A Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

[Ed. This is the text of a sermon I preached at St Albans Church, Ottawa, on Sunday, July 21, 2013. The texts on which my sermon was based were Amos 8.1-12 and Luke 10.38-42.]

So our lectionary occasionally provides us with readings that stop us short, I find. Our first reading, from the prophet Amos, is a pretty good example of this. He writes:

The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.

So we hear that, and then someone says at the end of it all, ‘Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church,’ and one is tempted to reply, ‘Sure, if you say so.’

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

[Ed. This is the text of the sermon which I preached at St Albans Church in Ottawa on Trinity Sunday, 26 May 2013.]

These days it often seems as though the doctrine of the Trinity is an answer to a problem nobody asked. Theologians who rabbit on about the Trinity appear to be like the engineer in the joke about the manager in the hot-air balloon, providing information that may be technically correct, but which help the balloonist not at all.

 

Consider the bewildering and tongue-twisting formulations of the sixth-century Athanasian Creed, which can be found near the end of the old Book of Common Prayer:

 

Now the Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity; Neither confusing the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, another of the Holy Ghost; But the Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal. (BCP 695)

 

And on it goes, well past the point at which we might consider uttering an expletive and chucking the book into a dusty corner. The mystery writer and Christian essayist Dorothy Sayers once parodied this kind of language, writing of ‘the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.’

John 6.51-58

I was asked to put a recent sermon I preached online. As I have written about sermons before here on The Marginal Virtues, I decided to post it here.

As I generally follow the guidelines for writing sermons set out by Wilson in The Four Pages of the Sermon (about which I wrote a series of posts), you may be able to notice when I change 'pages', although I don't think that this sermon features distinct theme sentences for each 'page'.

The occasion of the sermon was a service of Holy Eucharist in the basement of St Paul's Eastern United Church, in Ottawa, on Sunday, August 19. The parish at which I am presently serving as a pastoral intern, St Albans, has been undergoing renovations for quite some time, and we were not allowed to hold our service there because an inspector from the city determined that we do not have two accessible exits - which is true. St Paul's Eastern graciously hosted us.

The text on which I preached that day was from the gospel of John; namely, John 6.51-58. It is the gospel for the day according to the lectionary - the propers for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost.

Job 39.25

In The Guns of August, a book for which I am writing a marginal commentary, Barbara Tuchman, in true Biblical style, conflates Job 39.25, ant. loc., in order to describe Winston Churchill, then not quite forty years old and First Lord of the Admiralty. She writes (on p. 111):

When he smelled battle afar off, Winston Churchill resembled the war horse in Job who turned not back from the sword but "paweth in the valley and saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha."

This sentence is a dense conflation of bits from Job 39, vv. 21, 22, & 25. As the verbal forms demonstrate, she has in mind, and in part directly quotes, the Authorised (or King James) Version.

This allusion, it should be noted, would not work at all with other English translations: if taken from the text of the NRSV the part written only as a direct quotation would read, 'paws violently and when the trumpet sounds, says, "Aha!" ' If taken from the Revised English Bible, it would read, 'shows his mettle as he paws and prances and at the trumpet-call he cries "Aha!"'; if from the NIV, 'paws fiercely and at the blast of the trumpet snorts, "Aha!"'; if from the Jerusalem Bible, 'paws the soil of the valley and at each trumpet blast shouts "Hurrah!"'.

The which just goes to show that the Authorised Version is certainly the fertile source of much literary allusion and creativity. It also shows that you never know where you're going to find a Biblical allusion.

Isaiah 33.14

Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire?
Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnination?

This is a version of Isaiah 33.14 that I found at the end of a YouTube video featuring the 'Trogdor song'. I was amused. (Insert jibe about being easily amused here.)

I'm certain no English translation of the verse actually says 'burnination'; undoubtedly the maker of the image into which this gobbet of Scripture was put modified the text. The Authorised Version gives 'everlasting burnings', the NRSV and Jerusalem Bible give 'everlasting flames'; the REB gives 'perpetual flames'; the NIV 'everlasting burning'. Of course, perhaps the fact that 'burnination' is not actually a word has something to do with that.

The Four Pages: Grace in the Bible

Continuing my discussion of Paul Scott Wilson's method of sermon composition, which he calls 'the four pages of the sermon', we turn to the topic of the third page (which Wilson calls Page Three), which is 'grace in the Bible'. The last two pages, you may recall (summarised here), dealt with 'trouble', the first as it is revealed in the Biblical text, the second as we find it in our contemporary situation (in whatever context).

This 'trouble' consists, in the sermon, of one thing, one aspect of life in the world which is harmful or which places the burden on us to change (either ourselves, our society, or the world).

I will explore what 'grace' means as it applies to the third page in more detail in this post, but in short it refers to the action God is taking (and, on page three, has taken, in or behind the Biblical text) about the 'trouble' of the first half of the sermon. Since for Wilson the proper object of the sermon is God and one of the most important tasks of the sermon (for Wilson) is to inspire hope and a sense of mission in its hearers, and to do so theologically, then it is appropriate for the focus of a sermon to be what God has done and is doing (and for Christians, has done and is continuing to do through the death and resurrection of Jesus).

The Four Pages: Trouble in the Bible

Update: Well, I'd hoped to finish this stuff last week for Sunday, but writing the actual sermon kinda had to take priority, for obvious reasons. Based on the reactions I got after preaching, with some in-depth discussion with the folks, I can say that Wilson's method of four pages works. I should send that guy a card.

Anyway, the first of the four figurative pages is, according to Wilson, 'trouble in the Bible'.