by CCW | 13 February 2011 15:02
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[1] 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[2] 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.”
The readings[3] at Holy Communion are equally strong. The Gospel is sometimes known as the Matthaean Apocalypse; it unfolds or reveals a vision of the end-times, a vision of judgement that is also cosmic in scope. God’s victory over sin is accomplished in the coming of the Son of Man. The accompanying epistle reading from the First Letter of John underscores the theme of divine love that overcomes evil. “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God; and so we are,” he says, before going to stress the realities of sin and evil that are overcome only by the Divine Love. “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.” In a way, it captures a significant Epiphany theme; namely, the making known of the divine will and purpose for our humanity. That divine will and purpose is about the triumph of love over sin, only so can there be joy and salvation.
These are strong words that make for a powerful ending to the Epiphany Season and they are wonderfully concentrated for us in the Collect for today, a Collect which directly reflects the Eucharistic readings, and intentionally so. The Trinity Season and the Epiphany season vary in length from year to year according to the movable date of Easter. This year, the season of Epiphany runs its longest and fullest course – six Sundays. The lessons at Holy Communion for the fifth and sixth Sundays do double-duty, as it were, for the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth Sundays after Trinity. They were also the last set of readings to be appointed in the Prayer Book and mark a development that occurred after Thomas Cranmer. These readings were designated by Bishop John Cosin of Durham in the mid-17th century who composed the Collects as well. He did so by deliberately drawing upon the Epistle and Gospel, observing that was often the case with the Collects in the Prayer Book. His observation provides a lesson about the inter-relation of prayer and scripture. It signals an important feature of Anglican spirituality.
Our liturgy is about doctrine in devotion. We pray what we believe.
But what do we believe? Do we pray this strong teaching? Do we understand those “two vast and spacious things, … sinne and love,” as Herbert so concisely puts it? They are, after all, the great mysteries of the Christian faith. They challenge us.
Cultural Christianity, I think, is dead. All that remains is the burying. What is before us, individually and collectively, is the renewal and the recovery of the Christian faith in the face of an empty culture which disbelieves and discounts the very realities that are being pointed out here, the realities of sin and love.
The culture of nihilism despairs of “a world of sacred, shining things,” as the writers Herbert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly state in their book “All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.” Never mind that we are, in many ways, in a post-secular age where the assumptions of secularism have proven false; such things as multiculturalism, for example, which the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, the French President, Nicholas Sarkozy, and even the Prime Minister of Britain, David Cameron, have had to recognise is dead. Politicians are rarely prophetic and certainly not in saying these things; no, they have had to come to terms with the consequences of ideologies which they realise are bankrupt. The death of multiculturalism is, perhaps, the death of what one might call the religion of secularism.
But I find it intriguing that these writers, who want to revive the classics, and theologians, like David Bentley Hart in his book, Atheist Delusions, should point to the same problem, namely, the emptiness of the freedom of choice in a culture of dogmatic relativism. Choices are ultimately made on the basis of nothing at all because there is nothing other than just the freedom to choose. Our choices, like our lives, take on an arbitrary and random character. What is denied is the reality of our choices in terms of good and evil, sin and love. Those categories are denied any force of meaning. For the culture of relativism there is no good and no evil; there is no sin and no love. It is the secular illusion, “dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good,” as T.S. Eliot noted. And, paradoxically, there is really no freedom of choice, either. The therapeutic culture is actually deterministic either in terms of nature or nurture, genetics or upbringing. You are determined by your DNA or by your social and economic situation, by fate or chance.
The limits of these claims have been known before. As T. S. Eliot puts it:
The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all my years, one thing does not change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
Forgetful you neglect your shrines and churches;
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil. The Scripture readings speak profoundly to us about that struggle within us and within our world. They also speak profoundly to us about the overcoming of sin by the divine love. Our struggle as Paul reminds us, is to “put on Christ,” “put on the whole armour of God,” because sin and evil are very real and the need for God’s grace is absolute. “Do you think,” asks Eliot, “that the Faith has conquered the World/And that lions no longer need keepers?”
What we have forgotten is the Divine Word and its truth and power. A world where God’s Word is unspoken, Eliot suggests, is a world where ‘the wind shall say: “Here were decent godless people: /Their only monument the asphalt road/ and a thousand lost golf balls.”’
This is the world in which we find ourselves. Yet, here the Word is spoken. These words are strong and powerful words that challenge the Church to be the Church. It is not always easy.
Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?
She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be Good.
The great miracle of the Christian Faith is that we have a way to contemplate the hardest and darkest things, the things of sin and evil. It is the way of divine love.
It belongs to the power of that divine love that we face and name evil as evil, sin as sin, in ourselves and in our world. The devil’s greatest strategy, and the one wherein he is often the most successful, is in tempting us to think that there is no devil, that there is no evil, and so, too, “no one will need to be good.” Good and evil become empty concepts. And so do our lives as a consequence.
In answer, John tells us “for this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.” In answer, Paul tells us to “put on the whole armour of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” In answer, Matthew envisions the ultimate triumph of God over sin with “the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven”. In answer, Isaiah recounts “the steadfast love of God” for us in spite of our sinfulness, for “Thou, O Lord, art our Father, our Redeemer from of old is thy name.”
To contemplate those “two vast, spacious things,” namely, “sinne and love” is our freedom, our truest freedom. It is only possible because of the miracle of the divine word, the miracle of the Epiphany of God’s will and purpose for us which alone gives meaning to our lives, even, paradoxically, to our secular lives, by rescuing the secular from its dogmatic emptiness. To recount the steadfast love of God is to find redemption.
Fr. David Curry
The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany
February 13th, 2011
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