Deep roots; flourishing canopy

A sermon preached at Croydon Minster on 2^nd Sunday after Trinity. Readings: Ezekiel 17.22-end; Mark 4.26-34

 

+

 

What is the Kingdom of God like?

 

The Kingdom of God is a major concept in the teaching of Jesus. It sounds like a place or destination, but Jesus is clear it’s not like that. Or it sounds like a monarchy, the Kingdom of God, but it’s not to be confused with the trappings of royal power.

 

Perhaps the Kingdom of God is better thought of as the ‘reign of God’ or the ‘time of God’.

 

The time of God is both internal - within you – and external, a social and practical reality; it’s here already but yet fully to be revealed; it straddles earth and heaven: hence Jesus teaches us to pray, ‘Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven’.

 

In finding out what the Kingdom might look like Jesus gives us the parables. These are short stories and images from which we can extract deeper meaning. They speak to our imaginations and hearts first of all. Intellectual dissection of them deadens their impact. Just go with them!

 

The parables give us perspectives on the Kingdom and glimpses of it. ‘What can I compare the Kingdom to,’ Jesus asks, ‘what can I say it’s like? Well, it’s as if…’

 

A parable is Jesus’ way of saying ‘come with me into the reign and time of God’.

 

Today we’re given seeds; sprouting seeds; growing seeds; fruitful seeds.

 

Much of the growth of a seed is utterly unseen, hidden. Deep and sustaining spiritual growth happens hidden and unseen from the world, even from ourselves.

 

This deep growth is rooted in prayer and faithful understanding of God’s purpose. Like the seed underground it grows despite our activity, or lack of. It’s this spirit that monastic and religious communities adopt. It’s a feature of the monastic life. As a contemplative community of nuns, the Trappistines, says of their life: ‘ordinary, obscure, laborious’.

 

Our Church of England has been seduced, in recent years, into thinking that glitzy, eye-catching growth is what it’s all about. We have become a church obsessed with harvest and not with the sowing of the seed and the deep patient growth associated with it.

 

TS Eliot said, ‘Take no thought of the harvest but only of the proper sowing’. We’re not in a high yield results game, but about the Kingdom of God, and that needs proper sowing and cultivation.

 

Deep roots make for greater growth.

 

And at the end the harvest is undertaken, not by a ‘grim reaper’, but by Jesus Christ who celebrates the fruitfulness of the adoration of God, acts of love and mercy, moments of revealing the light and presence of God in dark and despairing situations: the time of God.

 

That fruitfulness comes from patient, prayerful growth: ordinary; hidden; unseen.

 

This first parable tells us that God’s Kingdom, and being part of it, is about growth with deep roots.

 

After all, a tree can grow a huge canopy, but without deep roots it has no anchor in the storm and it topples over or in a drought has nothing to draw on.

 

That’s true of each of us and the church. Without deep roots we topple over, we whither, and this leads to spiritual death. Prayer, faithful receiving of the sacraments, adoration of Christ deepens those roots.

 

The second parable assumes those deep roots but focuses more on the canopy of the tree.

 

But first it tells us that great things can come from small beginnings. We see that in Christ. The helpless baby in the manger, is the cosmic Saviour of the world! Twelve disciples propel the Gospel to the ends of the earth. St Therese of Lisieux encourages us: ‘do little things with great love’.

 

We also learnt that the canopy of the great tree doesn’t just exist for the benefit of the tree. Of course, the branches and leaves exist both to keep the tree alive – photosynthesis and all that – but they also exist to provide shelter to those outside themselves.

 

In the parable the birds of the air make nests in the shade of its branches. What a beautiful image of the hospitality the church is called to give to people, shading them from the heat of the day and scorching sun. Helping them find their place in the Kingdom of God.

 

How can we give shade in the scorching sun to the person who is a refugee, homeless, a spiritual searcher, a fugitive or someone whose life has messed up beyond recognition?

 

These two little parables speak of us being, like a tree, rooted in reality, in the earth, and yet reaching to the heavens.

 

The cross on which Christ died is similarly planted in the earth and yet reaches to the heavens. Christ’s humanity and divinity laid bare before us.

 

The arms of Jesus Christ stretched out on that cross, become like branches that invite us to shelter under the canopy of God.

 

His loving, Sacred Heart wounded and bleeding for us is revealed to the world so that ‘Christ may dwell in [our] hearts through faith – so that being rooted and grounded in love, [we] may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that [we] may be filled with all the fullness of God’ (Ephesians 3.17-19).

 

This reality and mystery we meet now in receiving his body and blood in the Blessed Sacrament and so doing we are standing in the Kingdom, the reign, the time of God.

 

Here are some words of the prophet Jeremiah to conclude:

 

Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,

   whose trust is the Lord.

They shall be like a tree planted by water,

   sending out its roots by the stream.

It shall not fear when heat comes,

   and its leaves shall stay green;

in the year of drought it is not anxious,

   and it does not cease to bear fruit. (Jeremiah 17.7-8)

 

Paying homage: offering worship

Preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster on Sunday 5 January, 2020, kept as the Feast of the Epiphany, readings: Isaiah 60.1-6; Matthew 2.1-12.

‘On entering the house, they saw the child and Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage’ (Matthew 2.11)

+

Familiar yet strange. The account of the journey and arrival of the Magi at the stable of Bethlehem, is both a very familiar scene and a rather strange one.

The very familiarity of the scene of the Magi entering the birthplace of Jesus, as represented in our crib, can make us miss some of the things that are going on and the things our imaginations add in.

For a start, the child is not a 10 day old new-born by the time the Magi arrive; the shepherds have long gone; St Matthew’s Gospel does not give us a number of how many Magi there were, although we know there were three gifts; the Magi are not actually described as Kings.

Being familiar with a scene also means we miss things that are there in the text. And tucked away in St Matthew’s account of the Magi is a little word that is really quite significant in the passage, appearing, as it does, three times.

The Magi say to King Herod: ‘Where is this child who has been born King of the Jews? For we have observed his star at its rising and we have come to pay him homage’ (Matt 2.2)

Herod responds: ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage’ (Matt 2.8)

St Matthew describes: ‘On entering the house, they saw the child and with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage’ (Matt 2.11)

The recurring word is homage. Homage is a rather strange word for us today. It tends not to trip off the tongue or be used in ordinary speech.

It’s a word that seemingly belongs to medieval novels or Arthurian legend, with liege men paying homage to their lord or king. It lingers on in the British coronation rite when the bishops and lords pay homage to the newly crowned Sovereign.

But, as is the way when we read the scriptures in translation, we find that the original word used conveys something different and, usually, something more.

The word in the original Greek text of St Matthew’s Gospel is proskuneo. St Matthew’s Gospel, like St John’s, uses it a great deal, in different contexts.

The literal root meaning of proskuneo is ‘to kiss toward’. From there the term developed the sense ‘to fall down or prostrate oneself’ (as in kissing the ground), and hence ultimately ‘to worship’ or ‘adore.’

*

The Magi arrive in Jerusalem at a royal palace; the natural place to look for a king to whom to pay homage: except this is the palace of a tyrannical, sadistic, puppet king, Herod, not the newly born king of the Jews. They’re in the wrong place; their expectations are off beam.

There is no reason to assume they consider Jesus anything more than a king. The proskuneo they want to pay is homage in the sense of acknowledging a royal presence.

Herod’s expressed desire to perform proskuneo is not a respectful, stooping kiss towards Jesus; but rather than infanticidal lunge to kill him. The only echo of a kiss in Herod’s desire is akin to Judas’s death kiss that consigns Jesus to arrest and trial.

So far, then, the homage of the Magi and of Herod is an empty gesture of ingratiation and nothing more.

But there is a transformation. Something moves the Magi’s proskuneo from courtly homage to reverent, worshipful devotion.

And Herod gave the game away. He asked the scribes and priests about the Messiah. For the first time the Magi heard of the promise of the One True God - the King of kings and Lord of lords - as articulated in scripture by the prophet Micah. This was the promise that the Messiah would arise in Bethlehem. The star told them about a king, the prophet told them about a promise they had never known before.

The Magi were to find something for which they had not knowingly been looking, but which their hearts longed and ached for: the Hope of the Nations, of every race and people and not solely the people of Israel.

That’s why the Book of Common Prayer calls the feast of the Epiphany, ‘The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles’. That’s why today is a day when we should pray for spiritual seekers, that they may find the desire of their restless hearts in the Living God.

This is the attractive and attracting light of God, of which Isaiah speaks in our first reading: ‘nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. (Isaiah 60.3). This light transforms; this light converts; this light warms hearts.

*

‘On entering the house, [the Magi] saw the child and Mary his mother; and they knelt down and did him proskuneo’ (Matthew 2.11)

Entering a house, not a palace, and seeing a child with his unsophisticated mother, far from home and with no regal trappings, completed their transformation.

The expectation of the Magi, the spiritual seekers, is transformed. If they were seeking a king of the Herod mould, then Jesus was not it: courtly homage would be pointless.

So the Magi kneel, fall down, prostrate themselves, showering kisses before offering any of their gifts: of gold, frankincense or myrrh.

That is our primary proskuneo to open the treasure chest of our hearts. I know as I have got to know people here that there are many treasures to our Christ. For some it may feel that the lid hasn’t been opened for a while, is a bit creaky, but still we open it up. We open the treasure chest to give and to receive.

The Magi first give proskuneo to the King of kings. And so can we! As Christ, manifest in the sacrament, in bread and wine, is held before us we sink to our knees to receive him; receiving his offering of himself to, and for, us.

Falling to our knees in adoration, bending our hearts in devotion is not a transaction but an act of love. We don’t pay homage to Christ; we offer and give worship to him. It’s what prompts St Paul’s magnificent assertion that, ‘At the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth’ (Philippians 2.10).

May we bend our knees and hearts in adoration, hope and love.