Trinity 7 2023 – Sermon preached in St. Paul’s Athens. The final service of Fr. Leonard as chaplain. Readings: Isaiah 44, 6-8; Romans 8, 12-25; Matthew 13, 24-30, 36-43

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

At the start of a forty year ministry you can calculate that there are potentially 2,080 Sundays for sermons to be preached – give or take a few for holidays. The few that you deduct for holidays will be more than counterbalanced by those Sundays when more than one sermon is needed – and then there are all those mid-week occasions, such as principal feasts, or saints days, as well as funerals and weddings. So over a trajectory of 40 years the scope for preaching is infinite – and a challenge to any ordained minister. Stamina is an essential characteristic to survive, and even thrive, in public ministry.

It has been my privilege, and indeed a joy, to be a preacher or God’s faithful people in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, Wotton, Glypton and Kiddington in Oxfordshire, the parishes of the Halesworth Team in Suffolk, The Ifield Team in Crawley, West Sussex, Cirencester in Gloucestershire, and lastly here in Athens and around Greece. In the last few years – even before Covid – I took to sending out my sermons weekly both in printed in pre-recorded form, and I am so grateful for the feedback and response I have had from some people over the years. I feel as if the sermons have indeed been appreciated.

But a priest is not only a preacher – there are all the celebrations at the altar, at the font, with couples getting married, at the deathbed of the dying, at the support of those who mourn. There are endless meetings – many of which have no end result, and a whole range of other duties and obligations too many to name.

So what does a priest do in the last sermon he or she preaches, when the 2,080 other possibilities are no longer on the horizon?

Well, I am going to fall back on the three main foundations that have sustained me for the greater part of my life, even from before ordination, and always I look to the holy scriptures for the inspiration, just as on every other occasion.

Of the foundations the first is God – proto o Theos – as the Greeks would say. I have built everything on the one who is the master-builder, the one to whom the prophet Isaiah directs us,

‘I am the first, and I am the last; besides me there is no god…You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me? There is no other rock; I know not one.’ Isaiah 44, 6-8.

These words, ‘the first and the last’ give us a deep insight into the second foundation of my life, the one we know as Jesus; the one we worship as the Christ, the Alpha and the Omega. Jesus and Christ are not two separate identities or objects, but one and the same. He is the Word of God made flesh who lived as one of us, in order that all of creation can be enfolded, and along with him through the mystery of the cross, humanity is freed from the enslavement to the slavery of sin. Please note my wording there – it is not that we are freed from sin, but free from our enslavement to it.

We can find in Christ reconciliation and restoration. In him we can find our way back to the security of the loving Father. It is our eternal quest as humanity.

This same Christ is embodied, literally, in the life of the Church, the third of my foundations. We are his body, and to have seen Christ is to have seen God the Father. There are those who have faith in God but no faith in the Church – as if the two can be separated. God is everywhere – we hear this said, and we don’t disagree, for God is the creator of all things, visible and invisible, as we declare in the Creed of Nicaea. But if God is everywhere he must also be somewhere, and it is the Christian revelation that God is in Christ reconciling the world to himself. So it is that the mystery of God is also the mystery of the Church. I’ll say more now about the church.

There are some who love the church but have philosophical questions about the existence of God. To them I say if you love the Church then you are already in love with God, for God has revealed himself in the Christ whose body the Church is. We cannot easily comb this out into strands. When we comb it out we end up with unsatisfactory and incomplete conclusions. It is all one, for God our Father is one – he is all that unity is and can be. Christ is one with him as the Father is one with his Son.

St. Paul’s in his letter to the Romans speaks of life in the Spirit, the Spirit of God. It is the Spirit that binds everything into the divine unity. Paul informs us that it is by being led by the Spirit that we become children of God, adopted into the participating in the generosity of the divine life, the life of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Pauls proclaims that it is through the Spirit we can call God Abba, Father. This is a liberating revelation. God is our Father.

Let’s put an end to all this contemporary reduction of language to the purely human level. God is our Father – Abba – he is not a patriarchal God, ‘Do not fear or be afraid…there is no other rock; I know not one.

One of the great Christian enterprises is prayer – beautifully polished prayers of the church, or the simple prayer of thank you, or help! The prayer that is evoked through poetic words, or the prayer that is focused without any words, the prayer of the heart, or the ‘Jesus Prayer’ – ‘Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

When his disciples ask Jesus about prayer he begins ‘Our Father…’ God is the Father who represents all that is good, all that is beautiful in relationships, so I urge the Church not to redact our inherited language to the one dimensional temptations of the ‘koini’ of everyday communication. We do not reduce God – we raise up humanity.

Matthew’s gospel today provides us with a second opportunity to think about the action of sowing seed – an agrarian image – which Deacon Christine developed in her sermon last week, with Matthew’s version of the Parable of the Sower.

In this second visit to the agrarian metaphor we are given by Christ some insight into the life of his Church. It is a parable that speaks to us all about our experience of real church life – church as we seek to do it as frail human beings. Jesus speaks of good seed being infiltrated by weeds. All of us pray for the church to be good, and pure, and holy – but we also know the capacity of humanity to infiltrate and distort this aspiration, this ideal version of Church. ‘Let both grow together until the harvest’ we are told. Then at the final reaping it will be God who will be our judge. He then explains that the sower is him, the Son of Man, and the good seed is the ideal kingdom. But even in the ideal world there is sin.

A couple of weeks back we reflected on St. Paul’s list of the works of the flesh, contrasting them with the fruits of the Spirit. We all know what life is like – and you will recall I focused quite a bit as gossiping being a fatal ‘work of the flesh’. In prayer, through the work of the Spirit, let everyone work for Christ’s Church, for we are the adopted daughters and sons of God, who have the privilege of calling him ‘Father.’

And a last reflection about the Church from one who will continue to be a faithful member even though retired from active ministry within a congregation.

We hear so much in our present days about organisations that are under intense scrutiny – national, global institutions, such as the BBC, The Confederation of British Industry, the Police Force, and even the prestigious global restaurant chain for gourmande’s, MacDonalds – where there is an institutional rascism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and other examples of poor human conduct. The church is not perfect, and has institutional problems, but it has one over-riding issue, in my opinion.

It is this – the Church is in great danger of being institutionally institutional. A Church that thinks, and acts institutionally, is a Church that cannot be open to the Holy Spirit of God, which looks inwards, and as it looks inward it loses the horizons to which humanity is called. In losing the vision it becomes homophobic, misogynist, rascist etc. for it becomes a Church that lives only on a human level, subject to the failures and frailties of human nature. We need to be a church that raises people up – gives them hope, gives them faith – and offers a vision and a way for humanity to experience the transformed humanity to which God calls.

I pray for St. Paul’s Church here in Athens as the vacancy begins. Find the right priest for you here, and remember the other congregations through Greece who also need a good priest in Athens. You are not a church in isolation from THE church. Strive not to be institutionally institutional, but live in the Spirit as the adopted children of God, and when all is said and done, don’t ever fail to cry out ‘Abba! Father’.

Of the 2,080 Sundays this is the last one in a long run. ‘Whoever has ears, let them hear’.