In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25, Jesus was telling his disciples that if you want to meet God face to face, the nearest you are going to come to it on this planet is to look into the faces of your brothers and sisters — and especially your sisters and brothers who have been declared unrighteous, unclean, unacceptable. It isn’t that we find God there; it is that God finds us there.
That is where our faith is nurtured and bears fruit. There, where we expect to meet monsters, we meet God instead. The opportunity to serve God lies there among the prisoners, the naked, the sick, the hungry, who have been reckoned to be least deserving of any service at all.
The vocation of the Anglican Communion is this. As Michael Ramsay said in ‘The Gospel and the Catholic Church,’ the centre of Anglicanism, her primary vocation is to witness to the perpetual passion of Christ’s body which must lead, according to the divine providence, into the heart of the gospel.
Proper penitence and a readiness to go willingly, and perhaps be lifted up, to suffer whatever sacrifices may be necessary for the visible unity of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
For this to happen we must die in order to bear fruit and be messengers of God’s redeeming love. We are called to die to the values of the world — greed for wealth, status and power; as well as our psychological tendencies: our desires and compulsions for success, to be loved, to be held in esteem, to be acclaimed by those in our group, to have, power and control over others. .It’s a call to disarm ourselves, to die to our plans and let God’s plans and ways take hold of us.
A rather shambly discourse with some dodgy eisegesis and appeals to rhetoric and sentiment more than reason.
Gee, and who was it that told the adulterous woman “Go and sin no more� That part of the story always seems to be forgotten? Law and Gospel go hand in hand.
This is a wonderful sermon, Spirit-filled and Scriptural.