Homily for Evening Prayer, 6th Sunday after Trinity, Sunday 19 July

Lectionary Readings for Evening Prayer The Sixth Sunday after Trinity 

Psalm 67 

May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, that your way may be known upon earth, 

your saving power among all nations. Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth. Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. The earth has yielded its increase; God, our God, has blessed us. May God continue to bless us; 

let all the ends of the earth revere him. 

I Kings 2: 10-12; 3: 16-28 

Then David slept with his ancestors, and was buried in the city of David. The time that David reigned over Israel was forty years; he reigned seven years in Hebron, and thirty-three years in Jerusalem. So Solomon sat on the throne of his father David; and his kingdom was firmly established. 

Later, two women who were prostitutes came to the king and stood before him. The one woman said, “Please, my lord, this woman and I live in the same house; and I gave birth while she was in the house. Then on the third day after I gave birth, this woman also gave birth. We were together; there was no one else with us in the house, only the two of us were in the house. Then this woman’s son died in the night, because she lay on him. She got up in the middle of the night and took my son from beside me while your servant slept. She laid him at her breast, and laid her dead son at my breast. When I rose in the morning to nurse my son, I saw that he was dead; but when I looked at him closely in the morning, clearly it was not the son I had borne.” But the other woman said, “No, the living son is mine, and the dead son is yours.” The first said, “No, the dead son is yours, and the living son is mine.” So they argued before the king. Then the king said, “The one says, ‘This is my son that is alive, and your son is dead’; while the other says, ‘Not so! Your son is dead, and my son is the living 

one.’” So the king said, “Bring me a sword,” and they brought a sword before the king. The king said, “Divide the living boy in two; then give half to the one, and half to the other.” But the woman whose son was alive said to the king—because compassion for her son burned within her—“Please, my lord, give her the living boy; certainly do not kill him!” The other said, “It shall be neither mine nor yours; divide it.” Then the king responded: “Give the first woman the living boy; do not kill him. She is his mother.” All Israel heard of the judgment that the king had rendered; and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him, to execute justice. 

Acts 4: 1-22 

While Peter and John were speaking to the people, the priests, the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees came to them, much annoyed because they were teaching the people and proclaiming that in Jesus there is the resurrection of the dead. So they arrested them and put them in custody until the next day, for it was already evening. But many of those who heard the word believed; and they numbered about five thousand. The next day their rulers, elders, and scribes assembled in Jerusalem, with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and all who were of the high-priestly family. When they had made the prisoners stand in their midst, they inquired, “By what power or by what name did you do this?” Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders, if we are questioned today because of a good deed done to someone who was sick and are asked how this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. This Jesus is ‘the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; 

it has become the cornerstone.’ There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized them as companions of Jesus. When they saw the man who had been cured standing beside them, they had nothing to say in opposition. So they ordered them to leave the council while they discussed the matter with one another. They said, “What will we do with them? For it is obvious to all who live in Jerusalem that a notable sign has been done through them; we cannot deny it. But to keep it from spreading further among the people, let us warn them to speak no more to anyone in this name.” So they called them and ordered them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John answered them, “Whether it is right in God’s sight to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard.” After threatening them again, they let them go, finding no way to punish them 

because of the people, for all of them praised God for what had happened. For the man on whom this sign of healing had been performed was more than forty years old. 

Homily for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity 

These two passages that we have read to close this day are about the same thing: telling the truth. In the famous story about the wisdom of King Solomon, because one woman does not tell the truth, she loses the child she has claimed. Justice cannot be based on lies. King Solomon finds the way to justice by his intuition, that the real mother will sacrifice her own happiness to preserve the life of her son. It is a story you never forget! 

In the second story, from the Acts of the Apostles, the religious establishment of the day does not want to hear the truth about the source of Peter and John’s power to heal. So the authorities tell them to shut up and go away. Even though “a good deed was done to someone who was sick,” they forbid Peter and John to tell the truth about it. Lest it diminish the authority of the ones who hold the power of the times. 

To understand what was happening here, and what was at stake here, you have to backtrack to the previous chapter, chapter 3, to hear the beginning of the story. 

Here it is: 

“One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon. A man lame from birth was being carried in. People would lay him daily at the gate of the temple called the Beautiful Gate so that he could ask for alms from those entering the temple. When he saw Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked them for alms. Peter looked intently at him, as did John, and said, Look at us. And he fixed his attention on them, expecting to receive something from them. But Peter said, I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk. And he took him by the right hand and raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong. Jumping up, he stood and began to walk, and he entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God. All the people saw this, and they recognized the man as the one who used to sit and ask for alms there; and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.” 

Power corrupts. It corrupts the ability to see the truth, and to tell it. The most moving feature of this story, to me, is that Peter and John say to the lame man: Look at us! Look and see who we are and why we are here. The lame man only looks at them, even then, because he expects them to put some money in his hand. That is what his whole life has been about—-waiting for people to ease their consciences with a coin. 

But when he does look at them, he is raised up to health and new life by the proclamation of the source of all healing and all life, Jesus the Christ, the embodiment of God’s goodness and God’s grace. Peter speaks the words of truth straight into his face and into his whole being: 

I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk. 

And so the man lamed for forty years is raised up and walks and leaps and praises God. And the people who see this truth are lost in wonder and amazement. 

The authorities cannot rejoice with the man restored to health; they can only be troubled by this challenge to their control of the means of healing. Temple ritual and the right rules are the way, the only way. 

So if they see the same truth that the lame man saw, and the people there saw, they cannot admit it. They deny the truth and forbid anybody else to speak of the truth. 

It is the same today. I can speak of my native country, the United States—-that the persons in power did not speak the truth about the devastation of the coronavirus spreading in their midst, nor did they exercise the leadership necessary to save thousands of lives. Telling the truth is the only means to healing. 

Telling the truth: justice and healing both must come through this conscious choice. 

One of my favorite books is by a Presbyterian minister and novelist called Frederick Buechner. Its title is Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. It is a small book that I have re-read many times. Buechner says that the only task of the preacher is to tell the truth, the truth as she or he has experienced it. That’s it. 

If he speaks truth, the preacher is bound to speak of the tragedy of life. Think of the book of Job,where the friends try to define God as present in ways and places where he is not present, to define him as moral order, as the best answer man can give to the problem of his life. But God is not an answer man can give, God says. God does not give answers. God gives God’s very self. 

Think also of King Lear, of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s great poem The Wreck of the Deutschland, where in the maelstrom of the storm-lashing waves the poet sees 

past all Grasp God, throned behind Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides With a mercy that outrides 

The all of water, an ark For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides Lower than death and the dark. 

As Buechner says, for Hopkins, as for the others, to speak the truth means to be true to the experience of truth as among other things stormbound and tragic. 

But if the tragic is the inevitable, the comic is the unforeseeable, as in the divine comedy of the Incarnation. The astonishing, freely given, gratuitous grace of God. The reversals of Jacob and Esau, the holy jokes that Jesus made that were the parables. The mistaken reason for which Jesus was put to death. As Buechner says, The good news breaks into a world where the news has been so bad for so long that when it is good nobody hears it much except for a few. 

And the truth as fairy tale: think of all those tales of transformation where every creature is revealed, in the end, as what it truly is—-the ugly duckling becomes a great white swan, the frog is revealed to be a prince, the beautiful but wicked queen is unmasked at last in all her ugliness. The Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, The Steadfast Tin Soldier. The marvelous and impossible thing truly happens. 

We have a glimpse of the Joy that is our destiny, and this is the ultimate truth we proclaim. Christ was raised from the dead, and He has redeemed all suffering through all time. The Gospel is the light we proclaim that shines through any present darkness. 

The truth is necessary, on a human level, in our daily round, for any semblance of justice or of healing. 

To tell the Truth of the Gospel, to proclaim the Joy that lies beyond the news of the day or the compass of our world here—-this is our great commission. The great and glad news of the Gospel is the larger Truth that depends both on our hearing and on our telling. 

May we embrace this our charge with hearts full of love. 

Amen! 

The Revd Dana English The Benefice of Holland Park July 19, 2020