Sermon for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity
“Whose is this image?”
In the contemporary culture of illusions, questions about image are everything. Whether it is ‘American Idol’ or ‘Canadian Idol’ or ‘So you think you can dance, Canada?’, so much turns on our image of ourselves and our sense of how we would like others to see us. In so many ways, it is a dangerous illusion. The dangers are the narcissistic ‘look-at-me-looking-at-you-looking-at-me’ and the soullessness of it all. What is missing, paradoxically, is the very thing for which we are seeking. We are seeking, I think, for some sense of meaning and purpose, some sense of identity and dignity. Our readings this morning speak wonderfully and directly to those deep and underlying desires.
“Our citizenship is in heaven”, Paul tells us. And Jesus asks those who would entrap him, “Whose is this image and superscription?” His question is really about us and recalls us to the deep and wonderful scriptural teaching that to understand our humanity is to understand that we are made in the image of God. For Christians, that image of God has been further intensified in Jesus Christ. He is the express image of the Father, and he is both God and man. And only so, can Paul claim that “our citizenship is in heaven.”
But what does that mean? The Church is always in one way or another counter-culture. Nowhere is that more clear than in these readings which speak directly and as a counter challenge to the dominant aspects of our culture which can no longer really be said to be a Christian culture in any meaningful sense. What defines us? Will it be our social and political convictions, illusions and commitments? Or will it be something spiritual and intellectual, something theological? In a way, it is as simple as that.
