Sermon, preached on the 23rd July 2023 – 7th Sunday after Trinity and the Feast of St Bridget of Sweden.
Readings: Genesis: 28:10-19; Psalm 139:1-11, Romans 8:12-25; S Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
No, for in gathering the weeds, you would uproot the wheat along with them. In Nomine +
She was one of the few Swedes who can be said to have founded a still thriving monastic order, to be mentioned in a public address by Pope St John Paul II, and she accused the Swedish King and Queen at the time to be guilty of “erotic deviation, extravagance and murderous plot”. (Let me just clarify that yours truly, despite being one of her compatriots, would never resort to such a drastic turn of phrase….)
I am talking, of course, of the Swedish saint and co-patroness of Europe St Bridget of Sweden who would have been commemorated today, had today not been a Sunday. Now, some of you might wonder how a 14th Century Swedish noblewoman relates to St Matthew’s writings we just heard. Bear with me, I will get there eventually.
First, a little bit more about Bridget – or Birgitta in Swedish.
Born in 1303 she was the daughter of once of the richest landowners in Sweden at the time, and married a nobleman at a young age. Throughout her marriage she was very active in various charitable works, focusing mainly on unmarried mothers and their children.
During her childhood Bridget frequently had visions, both of the Nativity of Christ and of His Passion and Death, and she prayed for a long time to know how many blows Christ suffered in His passion, and eventually she was rewarded when the Saviour appeared to her and told her the number 5480. It is said that he then devised a form of prayer which, if you say them daily for a full year, you will have prayed for each of His Wounds.
She was eventually made lady-in-waiting to the Swedish queen at the time (the one I referred to at the beginning of my sermon), and after her husband died, she founded the Order of the Most Holy Saviour, these days more commonly known as the Bridgettines (who today have one English house, in Birmingham to be precise, and whose superior general was one of the few personal friends of Pope St John Paul I).
In 1350 Bridget went out on a pilgrimage to Rome, both to seek authorisation for the establishment of her order, and to pursue her mission to elevate the moral tone of the age. In Rome she soon became much beloved by the poor but ruffled a few feathers in her zeal for moral reform and fight to end the Avignon papacy and making the Pope return to Rome.
All of this work, to try and improve the moral standards of the Swedish court (I’m told by reliable sources that at least some of the current occupants of the Royal Palace in Stockholm are of a much more sedate nature than their 14th century predecessors), to found a religious order and to make the Roman clergy live according to the rules of the Church were all things Bridget did driven by her visions of our Lord and Saviour, her absolute trust and confidence in His mercy and her willingness to live a more Christ-like life.
Much like in St Bridget’s time, using parables to do with farming was a good way for Our Lord himself to be understood by his audience. Initially, the rather feisty Bridget would most likely have referred to the Swedish monarchs as weed, being, from what we have heard from some of her pronouncements, a woman inclined to see the world somewhat in black and white.
Poor sinner that I am, however, I struggle to see the world as a monochrome, black and white, society, where we know perfectly well what is right and what is wrong. It is very easy to, to allude to another famous parable from earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, to keep seeing the mote in our neighbour’s eye but not the beam in our own OR – for that matter – that a matter isn’t clearly black or white.
It could be something as dramatic as Christian missionaries coming to non-Christian territories wanting to bring them the Good News of the Gospel, but while doing so suppressing – and sometimes oppressing – a thriving culture that had been there for ages and ages, OR something as simple as sending clothes to an earthquake zone abroad, wanting to send aid to the needy, but not realising that they are flooding an already fragile clothes industry with free clothes, thereby destroying peoples’ livelihood.
It is perhaps instinctive to do (like I’m sure St Bridget, with all her blessings, was prone to do) like the servants wanted to – gather the weeds and burn them. I would like to propose that that is not our role as Christians, rather we should take on the role of the householder and leave things be, not to uproot what is good amongst what is evil, resting in the faith that Our Lord will do the sorting at the time He sees fit.
I am not saying this in relation to anything here in this parish – but rather as a general rule for all of us as Christians and, indeed, something I struggle with myself far too much. It is far too easy to be overly moralistic (like my beloved compatriot) and think “Oh, he’s gay” , “oh, her child is born outside of wedlock” (just like yours truly) , “oh, he’s divorced” or “oh, she didn’t come to church last Sunday” and not leave to the Son of Man to judge at the end of the age.
Let me leave you with a little story:
A grown son took his mother to Christmas Eve worship. She was a teetotaler who did not approve of anyone drinking alcohol. As they sat down, the son noticed a disheveled man sitting in front of them whose head jerked back every few seconds. Initially the son presumed the man had a nervous tic—until he discerned the flask in the man’s hand! The son was horrified, worrying that his mother might also notice the man drinking and demand the ushers escort him out; but when she did notice, the mother whispered into her son’s ear, “That man is exactly where he needs to be tonight.”
And so let us all, together, continue making St Thomas the place where someone can come to be exactly where they need to be, today and tomorrow, and where there continues to be, to quote the hymn, “Love, vast as the ocean”.
Amen.
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