Matthew 12.50: ‘For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother’. The point is hammered home by St Paul: ‘For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified’ [Rom 2.13] and by the second chapter of the Letter of James, and by the first letter of John, ‘he who does the will of God abides for ever’.
So the preacher was correct; it is not enough to marvel at the teaching (as the crowd did when they heard Jesus), the next question is , What are you going to do about it? And if that is true of a fine preacher today, let us not forget that the words we hear in the Gospel are more than that.
How often it is we hear someone say that they can admire Jesus as a great spiritual teacher or a great moral teacher or a philosopher, but cannot accept that he is the Son of God. This might seems like an attractive position; you can admire a teacher without having to do anything about his teaching. But it is not really a tenable position; for there is no way of teasing s supposed historical basis from the miraculous elements in the Gospel, or the moral teachings apart from that claim to authority which makes Jesus different. We have been reading that great epitome of his teaching, the Sermon on the Mount over the last few weeks, and have already seen the claim to divine authority in the words, You have heard that it was said …. But I say to you. There is in the section we just heard, the final section of that sermon, an even more daring and audacious claim. Before we say anything else about today’s Gospel, we need to note this. For we must guard ourselves against any temptation of thinking Jesus less than he is.
Now it is true that nowhere in this passage does our Lord make any explicit claim; rather, what he says is said in a way that implicitly declares that he, Jesus of Nazareth, is the one before whom all will be judged. First, we read, ‘On that day many will say to me. Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in thy name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ ‘That day’ means the day of the Lord, the day of the final assessment. On that day, he says, ‘they will come to Me.’ Without preface, without emphasis, as a matter of course, He implies that He is the final judge of all men, not only as to the outward results they achieve, but also as regards the secret inner motives of their hearts and the character of their lives [Bishop Gore]. Then later we read, ‘Everyone … who hears these words of mine and does them will be like wise man who built his house upon the rock’; Here, again, is the tremendous claim: Jesus and His words are the only solid foundation for life.
So we must hear them, and do them. This is not only the sole ground on which our Lord judges us (and on this—and to find out what to do— we need to read the 25th Chapter of Matthew) it is also the sole ground in which the world may know that we prophecy or preach or do mighty acts in his name. For none of these things are by themselves evidence that we are Christ’s. Only his life-changing power by which we are enabled to do works of Love, Mercy and Righteousness will be evidence. So it is that those who claim to preach the Gospel cannot be trusted when they say ‘Lord, Lord did we not prophesy in thy name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ if what they preached was hatred and their actions were cruel, and they were as demons declaring a God of hate.
If nothing else, what many who call ‘Lord, Lord’ actually do demands that in our age we put more emphasis on calmly and clearly hearing the word and knowing what it is God Commands. Hearing the word is not rifling through the Bible to find something to support your beliefs and biases, it is to set yourself down at the feet of the Lord and hear him teach. And the simplest thing this means might just be to hear the great Summary of the Law, and bind it in your heart, and in your mind; to repeat it on going to bed and on rising from sleep, to think it while sitting in your home or when walking abroad. And with it on your mind to read again our Lord’s words in this great sermon, and find, as all who have made the effort have found, that you fall short of the goal, you will find your need for God’s forgiveness and God’s strength. For there is one fact of God’s will and grace that this sermon does not tell us, a fact that we will begin to ponder seriously in Lent and Easter: the atonement by which our Lord has taken the sins of the world, and brought us back to reconciliation with our Father which is in heaven, and the gift of grace by which we are empowered to live the new life.
Over the next seven weeks we will move from the end of the Sermon on the Mount into the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. If we are truly both hearers and doers of the word we will experience that mystery in us, renewing us. I invite you to join with me this Wednesday in the great act of Penance by which we begin the journey to the Cross and to life.