Return to the Gospel’s Core: Sermon Preached on 8th October 2023 (18th Sunday after Trinity)

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Philippians 3.4-14 Matthew 21.33-46

“I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus…”

This morning’s readings give us an intensely personal and impassioned passage from St Paul coupled with one of the more difficult and judging of Jesus’ parables. I think this pair of readings is profoundly relevant to the times we are in and the state of our Church. Christ’s words judge the Church of our time forcefully, and St Paul points a way out.

Let’s start by looking at the gospel reading, the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen.

Most of our Sunday gospel readings this year come from Matthew, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that as we’re coming towards the end of the year, we’re coming towards the end of Jesus’s public ministry in the story. So although it’s October, this Gospel reading is set in the Temple in Jerusalem in the last few days of Jesus’ life.

This parable might explain why the religious hierarchy in Jerusalem had come to fear and hate Jesus so much. The story is a sort of fictional representation of the history of God’s prophets in Jerusalem – most of them were mistreated or even put to death, at the hands of people like them. The landowner represents God, and in the end sends his son, obviously representing Jesus, to try and sort out these unruly tenants and get them to give him some of their grapes as rent, as they agreed. But they kill the Son. Jesus’ audience assumes the landowner would rightly put the murderers of his son to death. Jesus doesn’t actually confirm that, but He makes it clear that, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the Kingdom.” Bear that in mind – we will come back to it.

Our epistle comes from St Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and recalls his faith as a young man, and how he came to believe Jesus Christ was the son of God.  The young Paul was proud of his Jewish heritage and that he had always remained the staunch Jew he was brought up to be. Except for one problem: Paul was so convinced he God’s man that he forgot that God in the Hebrew Bible was clear that He wanted mercy rather than sacrifice and love of neighbour. Paul, however, thought his faith gave him the right to duff up the people he considered God’s enemies, foremost among those being the Church in its first years.

Thinking he was an expert on pleasing God, Paul found instead that God had to hit him with a bolt from the blue to put him on the right path. Writing with the benefit of several decades’ hindsight, Paul was glad that his preconceptions had been shattered. Paul had lost everything considered valuable by ordinary standards, but he willingly paid that price to gain his faith in Jesus Christ.

In trying to meet God’s standards through his own efforts, Paul found out that he didn’t even know really what God’s standards were. Instead, in following Jesus Christ, he learnt that he could never meet God’s standards, but instead had to throw himself on God’s grace – and in abandoning his self-will, he found true liberation.

So what does all this have to do with our situation today? Well I think the church lost its way in the middle of the 20th century, in a way somewhat reminiscent of the young Paul. Paul was, in his own words, confident in the flesh – confident in his heritage, his intellect, and his faithfulness. The churches of the Western countries, very much including the Church of England, became overconfident in its brain. As we entered a world of nuclear power and television, the Church thought it was much too advanced for these hoary old Hebrew fairy stories, and started thinking the idea that Jesus rose from the dead was primitive. It told itself it had “matured” beyond this, that the rest of society had matured beyond it too, and that for the Church to survive it would have to abandon belief in anything supernatural.

This rationalist, rather politicised, Christianity of good works was convinced that it could solve the world’s problems and assumed that only it could attract the rising young generation. That was the new young generation of sixty or more years ago now. Instead, over those decades, the churches in Western countries emptied. Yet, it couldn’t be that the Gospel was no longer attractive to people in an era of space satellites and the Internet. For the good news that Jesus Christ is risen spread like wildfire in most other parts of the world. This included, for example, the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, which has a higher standard of education the people of most Western countries.

I often get the sense that the Kingdom of God has been taken away from us, who neglected it by trying to turn it into a purely human kingdom of good works and material progress, and has been given to those bearing fruit. Worse yet, if we look at the state of our world, our materialist individualism, once celebrated by the Church as the wave of the future, is producing a lonely, acquisitive, and increasingly bad-tempered society which feels quite fragile. One feels that in those heady optimistic days of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Church overestimated how close human beings could get to create a perfect society in practise.

Yet perhaps the solution to many of our Church’s problems is simply to go back the core of the Gospel—that Jesus Christ, truly God and truly human, died on the Cross and so opened the way to eternal life for us. Actual Resurrection, not a metaphor for picking yourself of your feet when life goes wrong.

Far from being ‘dated’, it’s as relevant as it could be. Many intelligent and thoughtful people, many sober people, and certainly very many young people, think that the human race risks extinction whether through climate change, or if it’s survives that, through badly designed genetic modification or artificial intelligence. Certainly since 1945, we have lived in an era where the end of the human race didn’t require divine intervention but was something humans could achieve entirely through our own idiocy and savagery – savagery of a type visible over the last thirty-six hours in the Holy Land. Yet at a time when people fear the end of the world, we too often present the Church primarily as the solution to human problems – problems which may have no solution.

But although the world may be in trouble, we are not hopeless, brothers and sisters – far from it – for on the cross Christ made the full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world – yours and mine and those of the whole human race. If we put our trust in Him, then we have nothing to fear, no matter how frightening the circumstances of the world, nor how challenging the circumstances of our own lives – for all we must do is hold on to Christ’s hand, trusting that He loves us just as we are, with all our flaws and imperfections, and that He will lead us to heaven.

And the glories of this world, the beauties of this world, wonderful as they are especially on this golden October morning, are merely a foretaste of what will be ours in the nearer presence of God forever. So let us be like St Paul and stop trying to be clever enough for God or holy enough for God, or thinking that the Church can solve the world’s problems, and instead fling ourselves on God’s loving mercy in a world whose problems seem to be insoluble. For it is only in doing so that we can produce the fruits of the Kingdom that might lead this country and Church to renewal, and our planet away from of disaster.

And now to God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.