MERCIFULLY HEAR US
Homily for the Third Sunday after Trinity
The Rev. Michael Vinson+ Rector
The Collect. O Lord, we beseech thee mercifully to hear us; and grant that we, to whom thou hast given an hearty desire to pray, may, by thy mighty aid, be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
In Cormac McCarthy's arresting novel The Road, a father stands over a burned and disemboweled world, shakes his fist at an ash-choked sky, and screams into the void: Are you there? Have you a heart? A soul of any kind? It is a scene of absolute, crushing desolation. The sky does not answer. The silence is absolute.
And if we are honest with ourselves — truly honest — that image exposes the oldest and darkest fear of the human soul. It is the terror of speaking into a universe that does not care. That does not hear. It is the dread of a prayer that strikes the ceiling and falls back to the floor.
That fear is not foreign to the saints. In Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence, a missionary priest stands over the twisted bodies of tortured believers and cries out into the night, only to be swallowed by what he calls “the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish, God remains with folded arms, silent.” He is not a priest who has lost his theology. He is a man undone by the silence between his theology and his experience.
Every one of us has stood in the same place. We may hide it here, in the shelter of these sanctuary walls, behind the decorous cadences of the prayer book. But we have all known that gut-wrenching silence that follows our deepest cries — the prayer offered in a hospital corridor, in the small hours of the night, in the wreckage of something we could not hold together. We have all, at some moment, said with the psalmist: Is his mercy clean gone for ever? (Ps 77:8)
And so we come this morning to the Collect given for this third Sunday After Trinity, and we do not merely recite it. We mean it. O Lord, we beseech thee mercifully to hear us. We are not making a good-mannered request. No. We are begging God not to leave us in the dark silence.
But here is what today’s readings press us to face: the problem is almost never God's ears. The Trinitarian God hears. The question our lessons force us to ask is this — what posture are we to bring when we approach His throne in prayer? What garments adorn the soul when it comes to speak to our heavenly Father?
St. Peter, in our Epistle, answers this soberly and honestly: Be clothed with humility: for God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.
Notice that word — resisteth. This is not a description of God's reluctance or distraction. It is a description of His active posture toward the proud heart. He turns His face. He closes His ears. The man who comes to God trumpeting his own righteousness, his own sufficiency, his own arrangements — that man is talking to himself. Heaven does not hear him because he has not actually left himself. He has only dressed his self-interest in religious language and offered it upward.
To be clothed with humility, Peter tells us, is to do something specific. The apostle says to Cast all your care upon him; for he careth for you. This is not resignation or self-defeat. It is the most demanding act in the Christian spiritual life — to release the white-knuckled grip on our own outcomes, to surrender the self-management of our fears to God, to admit that we are not, in fact, holding this difficult world together. The humble man prays differently than the proud man. The humble petitioner comes empty. And an empty vessel can be filled.
But the grace of humility, once it strips us bare of self-will, immediately confronts us with something we would rather not see. When pride falls away, we are left standing in our actual condition before God. And that condition requires not just a change of posture — it requires a change of direction.
Our Lord knew exactly what He was doing when He told the stories in today's Gospel. The Pharisees and scribes were murmuring — murmuring — because Jesus received sinners and ate with them. They had come to God with their credentials in hand, their moral ledgers balanced, their tithes of mint and cumin carefully counted. And Jesus responded by telling them stories about a lost sheep and a lost coin.
I want you to notice what triggers the eruption of joy in both parables. It is not the sheep's cleverness, not the coin's intrinsic worth. It is repentance—turning from sin unto God— that brings the rescue and the return. Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance (Lk 15:6-7).
Now I want to stay with something that is genuinely difficult here, because it would be the greatest disservice to preach around it. St. John, in the ninth chapter of his Gospel, records these words spoken by the pharisees interrogating a man about Jesus who miraculously healed his blindness: We know that God does not listen to sinners. On the face of it, this is a terrifying truth. God does not hear the man or woman who has settled into persistent sin, accommodated it, made peace with it, folded it quietly into the corners of their life while continuing to present themselves at the altar of God.
That is a hard word. My frieds, it is meant to be a hard word. But look at what the Jesus does with it in todays Gospel. The very same God who does not hear the unrepentant sinner does hear — abundantly, joyfully, immediately hears — the repenting one. Heaven does not merely tolerate the tax collector who beats his breast. Heaven rejoices over him. The angels erupt. The woman calls her neighbors. The shepherd hoists the sheep across his shoulders and comes home singing.
And so the question that hangs over every prayer we ever offer is not a question about God's power or His location. It is a question of our direction. Are we walking toward Him or away from Him? Are we, in honesty and in penitence, returning to Him? Because if we are — even feebly, even haltingly, or even half-convinced — then heaven is already turning toward us. Our confession of sin does not merely satisfy Divine justice. It shatters the silence. It opens the ears of God.
But a deeper fear persists. Even if God hears today, will He still be there tomorrow? The ancient world was full of gods who heard and then forgot, who promised and then turned away. Homer's Achilles prayed with desperate urgency for the protection of his friend Patroclus, and Zeus — with the casual cruelty of Olympus — granted him half the prayer and withheld the other half out of mere indifference. The gods of the pagans were merely larger versions of ourselves: powerful and arbitrary, moved by favoritism, bribable with sacrifice, fundamentally untrustworthy.
But Psalmist turns the tables on all of that. The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him; yea, all such as call upon him faithfully (Ps 145:18). The Lord is nigh. He is near. Not waiting to be summoned from some remote divine precinct. Not calculating His proximity to his children based on the quality of their offering. He is near. But the Psalm is precise about the condition: we must call upon Him faithfully. That word in the Hebrew carries the weight of truth, sincerity, wholeness. In otherwords, we must pray honestly. It is the opposite of the divided heart, the prayer that is half-addressed to God and half-addressed to our own agenda. To call upon Him honestly is to mean it — to come without performance, without pretense, without the careful management of what we are willing to let God see. St. Augustine puts it this way, God must be our first love and this should find honest expression in our prayers.
And then the Psalm opens something deeper. He will fulfil the desire of them that fear him; he also will hear their cry, and will help them. He hears the cry of those who fear Him. Now do not let that word slide past you. The fear of God in Scripture is not the craven terror of a man before a tyrant. It is the reverence of a creature before its Creator, the honor and obedience of a child before a father whose love is also utterly holy. To fear God is to take Him seriously — to order your life around who He actually is rather than who you would prefer Him to be.
And the Psalm completes the thought in verse twenty: The Lord preserveth all them that love him. Fear and love, held together. This is not a contradiction. It is the grammar of covenant union. To fear God is to love Him — and to love Him is to obey Him. The one who fears God, who honors and obeys Him, is precisely the one who loves Him. And the one who loves Him is the one God hears.
Which brings us to the deepest thing I want to say this morning. Because if God hears those who love Him, and to love Him is to obey Him, then there is a sequence here that we cannot reverse. We cannot demand that God hear us while we are refusing to hear Him. Before we ask God to listen to us, we must first listen to God.
Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ said: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. And thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. This is not one commandment among many. This is the summary of the whole Law, the total shape of the life God calls us to. And when our lives are ordered around it — when our neighbors are not obstacles to our comfort but bearers of the divine image unto whom we are sent — then our prayers cease to be private petitions and become the natural breath of a life aligned with God's will. Beloved, hear St. John, who says, If we ask according to his will he hears us (1 Jn 5:14).
The hearty desire the Collect speaks of is not manufactured by some spiritual technique. We cannont ‘work it up’. It rises — it rises naturally, inevitably — from a grace filled life turned toward God and turned toward neighbor. The one who loves God and loves his neighbor does not struggle to pray. He cannot stop praying. The desire is already there, already kindled by love, because his life is already moving towards God. He is already found.
I want to return one last time to those two men crying in the dark — McCarthy’s father and Endō’s priest. Look at them again, not with despair but with hope. In their fury, in their grief, in what looks like the complete collapse of faith — they are still looking up. They are still speaking. They cannot stop speaking. The very existence of that cry in the night, that are you there? hurled into the void, is itself the proof that the flame has not gone out.
Beloved, the silence of God is never the absence of God. Let me say that again, because some of you need to hear it this morning: the silence of God is never the absence of God. St. Peter does not pretend that silence is impossible. He says we may have to suffer a while. There is a season — a real season, one that can feel interminable — in which heaven seems closed and void. Peter does not explain it away. The good bishop names this spiritual reality. And then he names what follows it: the God of all grace shall himself perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you. Perfect. Stablish. Strengthen. Settle. Four words like four ironclad promises. Friends, heavens silence is not the verdict. It is the crucible.
And so we come back to where we began — back to the Collect, back to the prayer that is our text this morning. Listen to it now with everything we have said in your ears:
“O Lord, we beseech thee mercifully to hear us; and grant that we, to whom thou hast given an hearty desire to pray, may, by thy mighty aid, be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Do you hear it now? We are not asking God for something He has not already promised. We are not begging a reluctant deity. We are praying back to Him His own word, His own covenant, His own character. We come in humility, stripped of pride. We come in penitence, turned toward Him. We come with sincere and faithful hearts, hiding nothing. We come as those who fear Him, who love Him, who have heard His commandment and are trying — by his merciful grace — to love our neighbor as ourselves. Our spouses. Our children. Our pastors, friends, and enemies.
And to that prayer — offered in that posture — heaven is not silent. Heaven is near. The Lord is nigh. He will fulfil the desire of them that fear Him. He will hear their cry, and He will help them.
Go then into the dangers and adversities of this week with that promise in your hearts. Not because you have done anything to merit it. But because He has given it. And what God gives, He does not take back. Amen.
