Claimed by Christ: A Sermon preached on Mothering Sunday (Lent 4)
22 March 2009
We have reached the point in Lent when we are permitted a little relief from our liturgical and personal disciplines and austerities. Priests looking rather fetching in pink, flowers wait to be distributed. It is as if we are taking a breath, a deep breath, before we enter the final straight leading to Holy Week and the Great Three Days of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Day.
Lent, of course, as we all know, is that period which the Church wisely sets aside as a time for introspection, for self-examination, for looking at ourselves closely and critically, for thinking about what we have done wrong and how we can put it right: a time for a spring-clean of the soul, body and mind to make us ready to enter Our Lord’s Passion and rejoice at his Resurrection. There is a couple of weeks to go if you still have some scrubbing and polishing of your lives to do. Don’t leave it too late so that you will regret the lost opportunity. Remember that God sees the secrets of our hearts. We may be duped and deceived by appearances but God is not fooled. He looks beneath the surface. He searches out the heart of each of us. But it is because he wants to bring us from the darkness and unhappiness of sin into the full light of his love. As S. Paul told the Ephesians, so he tells us this morning: “You were darkness once, but now you are light in the Lord; be like children of light, for the effects of the light are seen in complete goodness and right living and truth.”
All this is done, of course, in the loving embrace of God as Father, within the Body of his Son, the Church, and with recourse to Our Lady’s prayers to help us. That love is unconditional, it is indiscriminate and universal: it is meant for us all, all-embracing, all-encompassing and it was sealed on the cross.
This Mothering Sunday signals the love we have for our own mothers, for Christ’s Mother, Mary ever Virgin and for Mother Church and the love they have for us and that tells us something about unconditional love about those complicated relationships that we all have and how love keeps breaking through all the difficulties. The Church is no less a family than our own families and we know well enough that not all families work well, or do not work well all the time. But when they do work well, in imitation of the relationship of love which exists in the Holy Trinity, then there is nothing to match them. And the ideal remains something to strive for, something to hang on to as a point of reference. But love is never easy.
When Jesus called his disciples and asked them to follow him and to enter into that close relationship with him, he did not say that it was going to be easy. We should be under no illusions about that. “Blessed are you when men persecute you and speak all manner of evil against you.” That could not be more explicit to let us know what we might be in for. He told his disciples, and it is no less for us, that they would have to drink his cup, and that means nothing less than sharing in his suffering. We take part in his Via Dolorosa, the path to Calvary, during the coming Holy Week.
But it is an open invitation. None of us is compelled to be a follower of Christ. It is something we have chosen to do, something we have embraced. The message is clear enough for us to weigh up our response but once our response is made Jesus takes us at our word.
It is through Baptism (and we are fortunate this morning to have a Baptism in our liturgy) that our response is made, that our relationship is established. With the Baptism of a child that relationship is not consciously entered into, but it is a relationship established and complete nonetheless. As a child is entirely dependent on his or her parents in infancy, and that dependence is met with unconditional love, so it is with all of us baptised. We enter into a relationship of unconditional love and dependence with God. It is the beginning of that relationship that we see this morning. “Come, anoint him, for this is the one,” we heard God say in the Old Testament Reading as Samuel was anointed with oil: Samuel chosen and anointed. “The Lord seized on David and stayed with him from that day on.” God seized us at our baptism and has not let go. God has seized hold of these children this morning and will not let go. We might let go, we might fall away, that is the risk that God takes with us and allows us our freedom, but he will not let go. He will still be there when we have need of him and he will not turn us away when we return.
In Today’s Gospel, Jesus gives sight to a man born blind. He was living on the edge of the community, not really part of it. But Jesus brought him in, opened his eyes. The blind man has done nothing to merit the gift Jesus gives him. How often do we deserve the gift that we have been given? With his sight he now sees in the light of faith. He now sees more clearly than the authorities, the scribes and the Pharisees, they are still blind to the truth that Jesus brings. They question the man and cannot understand or accept that someone like him, an outcast, could have found God’s favour. They have eyes to see but they cannot see. They cannot see their way to respond to the free gift that is available. They have been left in the dark. Once again, Jesus has turned the world upside-down, challenged what once seemed certainties.
It is easy to be blind to the reality of God in this day and age. It is easy to turn away. It is tempting to believe that the world as it is, is the world as it is meant to be. But the power of God acting through us has the power to change all that. Through our faithfulness and commitment, through our transformation of ourselves, we have the power to transform others, to open their eyes to the reality of the love of God in Christ Jesus.
One of the worst of temptations that can afflict us is the temptation to think that we do not matter; that we are of little or no account; that what we say ore do has no effect. And the reason that this is one of the worst temptations is that it underestimates the power and love of God to work in us and through us. God’s measure is not the world’s measure. We are of infinite value and worth in the eyes of God. Who we are does matter. We are the agents of God and by the living of our lives in obedience to his call, we are transforming our families and our communities.
Through our Baptism we were claimed by Christ as his own. We were all marked with the sign of the cross and we continue day by day to impress the cross on ourselves as a reminder of that claim that he makes on us, and as a reminder of the love that he has for each of us, a love so great and so profound that he gave up his life for love of us. So what matters for us, what matters for these children baptised this morning, is our fellowship, our companionship, our friendship with Christ which was begun in baptism and carried through our lives by our faithfulness and our communion with him in his sacraments not least this one of His Body and His Blood.
S. Mary-on-Paddington Green, London
S. Saviour's, Warwick Avenue, London
Father William Davage