Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany
“I will recount the steadfast love of the Lord”
The great poet of Anglican spirituality, George Herbert, observes that:
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
In a way, it is a concise summary of natural, moral, political and metaphysical philosophy. But he immediately goes on to say that “there are two vast, spacious things” that are more necessary to measure or know and, “yet few there are,” he says “that sound them,” echoing, I think, the insight of the great medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, about the need for another science, a divine science.
Even as regards those truths about God which human reason could have discovered, it was necessary that man should be taught by a divine revelation; because the truth about God such as reason could discover, would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors.
So there is the need for the science of theology or Sacred Doctrine. What are these “two vast, spacious things” to which Herbert refers? They are “Sinne and Love.”
Something of the vast spaciousness of sin and love are before us in the remarkable readings for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany. Isaiah sings of “the steadfast love of God,” recounting in the strong words of poetry the story of God’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt and their journeys in the wilderness wastes of the Sinai desert, but he also sings of Israel’s faithlessness and rebellion; in short, our sinfulness. “They rebelled and grieved his holy Spirit.” St. Paul, in the concluding chapter of his Letter to the Ephesians, reminds us that we are in a cosmic struggle “against the wiles of the devil,” “against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Strong stuff, indeed, and a struggle in which we are only “able to withstand” and “having done all, to stand” by virtue of “put[ting] on the whole armour of God.”
