Sermon for Quinquagesima by Kate Fleming

Delivered by Kate Fleming in the King’s Chapel, March 2, 2025

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“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.”

In the name of the Father and of the The Son and of The Holy Ghost.

This is a world of reason. There are causes and effects. We eat the apple and we fall from Grace. Tragedy strikes, we fail. We live short lives and from the moment we are born we begin to die. Later this week we will kneel at the altar and be told that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. The hope of palm Sunday will be ash on our brows.

So what of Charity? According to the collect for this Quinquagesima Sunday: without charity, whosoever liveth is counted dead. Paul writes to the Corinthians that Charity causes prophecies to fail and tongues to cease. I will hazard a guess that for most of us charity evokes images of donation, of a giving of something to someone in need. Yet reading this epistle we are told that charity is the difference between life and death. A far cry from what we may have pictured. Like so many other aspects of our lives, we see a reflection of the life of the triune God here below, “For now we see in a glass darkly.” In its essence Charity is this: In a moment of need something is given, not because it is requisite, but for some other reason.

This is not dissimilar to creation. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. The physicists describe it well when they talk of a big bang. An explosion of light and heat and energy where there was none before. A generative movement across the face of reality. These are the first words. The first act is Charity. A giving where there was nothing. A giving carefully unfolded into creation as we know it.

On the retreat, as many of you know, we had a vigil. In my own mind this would be a time to bear witness to the pain of the world. To watch with Christ for just a moment. To be given a job, however small. So in the last hour of that Friday I knelt before about twenty icons in that freezing kitchen. Thinking that I could help, that I could do something, or make a difference. Only to find twenty saints and Jesus on a cross staring back at me. And I felt ridiculous. Mother Mary and St. Olga and St. Monica and St. Michael and all the company of heaven, and above all, Christ were looking softly and weeping for the world. There was no question. They lured me there by thinking I could be of some use, then they watched me instead. I bore nothing that night and I did not work off any of my massive debt to God. Fr. Ingalls has described this experience to me before in this Icon of the Hospitality of Abraham. An Icon that makes you wonder who is really granting hospitality. I have no doubt that kneeling on the floor in the Summer kitchen I was the one who was being watched, I was fully dependent on Christ, there was nothing I could do for the world, except to accept the love which was being offered.

Being dependent seems wrong to our modern sensibilities. We let ourselves believe that true adulthood, true strength and achievement comes from a lack of dependance. If we hold our peace as the blind man in the gospel reading is told to do, we will overcome all the troubles of this life. We think those who struggle are simply failing to do what we have managed to do. I am certainly guilty of this. When I read that the blind man continued to cry out to Christ I was angry. Why does he get healed and saved for crying out in pain from the side of the road while the rest of us have to pull ourselves out, how dare he distract the Messiah from his quest to save the world? Well this man knows something which I have failed to learn over and over again. There is no saving ourselves in this fallen world. There is no paying off our debts. To believe this is true is to believe that those who suffer, who hunger and thirst and that those who die are not the beloved of God. That they did not do enough, that they failed where we have succeeded. The blind man knows that this is not true. He knows how arbitrary and terrifying the suffering of this world can be, he knows that nothing of his own power will save him. He asks what the multitude passing him by means and is told Jesus of Nazareth is come and he cries and cries “Thou Son of David, have mercy on me.” Because this is his messiah who has come with the antidote to the death of this world. The second person of the trinity stands before him wielding charity. '

Charity, that force which destroys death and grants life, tells its story on the cross, in the descent to hell and in the resurrection. Christ takes on our life, then he gives us something where there was nothing before not because it is owed, but precisely because it is not owed. We are invited to share in a human life that is not bonded to sin, that does not have the chains of death wrapped around it from birth, tightening in life. And we burden that perfect life of Christ with our sin and death, and instead of running away from us this life takes on every burden of our lives and chooses to die. A very famous lion explains that “when a willing victim who has committed no treachery [is] killed in a traitor’s stead [...] Death itself [...] starts working backwards.” I used to think that being a burden was the easiest way to lose love. Well, Christ teaches all of us that being a burden is the way we must be loved. This is what we must learn in lent. All of our fasting and asceticism, all of our failure and penitence, all of it is meant to show us that we are not unlike the blind man calling out from the side of the road. We are not able to pay back a debt to God. All we can do is call out “Son of David, Have Mercy on Me.” And we can know that he who died on the cross will chase us down to hell if are willing to accept his charity, the very charity out of which he created the universe.

Paul tells the Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Let us put away the childish idea that we are able to bear our burdens alone and learn to be adults and members of the body of Christ to bear our burdens together.

This is a world of reason. And the fronds of last palm sunday will soon be ash upon our brows. But Charity defies reason and conquers it. Charity enters death and breaks its jaws. As we enter lent let us remember that there is nothing we can do to earn Christ’s love. And to the great dismay of our egos, there is nothing we can do to stop him from loving us.

Amen.