Sermon: Cathedral Eucharist - 27 July 2014

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 27th July 2014

Service:

Cathedral Eucharist

Readings:

Romans 8.26-39

Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 10.3M)

Having spoken a series of parables, the ones we have just heard in the gospel, Jesus asks his disciples, ‘“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes”’ (Matthew 13.51). You might think that the next thing Jesus would say is, ‘Really?’ or ‘are you serious, didyou really understand all that?’ The parables of Jesus are only ever a starting point, an opening up, they never close down an argument or line of thought. They are, as Jesus puts it, like a treasury out of which things ever old and ever new are brought.

‘The Kingdom of heaven is like… The Kingdom of heaven is like’. That phrase repeats insistently through this gospel passage. Parables are first about the Kingdom of heaven, the reign and sovereignty of God, a Kingdom that is here and now, that is being born and a promise of future hope. So parables will never be understood as if they are an intellectual puzzle to be cracked; rather the parables are an invitation into deep, prayerful reflection on the coming kingdom for which we pray, ‘Thy kingdom come’.

It is perhaps no accident that the parables are pastoral or agricultural in character. This isn’t because they are a hangover from an agrarian society and therefore somehow outdated or incomprehensible, rather they earth us and put us in touch with who we are created to be, as we come to the full stature and maturity of Christ. Mustard seeds growing; yeast rising; treasure carefully excavated from a field; a pearl that has grown around an invisible piece of grit; fish caught in the nets: all are images of gentle, patient growth and capturing and coming to maturity. Parables are about another way of living the world, a setting aside of the frenetic and the frantic.

The poet Rilke captured this sense in his ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’, where he writes:

In spite of all the farmer’s work and worry,

He can’t reach down to where the seed is slowly

Transmuted into summer. The earth bestows.[1] 

This message of patient, sustaining and sustainable growth is a direct antidote to the instant, quick fix obsession of society and Church, which is quite counter to the Kingdom. We want results; we want them quickly. Like Rilke’s farmer we are obsessed and possessed by our own ‘work and worry’. The Church, which is meant to be a sign and herald of the Kingdom, is not immune from this. This comes out amongst those in public ministry in the quest for personal legacy and personality centred ministries. It means for us all that we neglect our prayers, penitence and self-examination. In a results driven climate we have to hold on to that fact that growth and harvest isn’t a measure of our success but of God’s bounty and goodness.

So these parables open up the way of prayer in and of the Kingdom. Prayer should not be a strenuous effort on our part: scrunching our eyes and straining the sinews does not make prayer. We could re-work Rilke, ‘In spite of all the pray-er’s work and worry,/ He can’t reach down to where the seed is slowly / Transmuted into summer. The Spirit bestows’.

In our first lesson Paul writes about prayer that comes out of weakness and patience, prayer in which the Holy Spirit is always praying deep within us. So prayer is something we become, not something we do. Our task is to be like the soil that receives the seed, to place ourselves in the right posture of body, mind and spirit to receive the gift of prayer bubbling up in us like a spring of living water. Like an old fashioned radio we are tuned into a signal that is always being broadcast, it’s just that we are not always good at receiving that signal.

The Eucharist is the decisive sign of this. The scattered seed is sown and has grown, matured and been harvested; it is then ground down and reconstituted into bread. A multitude of grapes growing on vines scattered on a hillside are crushed and squeezed and fermented over time to become the wine of the Kingdom. It’s like the prophet Isaiah’s description of a mountain that echoes the Kingdom of God, ‘On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines strained clear’ (Isaiah  25.6).

This is why the Eucharist is called a foretaste of the Kingdom. It is the vision of people gathered around the throne of grace to worship, who are not defined by their tribe or language or nation, their age, shape, size or sex, but by their response to the call of God in Christ Jesus. It is the vision of those same people hearing and being shaped by the word of God proclaimed in the scriptures on which they feed. It is the vision of the peaceable kingdom where that same group of disparate people enact the sign of peace as a hope and intention even if their hearts are troubled. It is the vision of a banquet (to which all are invited) where bread and wine becomes the bread of life and cup of salvation through the breathing Spirit of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the vision of the Spirit breathing on us and into us to animate us to serve this vision in the world.

‘The Kingdom of heaven is like…’ Jesus draws out of the treasury things old and new to paint pictures in words of what that kingdom might be like. The kingdom is not instant but is insistent. We gather here now to familiarise ourselves with Christ’s proclamation of the Kingdom and then go from here patiently to live it; be it; and proclaim it. As Jesus says elsewhere in St Matthew’s gospel, ‘As you go, proclaim the good news, “The Kingdom of heaven has come near”’. (Matthew 10.7)