Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
admin | 6 February 2011“Forbearing one another and forgiving one another”
Paul’s words speak to the quality of our life together in the body of Christ. He reminds us of the necessity of our mutual forebearance and forgiveness of one another. Not exactly himself the easiest person to get along with, Paul understands only too well how hard we can all be to get along with and how hard, too, we can be on ourselves. We are often our own worst enemies.
Today’s Epistle complements and illustrates the Gospel. Wheat and tares, meaning weeds, grow together in the field of the world. Wheat and weeds are there together, both the good and the bad. But who can be sure which is which? Which is the weed and which is the wheat? This is to recognize the limitations of our judgments. “Let them both grow together until harvest”, says the Sower. God is the gardener and God is the judge. Not you and not me. That is itself a great mercy.
This doesn’t simply mean the suspension of our judgment in the abdication of responsibilities. We have the moral obligation to try to discern right from wrong and, and, by God’s grace, to act accordingly. We are bidden to be God’s good wheat in a world of wheat and tares. But it does mean a check upon our judgmentalism. “Forbearing one another and forgiving one another” is the counter to our judgmentalism. Our judgmentalism is our presumption to know what we cannot and do not know about others and even about ourselves. Yet, in our judgmentalism, we would put ourselves in the place of God as judge. We would presume to have a total and absolute view when, in fact, our viewpoint is altogether restricted and limited. We see, at best, “through a glass darkly.” To know this is to be aware of the limits of our knowing. It is the beginning of wisdom. It frees us from the tyranny of ourselves.
We confront the limits of human judgment both with respect to ourselves and to one another. But is all this simply a cautionary tale? Are we being exhorted merely to a posture of skepticism? To a suspension of belief about the possibilities of knowing anything and, therefore, about doing anything? Quite the opposite. What we are presented with counters the cynical and false skepticism of our age which would deny any objective view about what is good and true while asserting as absolute its own relativism. And what we are presented with equally counters the religion of sentimentalism and self-righteousness which makes the Church such a parody of itself and of contemporary culture.
At the heart of Paul’s exhortation are these strong, strong words about forbearing and forgiving. They impart an active quality to the virtues of “mercy and compassion, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering,” virtues which belong to our identity in Christ as “elect”, as “holy and beloved.” These are important spiritual qualities that belong to what the Collect signals as “true religion”, which itself requires that we “lean only upon the hope of [God’s] heavenly grace”.
We are reminded of who we are in the sight of God. That is no occasion for self-righteousness but for the deepening of our lives in faith, “put[ting] on charity, let[ting] the peace of God rule in [y]our hearts, let[ting] the word of Christ dwell in [us] more richly.”
These are clearly not qualities that we have of ourselves. They are entirely dependent upon our being in Christ. That point is made so very clear, I think, by Paul and is further complemented by Matthew. Herein lies the necessity of the Church as a spiritual institution defined by the Gospel which she is given to proclaim. That these qualities may contribute to the betterment of our social and political lives is undoubtedly and importantly true but that is not their purpose. In a way, it is beside the point.
In his book, The Myth of Religious Violence, William Cavanagh astutely points out that the rise of the national states is the real cause of the escalation of violence in the modern world, an escalation which reaches its apogee of destructiveness in the totalitarian regimes of the last century – Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, the list goes on. The extent of the destruction is unprecedented in human history. Sadly, the horrific specters of the mass destruction of huge populations of the world are still with us.
No doubt the politicization of religion contributes to violence and destruction in our contemporary world. But this brings out the deeper question and the greater paradox. What are exactly are the social and political implications of the Gospel? Paradoxically, it is only when the Church is true to her own doctrine and discourse about Christian life, that she contributes to the world around her, not by being of the world but precisely by being in the world, living for and with Christ.
That is our task, the never-ending challenge. To have forgotten this is to have forsaken everything. Forbearance and forgiveness are rich and strong words that capture a spiritual and inward attitude. Forebearance does not mean just putting up with things, going with the flow, as it were, or conforming to the way things are. No. It is a strong word about being firm and committed to what matters while putting up with the follies, confusions and uncertainties that belong to every age and every culture; there is a quality of inwardness that signals a patient strength of mind and soul in the face of the endless agitations that swirl and dance around us so seductively and destructively.
The spiritual inwardness of forebearing one another is about withstanding within ourselves that tendency to make quick and hasty judgments about one another and about our world and day; as such it forecloses on the hope that truth and mercy will prevail and triumph. Our lack of forebearance actually betrays the possibilities of forgiving one another because we have forgotten God’s forgiveness of us. There, in the word forgiveness, we confront the grace that redeems and restores, the power of God in Jesus Christ that perfects and transcends all our worldly conditions.
The first word of the Crucified Christ communicates the tremendous spiritual power of what forebearance and forgiveness really mean. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. Forgiveness truly comes into play when we realize the limits of our knowing and our doing.
Sadly, we have forgotten these things and the way they are expressed so powerfully in our Anglican understanding. Doctrinal minimalism is about forebearance; the patterns of contrition, confession and satisfaction in our liturgy bring out the way in which the redemptive power of forgiveness is communicated and realized in us. But such things are there to be remembered and remembered through these outstanding principles of Christian understanding that can never, never be reduced to the political and the social and yet so completely transform and shape them; the principles of forebearance and forgiveness, perhaps, above all others. To attend to those things is to live from them.
“Forbearing one another and forgiving one another”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Epiphany V, 2011