“Now the parable is this: the seed is the word of God”
Dust and dirt? Not again?! These are hardly appealing images for thinking about the nature of our humanity in its relation to God. But that is exactly what we are being asked to consider this morning, learning to trust not “in any thing that we do” or in our own power and strength but actually learning to “glory even in the things which concern [our] infirmities,” as Paul says, and thinking about what kind of ground we are, in which God’s word is being sown, as the parable from Luke’s Gospel suggests. Somehow the turn to dust and dirt on this Sexagesima Sunday is critical for our understanding of the redemption of our humanity in Jesus Christ. Hardly appealing, it might seem, but divinely necessary.
Apparently, it takes courage and humility. Apparently, it takes prudence and humility. What Paul is talking about in his Second Letter to the Corinthians takes courage and is courage, one of the four cardinal virtues. It is about standing fast and firm inwardly in the face of every imaginable form of hardship, both natural disasters and human violence, in perils and in prisons; not to mention that other burden, “the care of all the churches.” And it is also about the virtue of prudence, another one of the four cardinal virtues, as shown in the parable of the sower and the seed. What kind of ground we are has to do with how we order our lives with respect to God’s word; “the good ground” is the metaphor for “the good heart” that “hearing the word, keep[s] it, and bring[s] forth fruit with patience.” That is prudence, practical wisdom with respect to the things of God.
Humility provides the connection. It connects us to the ground at the same time as it signals our openness to God. Only by virtue of the first, our connection to the ground, can there be the second, our openness to God. Once again, this is why the story of Creation is so important and so necessary for our thinking about human redemption. Redemption, after all, completes and perfects our creation out of the wandering ways of our waywardness in the wilderness of the world. The word humility, too, connects us directly to the humus, to the ground of our createdness. Adam, referring to humanity, literally means formed from the ground.
To think about creation means to think about the Fall as well. In a way, the story of the Fall has its most graphic illustration in the image of dust or ground. There is a twofold sense to the story. On the one hand, it is about our disobedience. “Did God say?” the serpent asks, insinuating another interpretation, a kind of half-truth about God’s commandment to Adam and Eve, suggesting, instead, “that you will be like God knowing good and evil.” True, but only through the painful experience of suffering, the painful experience of the separation from the truth which we have denied in doing what we were commanded not to do.
What is the serpent but the creeping serpent of human reason, as the poet/preacher John Donne puts it? For who else asks questions except humans made in the image of God, made, that is to say, in the image of God’s own reason? But questions of what sort, we must ask? Questions which seek to know what God would have us know ultimately or questions which undermine and deny what we have been given to know? “And God saw that it was very good.” If the whole of the created order and each of its parts are unequivocally said to be good and, indeed, very good, then the express conditions of our being and place in God’s creation, presented in God’s command not to eat, must also be good; good and very good as arising from the goodness of God himself.
To give into the serpent’s insinuations is reason’s betrayal of its own principle, namely, the reason of God in the good order of his creation. It is to turn downwards to the dust rather than to look upwards to God from the ground of creation. The punishment is the perfect image of the sin itself; “dust you shall eat” and “cursed is the ground”, “in the sweat of your brow” you shall work and to “dust shall thou return.” Dust and dirt, yet again!
On the other hand, the story also underscores a feature of our creatureliness. Like every other material being in the created universe (angels excepted, they being immaterial), we are made of dust; dust, however, that has been uniquely and divinely shaped. Only about our humanity is it said that we are made “in the image of God.” True. But still, dust. At issue is how we look at the dust of creation. Do we turn to the dust over and against God or do we remember the fact of our creatureliness, that feature of dust and dirt that connects us to the material universe from which we look to God our Creator? The consequences are simply enormous. They condition our whole outlook and way of thinking about the world around us. They lie at the heart of the gospel parable and its meaning.
Being reminded that we are dust and dirt like every other created thing is part and parcel of our redemption. We are at once the dust into which God has breathed his spirit in Creation, thus we are made in his image, but we are also the dust which God raises up in Redemption, in the hope of the Resurrection. We need the reminder as the means of our participating in that redemptive work.
And that is the point, it seems to me, of these rich and wonderful lessons. What kind of dirt or dust will we be? Hard ground, rocky ground, ground choked with weeds or the good ground, the dust and dirt in which God’s Word and Spirit take root and bring forth fruit, the fruit of holiness and service, the fruit of sacrifice and love, the fruit of lives lived for and with God? Somehow we are being challenged to think about the dust and the dirt in significant ways, to think of ourselves as being the soil of salvation.
Salvation is not about escape from “cloddish clay” as the ancient poet Virgil puts it in his Aeneid, the muck which renders us inadequate to the life of the gods, nor are we consigned to the dark and dreary house of dust as in The Epic of Gilgamesh. No. There is the redemption of our humanity signaled precisely through the remembrance of two things: the dust and dirt of our creation and the dust and dirt of our disobedience.
At issue is how we look at things: looking downwards to the dust and dirt in revolt and denial of God or looking upwards in the hope of the redemption of the dust and dirt of the whole created order.
To think of ourselves as dust and dirt is, perhaps, a necessary corrective to the thoughtless over-exuberance of our technocratic culture which is often so cavalier and destructive of the dust and dirt of creation both in terms of how we deal with the physical environment and in terms of the social environment of our lives with one another. But the question remains for us: what kind of dust and dirt? The dust and dirt of dismal disobedience or the dust and dirt of redemptive love? What kind of dust and dirt will we be collectively as a Parish? The dust and dirt of death and dying or the dust and dirt of resurrection and renewal?
The parable is explained. Its metaphorical meaning is revealed. “The seed is the word of God.” But we are the ground in which that Word is sown like a seed. Will be prudent about the cultivation of the Word of God that is being sown in our hearts? Will we have the courage to persevere in the face of the challenges and the hardships of our world and day? “Now the parable is this: the seed is the word of God”, but we are the dirt.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Sexagesima, February 7th, 2010