Sermons and talks
Sermon by Eric Sutcliffe
Easter 4 (3rd Sunday after Easter) , Evensong at the Parish Church
Rdgs: Isaiah 63.7-14; Lk 24.36-49
Prayer: Heavenly Father may your word be our rule, your Spirit our Teacher, and your glory our intent; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
I have to be honest. The word ‘eschew’ was whattook my eye as I started to prepare this sermon. It’s a word from the Collect. Not a word much used today; and not a word to be trifled with!
More about this special word in a moment; but first the background of the Collect for today. It is one of the oldest in the Book of Common Prayer. It comes from a collection of prayers known as the Sacramentary of Leo 1st – Bishop of Rome from 440 to 461. So it is indeed a very old prayer, originally written in Latin and virtually untouched by the Reformation.
To avoid any confusion, we need to note that this is the prayer for the 3rd Sunday after Easter in the Book of Common Prayer, although you may be saying ‘I thought it was the 4th Sunday of Easter’. Yes! Both are correct! The new lectionary of Common Worship counts Easter Sunday as the first day in the season of Easter. So now all our Sundays are Sundays of Easter. Easter is far too important to be just a day, or a weekend; it is a season. We are still in the Easter season – and will be until Pentecost. Arguably it is the most important season of the Christian calendar; as it has been rightly said ‘we are people of Easter’. So to speak of Sundays of Easter, is so much more liturgically appropriate than Sundays after Easter!
This collect is placed in the Easter season because, in the early centuries of Christianity, Easter was the great season for Baptisms. So our collect is putting its emphasis on those who have turned to Christ and have been baptised. These are people who would gladly join with Isaiah when he says: ‘I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord…’(63.7).These are people who would join with us in proclaiming ‘the abundance of His steadfast love…’; people who gladly recognise the way Christ ‘became our saviour’ (verse 8); and who ‘in love and pity redeemed us’(verse 9), that is He paid the price to set us free. All these are phrases we heard in our Old Testament reading from the prophet Isaiah.
So the Collect appears to be addressing the needs of those who are to be baptised or are newly started on the Christian journey. If we look at the modern service of Holy Baptism we see two important emphases. First there are the negatives: ‘I reject…, I renounce…, I repent…’; negatives in the sense of things we want to distance ourselves from – rebellion, corruption, sin. And then there are the positives: ‘I turn to Christ,… I submit to Christ,…I come to Christ…’. These two emphases are echoed in our Collect for the day.
Our Collect similarly reminds us that our faith in Christ leads us on to two important steps of action. They are renunciation and obedience. The first step of renunciation is where our word ‘eschew’ occurs. ‘Eschew those things that are contrary to their profession’. The context suggests the word means to avoid, to fight shy of. The American Prayer Book indeed substitutes the word ‘avoid’. But there is something more compelling about the older word ‘eschew’. To ‘fight shy of’ is a little nearer the mark. Reject perhaps, or eject like when we say ‘shoo!’ to next door’s cat! Eschew, shy, shun, shoo… are probably all of the same root. And there is another word belonging to the same group. It comes as a surprise both because of the strength of feeling and also because of Who is said to be speaking. It occurs in that well known passage in Revelation chapter three, which pictures the Lord standing knocking at the door of the church of Laodicea. (We might well pause and wonder why our Lord is on the outside of the door of that church.) Just before this picture they, the church at Laodicea, have been strongly rebuked for being lukewarm – neither cold nor hot. This is so unacceptable to the Lord that He says ‘I will spue thee out of my mouth.’ ‘Spue’… literally spit out this lukewarm mouthful. It belongs to the same group of words: spue, shoo, shy, shun, eschew.
The collect, then, is praying that the new converts, the baptismal candidates, should eschew, strongly reject, the things that are contrary to their professed allegiance to Christ. That’s the negative part, the renunciation, the turning away from. The positive side, the obedience, is mild in comparison –almost Anglican in its tone! It is to ‘follow all such things as are agreeable to the same’ profession of faith. What a nice, polite way of putting it! ‘Follow all such things as are agreeable…’
I said earlier that this collect was virtually unchanged at the Reformation. In fact one little word was slipped in by the reformers: the word ‘all’. The newly baptised were exhorted to follow all such things as were consistent with their Christian profession.
Put the two parts together, the renunciation and the obedience, and we see that the Collect is saying we cannot be half-hearted in our allegiance to Christ. The Christian pilgrim has to forcibly and determinedly shun any thing that is going to detract from the journey, and at the same time embrace all those things that assist, help on the way.
Do we begin to see that this is not simply a collect for the new Christian, for the newly baptised? It applies to us too who are on that journey. We too need to shun, eschew, the things that are unhelpful. As the writer to the Hebrews put it ‘let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, (that so easily distracts), and let us run the race that is set before us’ (Heb.12.1). The metaphor has changed from a journey to a race. But the sense is the same. We will encounter difficulties along the way; we shall see other brethren stumbling and yet triumphing in adversity. There will be those who take a stand to find that their footing was not as secure as they thought. There will be those who encounter an antagonism, even in this country we regard as Christian, where an anti-Christian secularism hides behind an apparent political correctness. But the message is uncompromising. It calls for our whole-hearted commitment; whatever obstacles we encounter. And if we grow weary or lose heart we always have before us the image of Him who endured all and triumphed; the One who was crucified yet triumphed and rose again.
Alleluia. Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed! Alleluia. alleluia. Amen
