by CCW | 17 August 2009 06:00
“Concerning spiritual gifts, … I would not have you ignorant,” St. Paul tells us in this morning’s epistle. But we are ignorant of spiritual gifts and know not the time of God’s visitation upon us. The consequence is suffering and destruction, enemies that surround us and seek our hurt, the harm of families and home for “they shall not leave one stone upon another.” Wow.
It is not a pretty picture. And Jesus weeps over Jerusalem because of our ignorance of spiritual matters that, in one way or another, have always to do with the quality of our being with God, with the degree of our awareness about the presence of God in human lives and in the life of the world. When we forget or ignore that, then we leave ourselves open to suffering and destruction and death, he is suggesting.
Sometimes this gospel story is taken as a prophecy about the Fall of Jerusalem in 70AD at the hands of Titus who, subsequently, became Emperor. Sometimes, too, it is taken as an indication that the Gospel, in this case, The Gospel According to St. Luke, was written after the Roman occupation and destruction of the Temple. Perhaps. But such speculations are entirely secondary to the spiritual intention of the passage, I think. It is, after all, a recurring theme in the Old Testament. Time and time again, Israel is defeated and destroyed politically but the prophets keep on calling attention to the spiritual conditions of Israel herself rather than just to point at enemies “out there.” The problems are profoundly within. The problems are fundamentally spiritual.
Jesus weeps and accuses us of our ignorance. Then he enters the Temple, “casting out them that sold therein and them that bought”, pointing out, in strong and graphic language, that the holy place has been misused. It is exists as “a house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.” What is the point?
That trials and tribulations, hardships and suffering, are not merely the result of external causes. This is a kind of biblical and theological view that calls us to look at ourselves and our own thoughts and actions rather than just see ourselves simply as the victims of the machinations and actions of others. And there is a deep wisdom in this, however much we can and do suffer because of the actions occasioned by the faults and failings, and mistakes of others. There are accidents, after all. There is malice, too, the ill-will and wickedness of others that seek our hurt and harm. But by looking at ourselves we recover a sense of freedom and responsibility about our own outlooks. As the modern poet R.S. Thomas puts it, “you who are not free to choose what you suffer can choose your response.”
We do not need to be defined just by what happens to us. That would be a kind of fatalistic determinism. Paul and Jesus in these lessons recall us to a deeper spiritual wisdom. At the heart of it all is the awareness of the presence of God. To discern the different spiritual gifts is to know that “Jesus is Lord”; in other words, to perceive and recognize the different gifts belonging to the human community in its unity and truth means recognizing that our gifts and talents serve a higher end and purpose than mere self-interest; they serve the common good and that is not simply a human construct. “No one can say Jesus is Lord, but by the Holy Spirit.” And this is pointed out to us emphatically – in capital letters. “JESUS IS LORD.”
So what does that mean? It means that in Jesus Christ, God has visited his people, that Jesus is God with us, God made man, the God who has entered into the confusions and folly, wickedness and stupidity of the human condition. Why? To bring us redemption. We find our freedom in him regardless of the ups and downs, meannesses and follies, sin and wickedness of our world and day.
We are freed from ourselves as well as from those who would seek our hurt and from the things which, well, just happen. Jesus will remind Pontius Pilate that any power he has, ultimately derives from the only true authority, the authority of God. That, too, is a salutary reminder to us about the use and misuse of power whether it is political, social or ecclesiastical.
These are wonderful lessons that catapult us into the wisdom of the Scriptures and help us to face hardships and sorrows. Even more, they open us out to joy and delight. Why? Because of another dimension belonging to the gospel story that contributes to the Christian understanding of our life with God.
Visitation. In the older Prayer Books, in the service for The Visitation for the Sick, an exhortation is provided to be read in the presence of the person who is ill. “Whatsoever your sickness is, know you certainly, that it is God’s visitation … whether it be to try your patience for the example of others [and a testing of your faith] or “to correct and amend in you” whatever is lacking and is false in you.”
Pretty strong stuff. Can you imagine hearing this on your sick bed? I suggest that this is hard for us to hear. And yet it points to a very important concept, namely, the idea of the providential nature of God’s visitation.
This contrasts with the ancient world where, in general terms, the visitation of the gods to humanity is not a happy occasion. There is too great a sense of the incommensurability between the gods and the humans. For example, in the oldest story known to humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, wants Gilgamesh for herself as, well, her boy-toy. Gilgamesh rejects her “advances.” Why? Because he knows that what is at stake is his basic humanity. Ishtar has the rather nasty habit of turning her lovers into animals once she has tired of them. Close encounters with the gods means losing your humanity.
For the Greeks, too, there is a sense of the great gulf between the gods and the humans. Only in the city, the polis, is there a kind of unity between the gods and the humans, precisely in the unity of diverse gifts and abilities, the division of labours, we might say, and in ways that echoes St. Paul’s teaching in his first letter to the Corinthians. But, to take as an example, there is the story of Ganymede, chosen by the Olympian gods to be their “cupbearer” where the clear sense is that he ceases to be fully human and becomes instead a kind of automaton. Overall, the good advice is to avoid close contact with the gods at all costs.
Christianity turns the ancient world on its head in this regard. Our highest unity and truest freedom is not found in ourselves, to be sure. It is found in God’s being with us in the most intimate manner imaginable.
This implies a kind of inwardness, an inner peace and freedom that exists regardless of external circumstance and situation. The peace which Jesus is talking about, the peace which he gives is not the peace of the world but a peace “which passeth human knowing”. It is found in God’s visitation to his people, a visitation which has an inescapable positive character to it, even if it is expressed in the strong and objective language of the older service of The Visitation of the Sick. In a way, that objectivity speaks directly, albeit uncomfortably, to our contemporary concerns and demands in all of their subjectivity.
The visitation of God to our humanity is the mediation of divine grace through Word and Sacrament. The key point is that it is mediated. It has entirely to do with the divine principle of unity that gives purpose, meaning and intelligibility to the diverse gifts, ministrations and operations of our humanity. But the principle is mediated. Jesus is Lord; he is “I am who I am” who is with us in the communion of the Trinity.
“He taught daily in the temple.” Through the mediating institutions of our lives we may, just perhaps, learn the divine grace that seeks our good and our salvation. Then, indeed, we will not be ignorant. We will be open to the grace of God’s visitation.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor
Trinity X, ‘09
10:30am
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/08/17/sermon-for-the-tenth-sunday-after-trinity/
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