THE HEAD OF THE CORNER

Sermon delivered on the 5^th October 2008, the 20^th Sunday after Trinity by Fr Nicholas J G Sykes at the Holy Eucharist at St. Alban's Church of England, George Town, Cayman Islands.

Scriptures: Isaiah 5: 1-7     Phil 3: 4b-14     S. Matthew 21: 33-46

Isaiah 5:3f Judge, I pray you, between Me and My vineyard. What more was there to do for My vineyard, that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?

Over the last week I have been observing some highly staked negotiations between various shades of view in the Cayman Islands and a very steady UK negotiator in the form of one Mr. Ian Hendry. Unsurprisingly one tough item on the agenda was the Bill of Rights, and it was very interesting, to say the least, to find Mr. Hendry saying that the concerns that the UK team were finding about it in the Cayman Islands were quite unique in comparison to anything he had ever found in the other Overseas Territories. It seems that elsewhere, people were of a similar mind to the majority here before March this year, when it was blithely assumed by most that having an enshrined bill of rights was on principle the right and good thing to do. Since then, many people here have been awakened to some of the pitfalls that other countries have experienced with their bill of rights, and to the great possibilities of unintended consequences arising here as well from enshrining it in a higher law, namely the constitution. The result of this concern is a valiant attempt to write a Bill of Rights, Freedoms and Responsibilities, binding the government to uphold what are termed vertical rights, and restricting the courts’ function on finding laws incompatible with the constitution to making declarations of incompatibility, which would then be passed to the Legislature for their attention. There are a number of areas in which such attempts are coming up against some of the outputs of the local Human Rights Committee, and we all need to be in earnest prayer, as the Prayer Book puts it, for a happy issue out of all our afflictions.

Although it is necessary to revise laws from time to time, we should not think that we can fix all the problems of society by legislative or constitutional revision. We who are of the Church ought to be especially aware of this, because as Christians we accept that there is a different dimension involved in forming a society than the merely legal. We should not forget that the people that Jesus criticised most, the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the chief priests, the "wild grapes" as He called them, were people that for the most part looked exclusively to law for the fixing of problems. These in Jesus’ day were the tenants that God had placed in charge of His vineyard. Under cover of the law they had in fact been self-interested, greedy, and without regard to their responsibilities to God or care for those that God had sent to them. As Christians we accept the reality of a different kind of universe from the universe of those that are bound by the rule exclusively of law, and I am fully confident that the Christian lawyers that are here will agree. It’s the grace of God that has the power to restore and sustain a society in the rule of law. Law, however, in itself cannot restore a society to the grace of God. A society that truly functions needs something more than the ability to play by the rules. It needs qualities such as unselfishness and care for the vulnerable, moral and ethical qualities that go beyond merely keeping out of trouble with the law, no matter how human rights-sensitive that law may be. We can receive such traits and gifts out of the bounty of God’s grace, and we see the fullness of that bounty in the Cross-bearing of Jesus. Those traits and gifts cannot be enforced by law, but they can be imparted by God’s grace.

People for instance can obey the letter of the law where driving a vehicle is concerned, but we can still exhibit a selfish unconcern for the comfort of other road users, and one could probably instance such examples of this every day. What can often be a common trait in drivers, criminals and legislators alike is the desire for a speedy solution. A driver cannot wait his turn in the lane; a criminal such as a drug-peddler must get rich more quickly than someone working in an honest job, and the legislator may feel under pressure to bring a halt to the problems by introducing hasty legislation or providing overly flexible and liberal constitutions. As Christians we can afford to recognise the place of patience and endurance and sustained prayer and effort in our approach to things. In his words to the Philippians forming our second lesson today, St. Paul said that for the sake of Christ he no longer saw his standing as an outstandingly upright, Hebrew-speaking Pharisaic law-fixer as advantageous. He wrote off the advantage that that had seemed to give him for the sake of Christ. Neither did he think of his Christian discipleship as a quick fix. Christ has made him his own, but He is working on him still. "Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus."

 

St. Paul's words challenge us to imitate his way of discipleship, challenge us to set the same incomparable value (as he puts it) on "the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord", so that any other gain we may have had is counted as loss for the sake of Christ. It is necessary for us to grow together in this sense of the greatness of the knowledge of Christ for us to be able to influence our community effectively in the way of Christ. St. Paul offers us here the sense of his own growing in grace, his own becoming like Christ in His death, his own pressing forward to attain the Resurrection from the dead. This is the way we need to be as well, not being satisfied with what we may think we have attained spiritually now, even by the grace of God, but pressing forward together to that which is much greater. As we do so, there is the possibility, indeed the only possibility there is, of our being able to pull the society significantly along with us, such is the power and attractiveness of the grace of God in Jesus Christ, through the witness of His children.

 

POWERFUL WITNESSES

God grant us His grace to conform to what He offers us, to receive the disciplines that it requires, and to be a powerful living witness to the truth, to the children of our time blinded and deafened by false gods of many sorts. It is not the tenants of the vineyard, after all, who became the headstone. It was the Stone which the builders rejected, but by whose Name we live, that became the head of the corner.