Sermon for 16th Sunday after Trinity, 2020
Sermon for Trinity 16
September 27, 2020
Fr. Tony Melton
Pity is a lost word. The only time I hear the word used in anything in line with its meaning is when we say, “What a pity.” But we don’t generally mean it. It is usually a way of dismissing an unfortunate circumstance without the active feeling of pity. More commonly, we see the word used in a way opposite to its meaning. “Pitiful.” It generally carries some amount of spite, which is the opposite of pity. It is no wonder that the word has fallen out of use. The word and the goodness of pity was taken out of modern moral philosophy by Kant and Neitsche, Hilter’s philosophy. They describe pity as the illogical doubling of another’s suffering in one’s own self. The waste of energy to assist the weak in bearing the burden of existence. Yet our Collect begs God’s pity to cleanse and defend His Church, drawing our attention to the pity that Jesus shows the widow at Nain in our Gospel. Our subject today is the pity of God for His people.
And this is so needed in our time. It is often noted that Americans with their free market economy naturally divide people into “winners” and “losers”. And no doubt there is truth to this, which is why we put our children in sports, so that they see that their determination and skill have a direct impact on results and victory. Yet this is not the full picture of the world. There are always factors that are beyond our control. And even if a situation is someone’s fault, it is often not in their power to emerge from it. Pity is the appropriate response, but as I said, pity is a lost word.
Our central passage this morning is the Gospel for the 16th Sunday after Trinity on page 212. Please turn there now. Page 212. We will be looking at the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel. My aim is to show the pity of Jesus for the woman of Nain so that we can appreciate the pity of God the Father for us so that we, as the Church, might have pity for the world.
First, let’s look at the Collect at the top of page 212. “O Lord, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church.” It is a beautiful image, that the tears of God over our pitifulness would wash away our squalor. It is not simply out of duty that God the Son obeyed the Father and became a Covenant for the people. It is also that the Triune God was moved by pity to provide succour to His people.
With this in mind, turn your attention to the Gospel reading in Luke 7. Jesus travels with his disciples to a town a few miles away from Nazareth called Nain. And “behold, there was a dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.” She was weeping, and she had good reason. The loss of a child is every parent’s worst nightmare. To lose your only son, unimaginable. But that this woman was a widow meant that with the death of her son, she had no man to care for her. Now, today a woman can fend for herself in society fairly well. But this was not so for most of human history. Her future looked bleak, very bleak. For all these reasons, she wept. And Jesus saw her, and he heard her weeping, and He felt pity for her, and had compassion on her. He says to her, “Weep not.” He approaches the procession and touches the bier and says to the woman’s dead son, “Young man, I say unto thee, Arise.” And he sat up, and Jesus delivered him to his mother.
This is not the only time that Jesus did this. At His own crucifixion, His mother Mary, a widow by that point, would lose her own son. So that His mother would not be left without a man to care for her, Jesus appoints John to care for her. Perhaps he saw in this woman at Nain the suffering that His own mother would feel, and was moved to act. Who knows? All we know is that Jesus showed pity.
Lots of people try to figure God out through looking at the world, or through philosophy. And certain things can be easily seen and understood this way. We can see through Creation that God is big and powerful. We can know through philosophy that God is eternal. But aside from these very basic things, we can not know much for certain. Creation is so contradictory. There is beauty, but there is also terrible ugliness. The mountains and the oceans are merciless. And it is hard to see the goodness of God in war, and famine, and plague. Yet, there is another way to know God, and to know Him with something like certainty. And this is to look at His Son. Jesus shows us the Father. Is God kind? The vastness and complexity of the universe obscures the answer. Yet, the answer is crystal clear in the Incarnation. Is God in control? The chaos of the nations obscure the answer. Yet, we are sure of it when we see that Jesus calms the storm. Does God pity us? The numerous trials and tragedies that afflict our daily lives obscure the answer. Yet, the pity of Jesus clearly displays the pity of the Father for us. He is the true nature of things, and so we start our theology with the Incarnation.
The fact is that Jesus pitied the widow at Nain, so He pities you. He loves you. Children, if you don’t hear anything else in this homily, hear this. Jesus loves you so much. In fact, St. Paul prays in our Epistle that we would be able to understand the breadth, and length, and depth, and height of the love of Christ for us. It is too big, too high for us to understand. God doesn’t look at you and think, “Well, I guess I can’t back out now on this.” He sees our anxiety, and He pities us. He sees our sorrow, and He weeps with us. He sees the holes that we dig ourselves into that we can’t get out of, and He reaches out. He sees the sins and habits that we can’t seem to change, and He is moved to compassion. It is essential for your Christian walk that you grasp the hugeness of God’s love and pity for you. Listen to the syntax of St. Paul, “…to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.” Raise your hand if you want to be filled with all the fulness of God. Then, know the love of Christ. Start the lifelong journey of grasping the unfathomable magnitude of His compassion for infirmities, and the torrent of tears that He sheds for our pitifulness.
A knowledge of God’s love and pity towards us fill us with God, and our God is a pitying God. So a people full of a pitying God will be a pitying people. Oh, that we would show the pity of God to the world.
Think of this: God knows every detail and every factor that led to someone’s current circumstance, and He still shows pity. We don’t. We can’t know. You can’t even know the true weight of the burdens that your spouse carries. We all have our scars, and our trauma. We are far more broken than we like to admit. Show pity on each other. Lift each other up. Often we don’t know what’s going on in other people’s lives. People carry terrible burdens. Perhaps someone is going through a crises. Or maybe they carry around unbearable guilt or shame or trauma. How would you know? Pity is not simply seeing actual pitifulness and acting with compassion. It is the realization that things are always far more complicated and broken than we realize, and so our default is always to show Grace.
This morning, God has continued to show us compassion, for we are invited into the great pattern of the Liturgy where we see Christ, we know Christ, we receive Christ, and we be Christ. I’ll close with the incredible words from our Epistle.
“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the Church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.