Hiatus

reverendned — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 06:23:06 +0000

Due to pressures of work and an increasingly heavy load of Sunday services, I will not be regularly posting over the next few months. However, I have almost an entire liturgical year of sermons here already to correspond with the Book of Common Prayer 1662 lectionary. I still value comments and feedback. It is with regret that I make this decision, but it is better to be honest than commit to something that you cannot do as well as you would like.

In Christ

Sexagesima

reverendned — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 08:44:58 +0000

“Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.” (Matt. 13: 9)

It struck me that I had never asked myself the question: do I have ears to hear?

Particularly when dealing with familiar passages of scripture such as the Parable of the Sower (Matt. 13: 1-23). As I read this Gospel passage over before the service this week, I realised that I had never really understood it. During my youth, I frequently understood this parable as a statement predicting the unprofitability of unbelief.

Of course this was not in any sense the way to understand this scripture. Indeed Christ explains this scripture very differently. The sad thing is that for a long time I was more like the people of whom Isaiah said hearing they will not understand, and seeing they will not perceive (Matt. 13: 14) ; listening to the parable, then understanding it perhaps in my own way or not at all.

In fact, the parable was not suggesting that the seed which fell on the rock, or the hard ground, represented unbelievers; but rather it is the capacity of man to respond to the word of God, which is the seed, which is the object of the parable. And the rocky ground or the seed on it is not an unbelieving heart, but rather a believing one in which the Word of God can not find a home. Believing yes; Christian, perhaps only nominally.

We who are baptised are not called so much to merely believe or hear the word, but to act upon it, that we might bring forth much fruit (Matt. 13: 23).

Yet am I one of those who while Baptised, and while hearing the Word, fail to have it enliven my soul and make a doer of the word and not merely a hearer?

Yet if I am even that, am I so overcome with the cares of the world that I hear, but do not act, and my desire to be a doer of the word is strangled by the many things that overwhelm me which are not as important as the Gospel commandment to love God and to love my neighbour? (Matt. 13: 22).

Even if I am a hearer of the word, therefore, I must always be focused on what is important, and to be doing good; both for God and for neighbour.

Therefore I enjoin all of you that you not only hear, but act, upon the Holy Gospel which has been proclaimed, that you become not unfruitful, your desire to serve God strangled by the concerns of the world, but that you bring forth much fruit.

Reverend Ned's Weblog

Hiatus

Sexagesima