Dear Friends
Our life is full of rituals, they mark out who we are as a society and who we are as persons. Shaking hands when we greet another, answering the phone with “Hello”, eating using cutlery, discussing the weather—these rituals bind us together.
It seems unfortunately common that sometimes we go through these rituals with another who does not buy into it, someone who shakes hands without really meaning it or who says “thanks” without any gratitude: but this does not mean the ritual is wrong, it means that that person has not engaged with the meaning of the ritual.
God gave Israel rituals to follow in order to make them a society, a people, a Church—these we read about in the first five books of the Old Testament. These were good rituals, they bound Israel to God and he to them: yet we read in the later prophets how God is turned away by these rituals.
I hate, I despise your feast days,
Amos 5:21–24
And I do not savour your sacred assemblies.
Though you offer Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings,
I will not accept them,
Nor will I regard your fattened peace offerings.
Take away from Me the noise of your songs,
For I will not hear the melody of your stringed instruments.
But let justice run down like water,
And righteousness like a mighty stream.
The rituals were not to appease a wrathful God but to bring Israel, the Church, into a greater communion with the Lord. Yet when the rituals became an end in themselves—when the people saw the importance was in what they did rather than for whom they did it—God was repulsed by them. For, as King David so beautifully prayed,
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit,
Psalm 50
A broken and a contrite heart—
These, O God, You will not despise.
And now God has given us the perfect ritual, the perfect sacrifice, the Eucharist. But the fundamentals of ritual remain, it is not that we merely perform the actions but that through the actions we reaffirm our commitment to God and he reaffirms—though he never wavers—his commitment to us. Through the ritual we are bound together to each other and bound to the Lord. We are brought together as a true society, a true community, the true Church of the living God.
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Sermon
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, Amen.
A widow, dear brothers and sisters, is one who has lost her husband, lost the target of her love. And we see here, in today’s Gospel reading, the Widow of Nain. She has now lost not only the target of her love but she has lost her only son: the life which she has born as the fruit of the love for her beloved has died. And in the world of the first century, as for most of human history, in this state she is alone and destitute.
I, too, am alone and destitute, for I have lost the target of my love, I have lost God; in my life I have made the Lord a periphery character rather than my heart’s desire. And in this state I, as the Widow of Nain, have lost the hope of eternal life. Another had been through such turmoil, such pain, our Father Abraham. He had placed his love for the Lord in another person—in his son Isaac, the son of the Promise—rather than in the living God. His love was now misplaced. For it is right to love another, to love our children, but the Lord explains the greatest commandment to be “You shall love the Lᴏʀᴅ your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, … [and] You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37, 39) Love God first, then others.
Abraham had forgotten his first love (compare Revelation 2:4). Yet the Lord was able to bring him back by asking Abraham to place all his faithfulness in God, to return again to his first love.
“Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” (Genesis 22:2)
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Read last Sunday’s Sermon, Behold the Bridegroom comes.
Archive of Past Sermons.
Services this week
Friday 14th October
Discussion on the Apocalypse, 8 pm
Online only
Saturday 15th October
Vespers, 6.30 pm
At St Francis’ Hall, Eastleigh
Sunday 16th October
Divine Liturgy, 9.30 am
At St Francis’ Hall, Eastleigh
Online session is via Google Meet: please get in contact for the details.
Please join us: all are welcome, come and see.
Attending Church
We will be meeting at St Francis’ Hall, Nightingale Avenue, Eastleigh, SO50 9JA. Come and See.
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Yes, absolutely. Offer yourselves to the Lord: pray! Make available to him all your talents and ask him how he would like you to use them — listen for his reply.
Your prayers!
With love in Christ
Fr Alexander
[email protected]