by CCW | 18 March 2009 09:00
The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon for the Feast of St. Patrick[1].
The Gospel (Matthew 4. 13-24, BCP., 315, Propers of a Missionary) says nothing about shillelaghs, shamrocks or even about snakes, let alone green beer! It does say something about places “upon the sea-coast”, about the preaching of Christ seen as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy of light coming to “the people which sat in darkness” and in the “shadow of death”, about repentance, about discipleship, and about healing and salvation; in short, about all the things that belong to the evangelium – the good news that is the meaning of the word, gospel.
And the lesson, too, (Acts 12.24-13.5) underscores the same theme. “The word of God grew and multiplied,” meaning what, exactly? A new gospel, new things added to the essential proclamation of the faith? This is, unfortunately, a feature of our contemporary confusion, a kind of arrogance and pride, really, which assumes that we know more and better than others before us about the nature of God and even about our humanity. Don’t we, though? Have there not been discoveries that challenge and overturn older ways of looking at things? Are we not always progressing?
The idea of progress is one of the enduring myths of our technocratic culture. There have been, of course, remarkable changes and improvements in many areas of human life, in medicine and in the comforts of everyday life. But all our technological improvements come with warning labels attached. It would be naïve to suppose that everything is moving in a constantly improving and upward direction. That is the fallacy of the ideology of progress. The reality is that there are gains as well as losses, losses of the understanding, especially about ourselves and God. All developments and improvements need to be seen within the more comprehensive understanding of the relation between God and our humanity that belongs to the proclamation of the Gospel and not as a rejection and a jettisoning of the basic and essential teachings of Christianity, the greatest and most critical of which is the doctrine of the Trinity.
No celebration of The Feast of St. Patrick can ignore the wonderful hymn attributed to him, the poem known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”(Hymn # 812). The hymn offers a wonderful collection of images dealing with the power and grace of God in relation to us through nature and scripture, through spirituality and theology, and even psychologically, we might say. Yet all these images are contained within the Trinitarian understanding that embraces and frames the entire hymn. It begins and ends with the invocation of the doctrine, the teaching about God as Trinity. The doctrine is at the heart of our devotion and worship of God.
I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One, and One in Three.
All of the contemporary confusions within the Anglican Communion – liturgical, political, and moral – have really to do with the forgetting of what is signified so profoundly in this poem and hymn. Everything comes down to the matter of Trinitarian orthodoxy, to the wonder of the revealed teaching about the nature of the God in whose image we are made. In the Christian understanding of things, that means the Trinity, God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
It is not the case that any three will do. Churches err greatly in allowing forms of address to God that compromise and betray the scriptural revelation of God by Jesus as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the God in whose name we are named at our baptisms, and no other. All of the other images about God’s relation to us are subordinate to these primary terms. They are not negotiable neither can they be dismissed sociologically and politically as human inventions reflecting the power structures of ancient cultures. That is to betray, in the most egregious manner possible, the intellectual integrity of the cultures that have gone before us and to which we are indebted. We betray the very insight that moves and compels them and that contributes to the being of the Church, her mission and her teaching. We betray the philosophical and theological understanding to which social and political concerns are, at best, only secondary.
In reducing everything to the politics of power, we either knowingly or unknowingly subscribe to a form of atheism – the atheism which assumes that God is nothing more than a construct of the human imagination, a metaphor, at best, for how we envision ourselves and the ordering of our lives socially and politically. It is all about power structures, on the one hand, and the inviolability of the sovereign individual, on the other hand, though how one can talk about the individual, especially about ourselves as persons, without talking about God is, even historically speaking, a great mistake. The term “person”, after all, is a term deeply rooted in the theology of the Trinity, rooted, that is to say, in the ways in which humans have endeavoured to find and even develop a language that honours the revealed mystery, a language that doesn’t reduce the mystery to the human understanding but which raises the human understanding into the mystery itself.
It is not for shillelaghs, shamrocks and snakes that we commemorate St. Patrick, but for bearing the light of Christ to Ireland in a time of darkness. May that light enlighten our darkness and strengthen our wills, binding unto ourselves “the strong name of the Trinity”.
Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Patrick, March 17th, ‘09
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/03/18/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-patrick/
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