Sermon - Rev Jack Arnold
Church of the Faithful Centurion -
Descanso, California
Today’s sermon brought
the Collect, Epistle and Gospel together and is partly contained in the
forewords above.
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Consider these words from the
Collect:
… that all our doings without
charity are nothing worth; Send thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that
most excellent gift of charity …
In the Collect, we acknowledge to
God that if we have not charity, nothing we do is worth anything; we then ask
Him to send the Holy Ghost into our hearts with the precious gift of
charity. Webster tells us that
Charity is love; universal benevolence; good will; the word which properly
denotes love. What it really means is Love
in Action! Like many areas of our Christian development, we will never
fully get there. But we shall make progress so long as we do not give up! As
Winston Churchhill once said “Never, never, never, never EVER GIVE UP”. So
should we never give up in our Christian development. We may stumble and fall
at times, but if we get up and keep going and return to our Lord, then all will
be well in time.[1]
Properly understood charity is the Love of God, that perfect love, to which man
should aspire. Charity is not giving oodles of money away to an organization,
hoping to make yourself look better, like many modern “philanthropists.”
Charity is the purest form of love there is, with no self-seeking motivations,
but just the goodness of God in it, and this is the love that God gives to us
to give to others. It is to help people with the love in your heart that Christ
and God has given us, to enable us to act on His behalf here on this Earth.
Love is not selfish or wasteful, but kind and abundant. We are to be agents of
good change, not that of bad, and with Charity, we will act with love towards
one another. If we do not have
love in our hearts towards one another, how can we expect to be able to have
any positive change on the world around us?
Paul tells us no matter our
gifts, talents and so called accomplishments, without the Love of God, we are
nothing and have done nothing. He is the reason that we are here in this life
and He is the one we must act for.
It must be clear to us that our understanding here on earth is limited,
we will never here see the fullness of God’s plan, yet the part most clear is
the love we are to have one for another, to do unto others as we would have
them do unto us, for no reason other than we know that is right so to do. It does not matter to us we will never
see the fullness of His plans, each of us are a small piece of a much bigger
plan. And all of us small pieces work together to fulfill the bigger plan. We
only need to find our part in the plan and act upon that, again with Charity in
our hearts. Charity is vital to our Christian life. We need to have it within
us to perform good works for Our Lord.
For if we do not have true love or Charity within our hearts, we cannot
act for God. When Paul talks about God’s great plans, he uses the phraseology
“through a glass, darkly”, which is very interesting inasmuch as CS Lewis uses
a variation to describe earth as compared to heaven. He calls the earth The Shadowlands and says in heaven all is
clear and bright, not dark and muddled as here on earth. So, here our understanding is limited,
it will not always be so. That will be fulfilled when we pass the Pearly Gates
into heaven, and in order to do that, we have to have faith, and have good
works acted upon with charity. If one of these ingredients are missing, we are
not acting according to what He wants for us. So, we have to believe with all
our heart in God and Christ, and act upon that belief with great Charity.
As they were coming in to
Jericho, Jesus told the disciples of what was to come, yet they could not grasp
their leader would submit to such treatment on their behalf. He was the Conqueror; in a sense they
were right, He came to conquer death for us, not the Roman Empire. As they went along, they encountered
the blind man who was, like many of us are, blind. His blindness was of the eye, not the heart, he knew the
power of God, and of love. The blind man who wanted his sight and knew Jesus
had The Power. He cried unto the
Lord and was rebuffed by His People.
Did he give up? No, he
cried the more. As we should not
let others discourage us from following the Lord, indeed we should increase our
prayers and serving fervently. When Jesus heard him, he turned and asked what
the man wanted. MY SIGHT! No generalizations, no beating about. The blind man asked of Him what he
truly wanted. Ask and it shall be given unto you. He lacked sight, not vision. Nor, it might be added did he lack faith. We should ask God
to have to sight and hearing that we might see, hear and act upon the Word. To
some, the faith he had might seem a blind faith, but it was one that he acted
on and gained what he lacked. Will
we have the faith to act?
True love is Faith, Hope, Charity[2].
Be of God - Live of God - Act of God
What is Quinquagesima?
Quinquagesima, or, in full, Quinquagesima Sunday, is
the name for the Sunday next before Ash Wednesday in the Catholic (Universal or Whole)
Church Calendar.
The name Quinquagesima originates from Latin
quinquagesimus (fiftieth), referring to the fifty days before Easter Sunday
using inclusive counting, which counts both Sundays (normal counting would
count only one of these).
Since the forty days of the Lenten fast included only
weekdays, the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, succeeds Quinquagesima Sunday
by only three days. The earliest Quinquagesima Sunday can occur is February 1
and the latest is March 7. The Roman Church no longer observes much of the
Christian Year, including Quinquagesima and the two immediately before it —
Sexagesima and Septuagesima Sundays.
The contemporary service books of many claiming to be
Anglican provinces do not use the term but it remains in the Book of Common
Prayer.
The 17-day period beginning on Septuagesima Sunday
spanning Sexuagesima and Quinquagesima Sundays was intended to be observed as a
preparation for the season of Lent, which is itself a period of spiritual
preparation for Easter. In many countries, however, Septuagesima Sunday marks
the start of the carnival season, culminating on Shrove Tuesday, more commonly
known as Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday.
[1]
To quote Winston
Churchill, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never-in nothing, great
or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour
and good sense.” (29 October 1941)
[2]
The three Gloster
Gladiator fighters Faith, Hope and Charity defended Malta against the Italian Air Force during the
early part of the siege of Malta in World War II. Legend has it that all three persisted and of the three, Charity never failed.
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