Sermon preached at St Paul’s Athens for the 4th Sunday after Trinity – 27th June 2021: 2 Cor 8, 7-15
Fr Leonard Doolan
Today we are resuming our alignment with the rest of the Anglican Church calendar, having been out of step with it since the beginning of Lent. The decision, with episcopal support, to follow the Orthodox date for Easter, in this year alone, was a bit of a gamble, but one that paid off. The relaxation of COVID regulations in Greece favoured only the Orthodox Easter date. Had we celebrated Easter according to the Latin (western) date, we would have had almost no liturgy in our church. That four-week difference in dates was significant, and in fact there was a freshness to our Sundays this year because we were in Lent, Holy Week, Easter through to Pentecost with the majority of Greek people.
But from today we ‘catch up’ and already it is the 4th Sunday after Trinity.
There is a very neat parallelism in the passage from the Corinthian letter this morning. He urges the Corinthian church not only to be zealous in faith, speech, knowledge, eagerness, and so on, but also to be generous in their financial giving. This models the pattern of God’s action in Christ. The small Christian communities well to the north of Corinth, up in Macedonia, have fallen on troubled times, and substantial financial hardship. The Apostle exhorts the Corinthian Christians to take their corporate responsibility seriously, and out of their resources, to send aid to the north.
In doing this Paul is making a connection that he stresses in other parts of his correspondence, namely, that as the Body of Christ, we are all linked to one another, like the limbs of a body are linked. So when one part of the body suffers, the whole body feels the pain. Just like if any one of us stubs a foot against a step, there is pain in the foot, yes, but the whole body feels the impact.
If we feel pain in one part of our body we may be inclined to take some sort of analgesic – and it has always baffled me how my effervescent paracetamol tablets know how to find their way to the part of my body that is hurting. In a funny way this also emphasizes how the individual parts of the body are all interconnected. So it is between the Christian communities. One hurts, all feel pain, and we all should respond to part of the healing. It is now a commonplace in our global Anglican church that we are partnered with different parts of the world, so that we can share each other’s experiences, both the challenges and the joys. In the Diocese of Europe we are so diverse geographically that we express this principle within our own Diocesan life.
So it is that St. Paul’s Anglican Church Athens has benefitted more than once from diocesan – wide appeals, perhaps the most significant being several years ago at the height of the surge of refugees and migrants flooding into Greece in search of greater security and life potential. Smaller projects have received episcopal support more recently. All of this is simply an extension of the fundamental principle expounded by the Apostle Paul.
So what is the parallelism I referred to a few moments ago: ‘For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.’ (2 Cor 8, 9).
The Apostle expands on this elsewhere, in particular in the letter he wrote to the Philippians (Chapter 2) where, in what might be a very ancient credal hymn of the primitive church, the self-emptying God – the kenotic God – is praised.
So here in Corinth Paul is sharing the theology of the glorious divine richness adopting the condition of poverty, not naively in the sense of financial poverty, but in the more general example of humility, of being one with the earth, one with the everyday life of people. Christ shares our condition, understands fully what it is to inhabit humanity, so that he can transform our condition through the weakness of the power of the cross. This is worth emphasizing – the weakness of the power of the cross. Through this transformation of humanity in the cross we receive the riches of faith, hope and love – life in the fruitfulness and bounty of the Holy Spirit, and the ‘life everlasting’ referred to week by week in our Creed.
This is a very clever thing that St. Paul has written to the community on Corinth, for it sums up the whole process of our salvation in Christ, and the sanctification that is the result of participating in Christ’s life with one another.
The parallelism is later well expressed by St. Irenaeus in the well-known bon mot or apophthegm ‘the Son of God became a son of man in order that the sons of men might become sons of God’. Forgive the gender restricted language. The principle is the same, and we can see in these words the similarity with the parallelism used by St. Paul. Both exempla are about the nature God, about our participation in the real and divine life of Christ, and through this the transformation of our humanity.
There is a well – known hymn; Love divine all loves excelling. The words are by Charles Wesley (1707-88). It is set to two different tunes in the hymn book, but you can’t beat the tune called Blaenwern.
The first verse speaks of the love of God coming to earth, and fixing in us his humble dwelling, but the final verse is the one that expresses sanctification, the whole purpose of God participating in our lives and we in his. It so lyrically expresses the principles that both Paul and Irenaeus are expounding:
Finish then thy new creation,
Pure and spotless let us be;
Let us see thy great salvation,
Perfectly restored in thee,
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love and praise!
So, in a sense, we have 3 fine learning points this morning, all of which are consistent in summing up the faith: The Apostle Paul, St. Irenaeus (2nd/3rd century Bishop of Lyons), and Charles Wesley’s jewel of a hymn.
We share in God’s love, who shared it fully with us in Christ. In Christ we discover our truly authentic selves, who must share our rich discovery in every sense with others. Transformed with others by Christ who is God with us, we are changed from glory into glory.
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