by CCW | 17 May 2009 13:53
The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon for The Fifth Sunday After Easter/Rogation Sunday[1].
We are a practical people, or, at least, so we like to think. And yet, it is about the practical that we seem to have the greatest problems and the greatest worries. Ours is a fearful and uncertain world, a fearful and uncertain world about practical things such as the economy and the environment. Whether anything can or cannot be done about them is our fear and worry.
Behind our practical preoccupations with jobs and the economy, work and the environment, lie a host of assumptions about ourselves and our relation to the world. Some of those assumptions need to be challenged, corrected and overcome. “In the world,” Jesus says, “ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
Such a statement seems to imply that the world is the enemy. Yet, what is meant here is our attachment to the world seen as standing over and against God; preferring our material comforts and concerns, our immediate practical interests, as it were, to the spiritual and intellectual principles that properly define and dignify our lives. For here is the paradox. There are no practical solutions to theoretical problems and our problems, in a way, are wholly theoretical, by which I mean that they have to do with the assumptions that underlie our practical preoccupations; in short, our attitudes and approaches to our world and day. Our neglect of things spiritual and intellectual results in our fearful paralysis about things practical.
On matters of the environment, we confront the problem of seeing the world as merely dead stuff, as matter that is simply there for human manipulation and exploitation, (a legacy, albeit with qualifications, of the enlightenment and post-enlightenment world). At the same time, we confront the fatalistic view that our humanity can do nothing except destroy the natural world. In this view, it is all over. The planet is doomed and we have destroyed it. It is not “Good Night, Moon”; it is “Good-by, Earth”. “It’s the end of the world as we know it and we feel fine,” as the band Great Big Sea, puts it, only we don’t feel fine! Interestingly, it is not religious extremists who are standing on the street corners preaching the end of the world; it is the extreme environmentalists. If there is any hope at all, in their view, it lies in getting rid of humans. The perspective is profoundly anti-human. And hopeless.
Both positions share a common logic. Both assume the power of technocratic reason either to exploit endlessly, or to destroy everything eventually. Both positions assume a certain view of reason, namely, reason as an instrument of power, and each have a certain view of the natural world; for the one, it is just there for us, for human use; for the other, man is inherently destructive of the world.
At issue is our relation to the world. And that is exactly what Jesus is talking about in the Gospel. And that is what James is speaking about in his Epistle. “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only,” James argues, “deceiving yourself,” pointing out that when we are “hearers only,” and fail to act out of what we have heard, then we have forgotten who we are. What a wonderful insight! Our forgetfulness of ourselves has to do with our failure to act upon what we hear. Hear what? What we hear, of course, in the Word of God, proclaimed and celebrated in the ordered life of the Church.
Easter is the season of the Resurrection. It culminates in the Ascension of Christ on the fortieth day of Easter. Such is the chronological ordering that reflects a doctrinal understanding. And it is an important doctrinal understanding. “If ye be risen with Christ, seek those things that are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God,” we heard on Easter day. It already points us to the Ascension and the Session of Christ. These are the powerful images of some pretty powerful teaching. But we come to the Ascension of Christ as the completion of the Easter teaching of the Resurrection only by way of Rogation Sunday, and the days of Rogation. What is this all about?
It is all about the redemption of the world and the redemption of our humanity. It is all about the vocation of creation and the vocation of our humanity. “O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands,” as Psalm 100, the Jubilate Deo, puts it, before signaling as well our human vocation, “com[ing] before his presence with a song” and going “into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise.” Why? Because “it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” The world is God’s world and we are God’s people. There is a purpose to the world and for our humanity that is greater than the hubris of our technocratic domination and destruction of the world. Creation exists for God. And that is the great and important message and word that belongs to our Christian witness. “Man is the world’s high priest,” the poet George Herbert puts it, reminding us that “Of all the creatures both in sea and land/ Onely to man hast thou made known thy ways/ And put the penne alone into his hand/ And made him Secretarie of thy praise.”
That’s a powerful idea. The world exists for the praise of God and we are to be the Secretaries of that praise! It is our vocation to articulate creation’s praise of the creator; in short, to offer “the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.”
In our text, the word ‘overcome’ means ‘having conquered’ or ‘prevailed’, ‘having gained victory’ over the world. It has to do with Christ’s victory over our destructive and perverse attachments to the world, to our forgetting that it is God’s world and that our vocation is to “come before his presence with a song,” the song of all creation in the praise of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier of the whole world, the God who in Jesus reveals himself in the intimacy of the Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
Rogation Sunday recalls us to prayer and praise in the world where we find ourselves, not in some fictional place, not in some cyberspace fantasy of virtual reality, but exactly where we are and precisely in the activities of our daily lives. Rogation simply means asking; prayer in its most basic sense is asking God for what we need. Of course, that can only be “according to thy Word,” and as “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Such qualifiers are not a cop-out. They signal, actually, the humility of wisdom that counters the hubris of presumption.
Rogation Sunday recalls us to the land as God’s land, to the world as God’s world. There is a whole theology of the land in the Scriptures that has its fullest expression in Eastertide, especially in the movement from Rogation to the Ascension of Christ. We are being reminded of our vocation, the vocation of the whole of creation through the vocation of our humanity.
I cannot contemplate Rogationtide without thinking of a poet whom I regard as the great poet of the Rogation, Thomas Traherne. He offers, I think, the perfect antidote to the problems of our incomplete relation to the natural world and to our self-forgetting. He bids us enjoy the world which is a far cry from exploiting the world and a far cry from destroying the world. Yet, “you never enjoy the world aright,” he says, “till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars … till you can sing and rejoice in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in scepters … till you delight in God for being good to all.” In short, “you never enjoy the world aright,” he is saying, until you enjoy it in God.
In so many ways, this is the radical meaning of our liturgy, too. In the midst of our practical fears and worries, anxieties and uncertainties, trials and tribulations, here is the salutary teaching which impels our practical doings; it lies in our “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.” It is captured, too, in the Collect for today, “that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same”; that is to say, thinking and doing! That viewpoint is meant to carry over into our practical lives in the qualities of thoughtfulness, service and ethical responsibilities. In locating the things of our practical lives in something more reflective and emphatically prayerful, we discover both our freedom and our responsibility. We recall our vocation and find ourselves in the presence of the Trinity; and all through the Son who challenges us to pray aright, indeed, to prevail in prayer, reminding us that:
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Easter V, Rogation Sunday
May 17th, 2009
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/05/17/sermon-for-rogation-sunday/
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