Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, March 7, 2010
Solemn Evensong
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Year 2: Jeremiah 6:9-15; Romans 8:1-10; Deuteronomy 8:1-10

When I began attending the Episcopal Church in the early 1970s, one could often follow the Sunday Mass lessons in the Prayer Book itself. The Church was in the stages of preparing a new Prayer Book. I remember becoming vaguely aware that sometimes we used the really small prayer books that were in the pews – and sometimes we used a new paperback that everyone called the “Green Book” because of its cover.[1]

When I was ordained in 1983, I served first on a five-person clergy staff, all much more senior than me. My colleagues often remarked on how great it was to have the new lectionary. They were part of a generation that had very little material to work with. The older Prayer Book Mass lectionary was on a one-year cycle. It was basically a carryover from the Medieval lectionary. What had made it work for preaching after the Reformation was the requirement, in place in the American Church until 1856, that the Sunday morning service include Morning Prayer, with its two lessons and psalms, the Litany, and at least the first part of the Communion service – through the sermon and collection.

By the 1970s, it was often said that ordination in the Episcopal Church included subscriptions to The New Yorker and a half-dozen other magazines so that preachers would have something new to talk about.

The Prayer Book collects – opening prayers – were also a great source for Sunday sermons. Thomas Cranmer provided most of the choices and the first translations of Latin prayers into English. He was, of course, one of the great translators and stylists, and ordinary English is still marked by his work.

In my profession, one gets to know the collects really well, at least their words, their cadence. Beginning with Evening Prayer last night, I’ve read or sung today’s collect in four services already, and that’s not counting the two times I’ve heard Father Smith sing it today, at Morning Prayer and just now in Evensong. Again, that’s since last night. Here it is again:

Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.[2]

The prayer comes from the late eighth century text of what is called the Gregorian Sacramentary.[3] It sounds almost Calvinistic to my ear. The foundation of Calvin’s thought was election: God himself chooses who will be saved and who will be condemned to hell. And I don’t think it’s an accident that today’s lesson from Paul’s Letter to the Romans is being read:

Any one who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead because of sin, your spirits are alive because of righteousness.[4]

John Calvin was the major theologian of the Reformation and shaped the thought of Protestants, including Anglicans, and the subsequent Counterreformation. But the Anglican tradition has never been enthralled by the idea of the total depravity of humankind. We follow instead the words of the First Letter to Timothy about “God our savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”[5] John Calvin wanted a certainty about God’s work that our tradition has never felt called to affirm.[6]

This particular has bothered me more over the years because it is hard to read aloud than for its sense of a doctrine of election. For me, it echoes in a consoling way the care God, who feeds the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the field, has for us.[7] I don’t know how Calvin would resolve his doctrine with the words of Matthew’s Jesus who says, “Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’  For the Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.”[8] The call to seek God’s kingdom has always seemed to me to open the door to some of our own efforts, to our own individual response to God, and not a perfect response.

My own candidate for the worst prayer is collect Cranmer composed for Eastertide. We hear it in the summer, in August.

Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.[9]

It keeps Jesus risen life as far from us as possible. Here he (1) a sacrifice for sin and (2) an example for us to follow. Where are we, the living members of his body? My vote is for the Jesus of Mark’s gospel who says to the father of the epileptic child, “‘All things are possible to him who believes.’ Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’”[10]

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.