Sermon: The First Sunday after Trinity

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 2nd June 2013

Service:

Choral Mattins

Readings:

Deuteronomy 5: 1-21

Acts of the Apostles 23: 1-11

‘Hear, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances that I am addressing to you today’

 ‘Legislation is not primarily for the use of people who have common sense; it is to regulate people who have not got a great deal of common sense.’ That thought, of one of our current legislators in the House of Commons, opens up some interesting questions in relation to our reading from Deuteronomy. The first question is ‘what laws are so self-evident that they don’t need to be written down and what laws are so not self-evident that they do need writing down’ and the second question, ‘what is common sense and how does it relate to the law?’

Perhaps if we all had common sense, then we wouldn’t need any laws; thus putting our legislators out of their jobs. Of course my common sense may not be yours. I remember the true story of the man from a very rural area of a less-developed country, who was short sighted so was given a pair of glasses and told that all he had to do was wear them. They worked. But over time however the powers of sight given by the glasses waned and the man returned to the eye clinic. ‘My glasses aren’t working any more’. The nurse took the glasses wiped them clean and gave them back to the man. The man put them back on and was thrilled that his glasses had been mended.

Common sense tells you and me that you need to clean glasses. But then we are well versed in what glasses are. Try the common sense line on how to get some aspects of computer technology and how frustrating it can be if you can’t get it to work. It takes the common sense of a twelve year old (usually) to make the computer work; they see it as common sense - click here, open this dialogue box, close that application down – there you are it’s working.

The art of common sense has to come from information and the wisdom to apply it. So it is not just about common sense but a common mind. And for the Bible the common mind is a gift and not self-evident. The common mind for the social good flows from the loving purposes of the sociability of God the Holy Trinity.

The notion of law deriving from God is deeply problematic for the modern mind.  For a start law making must be a rational process, because we are rational beings. A law and its consequences must be measurable and clear. But from what do we draw the evidence that makes a law obvious? The business of making laws is not common sense based, otherwise every time a new law was brought forward, which by definition wouldn’t be necessary, then there would be total agreement about the merits of the new law. But law-making is a messy human business as the great nineteenth century German statesman Otto van Bismarck apparently remarked, ‘Laws are like sausages. It’s much better not to see how they are made’. The messiness of law-making is, we might say, the discernment process of the common mind and is good, but it shows that rationality is not the sole basis for law. We are not purely rational, we desire, we love, we hate, we resent: other things drive our speaking and thinking and acting.

There is a societal necessity of seeking the common good and framing it norms and understandings that we call laws. At the heart of Deuteronomy is the move from God revealing laws, to Moses recording laws to the people of Israel receiving them.

Have no gods but the God who creates and is not created by your mind and vanity and whose name is to be honoured. Maintain a holy day as space for God. Live in harmony with one another, honouring those older than you, keeping life precious, not violating other people, property, bodies or promises and desire God not things. The Ten Commandments are not all self-evident and some are deeply contested today; they are not common sense. What they give is another account of humanity. It is an account of humanity rooted in God’s sovereignty and justice; it is an account of humanity in which our life together is a gift of God, with God and in God. What Deuteronomy gives awaits reception in the hearts of men and women today. And when it is received, it is received through love which is the fulfilling of the law. That fulfilment we know in Christ, into whom each one of us is rooted and grafted through our baptism. This is the way that opens to us not common sense, but a common life in Christ for the sake of his Kingdom; it is an invitation into an abundant, grace-filled, fulfilment of the law in the person of Jesus Christ.

God of faithfulness and love,
Give us the grace to honour you and our neighbour in our thinking, speaking and doing
Bless Elizabeth our Queen, on this anniversary of her Coronation and anointing.
Give your wisdom to all who make and enforce the laws of this land and the international community.
May we enter more deeply into the mystery of the Common Life in Christ
That in doing so we seek out and live the ways of your kingdom,
We make these prayers in the power of the Spirit and in union with Christ Jesus, our Lord.
Amen.