OF LILLIES AND SPARROWS

"Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not… Consider the [sparrows]: for they neither sow nor reap… How much more are ye better than the fowls?"

- Luke 12:24, 27

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)

A SERMON FOR THE 15TH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY

INTRODUCTION

Beloved in Christ, today is the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, and the Church, like a careful mother, places before us both the example of her saints and the nourishment of her Scriptures, that we may be instructed in faith, steadied in hope, and enlarged in love.

This past week, we lifted our hearts in joy for the Feast of Our Lady of Walsingham, that most English of feasts, when the Virgin Mother of God revealed herself as the protectress of our patrimonial homeland, calling her children to the mystery of the Incarnation: that in the humble village, as in Nazareth, the Word is made flesh, and heaven stoops down into the meadows and cottages of earth. Walsingham is England’s Nazareth, a sign that Christ has chosen to dwell not only in the great cities, but in the quiet homes of His people.

We remembered, too, the bold and radiant St. Thecla, Equal to the Apostles, who followed St. Paul and confessed Christ with a maiden’s courage, confounding tyrants and teaching us that true discipleship is to hear the Word and keep it, though it cost one’s very life.

We honored the gentle and luminous St. Silouan of Athos, who beheld the abyss of his own weakness yet heard from Christ: “Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not.” His life reminds us that to be a Christian is to stand at the edge of despair, yet to choose again and again the hope of God’s mercy.

We gave thanks for Blessed Lancelot Andrewes, bishop and poet, great Father of our Church, who prayed with a beauty so deep that his very words became ladders to heaven. His teaching of Scripture and his devotion to the Holy Eucharist have made him a father to Carolines and Orthodox alike, his voice is a bridge across centuries and stirs us to the core of our beings, as we remember the importance of our fathers’ and mothers’ witness of Christ’s faithfulness to the world.

And lastly, we rejoiced in the beloved disciple, St. John the Theologian, the eagle who soars to the very mystery of God. He teaches us that to know Christ is to abide in love, and that the glory of God is revealed not in thunder but in the Word made flesh, who dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

Thus, beloved, the lesson of this Sunday stands before us with great clarity: we are called to holiness like the Nazarite, to glory only in the Cross like St. Paul, to live in thanksgiving like the Psalmist, and to trust our Father like the birds and the lilies. The saints we have commemorated embody this trust: the Holy Mary of Walsingham in her fiat, St. Thecla in her courage, St. Silouan in his hope, Blessed Andrewes in his prayer, and Holy St. John in his abiding divine love. With such a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, we turn now to the Scriptures appointed for this day, that we may hear in them the same voice of the Spirit which guided the saints.

SCRIPTURE

From the Book of Numbers, we heard of the Nazarite vow: a life set apart, consecrated wholly to God. To drink no wine, to touch no death, to let one’s hair grow long in holy foolishness. This was to be marked as belonging to the Lord. And the reading concluded with that priestly blessing which has echoed through the centuries: “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: the Lord make his face shine upon thee, and give thee peace.” Here we learn that holiness is both renunciation and benediction: a turning from the world’s vanities, and a reception of God’s own shining countenance.

In the Epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul, writing with his own hand, declares that there is nothing worth boasting of in this world save the Cross of Jesus Christ. Circumcision or uncircumcision avail nothing, but only a new creation. The Apostle bears in his own body the marks of the Lord Jesus, scars that preach more loudly than words. He teaches us that Christianity is not external show, but inward transformation, where peace and mercy rest upon the true Israel of God.

Then, from the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, we heard the words of Christ our Lord: “No man can serve two masters.” The Lord calls us to choose between God and mammon, faith and fear, trust and anxious striving. He points us to the birds of the air, the lilies of the field, and the grass of the meadow. This was a reminder that the Father’s care clothes all creation and shall much more clothe His children. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness,” says Christ, “and all these things shall be added unto you.” And with His final sentence He cuts at the root of our ceaseless worry: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

SERMON

Christ Teaching on the Mountain of the Birds and Lilies

Beloved in Christ, today the Church sets before us one of the gentlest and one of the sharpest passages of Holy Scripture. We are led by the hand of our Lord up the mountain, to sit at His feet as He opens the book of creation before our eyes. He does not give us arguments of philosophy nor the treasures of kings. He points to sparrows and wildflowers, to things so small that we might pass them by without notice.

“Behold the fowls of the air,” He says. “Consider the lilies of the field.” And then this command, that falls with the weight of eternity: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

Here is the heart of the Gospel. We cannot serve two masters. We cannot cling to God and to Mammon. The soul will have but one Lord.

The Tyranny of Two Masters

“No man can serve two masters.”

Our Lord names the rival of God with terrible clarity: Mammon. Not only money, but that spirit of wealth, of anxious grasping, of trust misplaced in possessions, in schemes, in what moth and rust corrupt.

And He does not say it is difficult to serve both God and Mammon. He says it is impossible. The heart cannot be halved. St. Augustine reminds us: “He loves Thee too little who loves anything together with Thee which he loves not for Thy sake.”

How searching this is! For how many of us try to do exactly this: to live with one foot in Christ’s kingdom and one foot in the world’s? But the compass needle cannot point north and south at once.

St. Cyprian, that early bishop-martyr, said with the sternness of love: “He cannot be Christ’s who is more the world’s.”

And John Donne, confessing his own divided heart, prayed with desperate honesty:

“Take me to You, imprison me, for I

Except You enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.”

The heart must be wholly Christ’s, or it will be wholly restless.

Glorying Only in the Cross

In today’s Epistle, St. Paul brings this to its sharpest edge: “God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.”

Here is the one Master, the one boast, the one glory.

The Cross is not only Christ’s gift to us; it is also Christ’s claim upon us. It crucifies the world to us, and us to the world. It makes of us a new creation. It takes our divided heart and makes it whole again.

And in this we see the Vincentian rule: what has been believed always, everywhere, and by all. For the Fathers, the Doctors, the Councils all bear the same witness: the Christian life is not a compromise between two masters, but a crucifixion of one world and a resurrection into another.

The Nazarite’s Vow Fulfilled

The Old Testament lesson gives us a figure: the Nazarite, who vowed himself wholly to God, avoiding wine, touching not the dead, letting his hair grow as a sign of consecration.

But when his vow ended, his hair was cut and cast into the fire of sacrifice. Even the symbol of consecration had to be consumed in God’s flame.

So too our vows, our devotions, our very Church life. We cherish our Anglican liturgies, our heritage of collects and hymns, our beautiful order. But even these are not ends in themselves. They are offerings to be burned in the love of Christ, who alone consecrates wholly.

Hooker taught us: “The end of all our liturgy is the union of man with God, and this by Christ’s own sacrifice.”

The Nazarite was a shadow; Christ is the substance. The vow is consumed; only union with God remains.

The Sermon of Creation

And now, having spoken of the false master and the true, the Lord sends us to the school of the fields.

“Behold the fowls of the air… Consider the lilies of the field.”

St. Basil, in his Hexaemeron, declared: “The meadows preach God to us.” And St. Ephrem sang that “the flowers are prophets, whose fragrance proclaims the mysteries of Paradise.”

George Herbert, too, heard their sermon in his own life:

“And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing.”

Here is the parable of resurrection, written in petals and buds.

And Milton observed with weary realism: “The anxious cares sit on the brow of kings.” But lilies wear no crowns, sparrows hold no purse, and yet they shame the anxiety of emperors.

If God so clothes the grass of the field, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

The Daily Bread of Trust

“Take no thought for the morrow.”

Our Lord recalls to mind the manna in the wilderness—given day by day, spoiling if hoarded. God was teaching Israel that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

Jeremy Taylor, that sweet Bishop, wrote: “God is first, and God is last; and if God be not first in our thoughts, He will not be last in our salvation.”

The Nonjuror bishops, stripped of their wealth, lived this teaching. Bishop Thomas Deacon prayed that we might never prefer the bread that perishes to the Bread of Life.

And Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, whose holy memory we honor, taught us to pray for “our daily bread, our supersubstantial bread, our bread of the morrow, Christ Himself.”

This is the pledge given at the altar. The Eucharist is not only a remembrance—it is the tomorrow’s bread brought into today, a sacrament of trust that God has already provided for tomorrow.

The Kingdom First

Here is the crux: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness.”

Not seek it second, not alongside the world, not in compromise. Seek it first. If it is not first, it is nothing.

T. S. Eliot caught this truth in his great meditation:

“Seek the point of intersection of the timeless

With time,

And the occupation for the saint

Is to apprehend the point of intersection.”

That point is the Cross, where eternity broke into time, and time was lifted into eternity.

The Peace of God

And so the blessing of Aaron becomes the benediction of Christ: “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee; the Lord make His face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee; the Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”

Peace, not anxiety. Bread, not hunger. Resurrection, not death.

Milton was right: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” But Christ has come to plant His heaven within our restless minds, to turn our worry into worship, our toil into trust, our tomorrow into eternity.

Therefore, beloved, let us choose one Master. Let us glory in one Cross. Let us seek one Kingdom. Let us learn from sparrows and lilies to trust wholly in the providence of our Father.

COLLECT

Let us pray...

O Lord, who hast taught us by the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field to trust in Thy fatherly care: Grant us grace, we humbly beseech Thee, to seek first Thy kingdom and Thy righteousness, that, freed from the service of Mammon, we may rejoice in the liberty of Thy children, and in every trial find our rest in Thy providence; through Jesus Christ Thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.