Year: 2010

“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.

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“My soul cleaveth to the dust:
O quicken thou me, according to thy word”
(Psalm 119, pt 4, vs 25)

Dust and dirt? Quite a change from the emphasis of the Epiphany season on the essential divinity of Christ, it might seem. To be sure, with Septuagesima Sunday we mark a new beginning. We begin at the beginning. And that means, beginning, too, with dust and dirt, with the ground of creation, quite literally.

At Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, we begin reading from The Book of Genesis. In so doing, we enter into an ancient tradition. The tradition conveys ancient wisdom, namely, a profound reflection upon the mystery of Creation within the Revelation of God as Trinity.

We begin with Genesis only to find ourselves in the midst of the vineyard of creation in today’s gospel. But we begin with Genesis. It is, at once, a difficult and a necessary starting point. It is difficult because of the contemporary tendency to view the Book of Genesis in one of two ways, both of which are false. The first way is to read Genesis as a kind of scientific treatise, which it isn’t (this is the folly of creationism: bad science and bad religion). The second way is to read Genesis as a haphazard collection of fables and myths, which it isn’t.

The Book of Genesis does not propose a discovery of God; it begins with God. “In the beginning, God.” There is the proclamation of God as the absolute beginning after which everything else is secondary, after which everything else is derivative, after which everything else is a product. And while something of the Mind of the Maker, to use a famous phrase, is made known in what he makes, the Creator is not simply equated with what he makes. He is known as beyond and in control. It is his creation. The distinction between the Creator and the created is absolutely crucial.

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