Thoughts on The Third Sunday after Trinity (2026)
Evening Prayer – Luke 14.12-24
Ambrosius Bosschaert, Bouquet of Flowers on a Ledge, 1619
What is it
with Jesus and parties? He talked a lot about feasts and banquets and our own
central Christian act of worship is also a type of feast, or banquet.
Holy
Communion is both a sacrifice and a feast. It looks back to the one sacrifice
of Jesus on Calvary 2000 or so years ago and makes it present for us in the
here and now, and it looks forward to the eternal banquet in heaven and gives
us a pledge, or a foretaste of it, in the here and now.
And this
evening we are here because the good folk of St Mary’s in Thornford have laid
on another kind of banquet for us: a feast for the eyes (and the nose in some
cases).
If Holy
Communion takes us back to a sacrifice and forward to a heavenly feast, a
flower festival (a flower feast if you like) takes us back to the Garden of
Eden, and forward to the New Earth promised in the Book of Revelation.
Here’s what
it says: Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first
heaven and the first earth had passed away… (Revelation 21:1). John is
actually referencing a verse from Isaiah here which is almost identical: “See,
I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be
remembered, nor will they come to mind. (Isaiah 65:17)
Perhaps I am
speaking for myself, but we tend as Christians to focus on the New Heaven when
we hear the phrase ‘the New Heaven and the New Earth’ don’t we? We often forget
that the promise of redemption and restoration belongs not just to us humans,
but to the whole of creation.
St Paul
says, in a mysterious and poetic passage, that the whole creation has been
longing and groaning for the final redemption, as though it is labouring with
the pains of childbirth. Creation eagerly awaits the restoration where it will
be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory
of the children of God. (Romans 8:19-23).
The Bishop
and theologian NT Wright put it like this: Jesus's resurrection is the
beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven
but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the
Lord's Prayer is about (in
I once
worked with a wonderful Jamaican lady when I was teaching in London. She was
called Ruth and she was a Seventh Day Adventist. We used to get into
theological conversations over lunch and one day she explained to me that
Seventh Day Adventists don’t believe that heaven is the culmination of the
spiritual life. Heaven is a kind of intermediate state that looks forward to
the restoration of the earth into a New Edenic paradise.
She
explained it to me so simply that I have never forgotten it. She said, “We like
it here. It’s beautiful. This is our home and one day God will give it back to
us as it was always meant to be.”
You know our
story begins and ends with a garden, and there are gardens along the way too.
We start in the
garden of Eden from which we were expelled. In Eden everything is in perfect
harmony. It’s a primordial paradise and what better way to symbolise that than
by using the image of a perfect garden?
Then God
promises a way back to a garden of sorts,
when he leads the Israelites to a land flowing with milk and honey, where there
are figs and pomegranates everywhere and the grapes are too heavy to carry.
There’s
another Garden in our story in Gethsemane, where Jesus, filled with anxiety at
the prospect of his suffering, sweats blood for us in his obedience to the
father. It’s his obedience that undoes the disobedience of Adam in the first
garden.
There’s
something about gardening and gardens and trees and plants and flowers isn’t
there?
To make a
piece of untamed land into a garden and grow beautiful flowers in it, like the
ones in this Church today, is somehow emblematic of our spiritual life.
Jesus
compared spiritual growth to gardening on more than one occasion (think of the
parables of the Sower and of the Mustard Seed for just 2 examples) and our
Christian life is often about preparing the soil of our souls to receive the
Good News of God’s love; of digging up the weeds of unbelief and cynicism; of
shifting the rocks of stubbornness and long-held attitudes and convictions; of
watering the dry, parched ground of our hearts with the Living Water of the
Holy Spirit.
And all this
so that our souls and our lives (our own metaphorical gardens) can be brought
back into harmony and flower.
And what of
flowers? Well traditionally in our Christian tradition they have symbolised the
finest of the virtues.
Flowers
represent the adornments of a well-formed Christian character and I suggest
that they symbolise those unique Christian virtues listed in Jesus’ Sermon on
the Mount.
In the
Beatitudes he mentions ‘poverty of spirit’, which is a kind of humility that
knows that ultimately nothing is really ours, it’s all been given to us by God.
He said ‘blessed
are those who mourn’, and that’s something about having a heart big enough to
enter into the world’s sorrow, to share in it and pray for it.
He also
named meekness, and that’s something to do with treading lightly through life,
with restraint; not throwing your weight around in pursuit of the things you
think you want.
Then he said
that ‘those who hunger and thirst for righteousness would be filled’, and that
is first and foremost about thirsting for our own healing and redemption,
because we can’t hope to fix an unjust world if we are still corrupt and broken
ourselves.
And then
there’s ‘blessed are the merciful’, because if they have hungered and thirsted
for righteousness they will know that they have needed God’s mercy themselves,
so they should extend that mercy to others.
Next comes a
blessing on ‘the pure in heart’, with a promise that they will see God. They
have done the inner work and come to terms with their own corruption and
brokenness and cultivated the virtue of humility and that wipes the inner-eye
(the nous) clean so that God can be glimpsed in everything.
‘The
peacemakers’ come next, and they are called the children of God because God the
Son has made peace with God for us, and broken down the barriers between us. So
those who follow in his footsteps and sow peace also get to be called sons and
daughters of God.
And finally
there are those who have loved God and their fellows to the extent that they
have been willing to suffer for their faith. Jesus says Blessed are those who are persecuted
because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
So we might
say that when we get to that point; when we love God and our neighbour with our
whole being, to the extent that we are willing and able to lay down everything
for love; then we have reached the point at which the garden of our soul is in
full flower.
To tend a
garden and produce flowers is to engage in a kind of prayer; it is to say to
God, again and again, “Restore me, Lord! Take me back to Eden. Make me what I
was always supposed to be before things went wrong!”
Cultivate in
me the virtues of your Son, that I may glorify you as he did and inherit the
kingdom he has won for us.
Thank you to
those of you who worked hard to put on this beautiful show. You have blessed
us. You have given us a little taste of heaven on earth and you have done it by
giving back to us the gifts of God, which you have cultivated and cared for and
presented in this beautiful setting.
It reminds
me of one of my favourite prayers in the service of Holy Communion; when the
bread and wine are offered at the altar, the celebrant often says: "All
things come from you, and of your own do we give you".
Let us pray:
Come Holy Spirit…
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