Year: 2011

“Be not anxious”

Jesus’ words are comforting words that speak to an anxious world. What are our anxieties? Quite simply, they are our cares, the things which, quite literally, occupy our thoughts. The first Books of Common Prayer (1549, 1552) use the phrase “be not carefull,” as derived from William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament. The King James Version of the Bible, produced four hundred years ago in 1611, uses the phrase “take no thought” to capture the Greek word about how our thoughts are so easily taken captive or occupied, possessed, we might even say, with various concerns. The phrase, “take no thought,” became the version in the Books of Common Prayer from 1662 onwards until 1959, when in Canada the word “anxious” was introduced in its place, a word which has 17^th century provenance in English but which has been given a much greater weight of interpretation in the 20^th century, no doubt, through the influence of the psychology of Sigmund Freud. The German word angst has entered into our contemporary vocabulary with a vengeance. We are anxious about our anxieties, stressed out about our stresses; in short, self-absorbed.

Our anxieties are the cares which choke and oppress us and preoccupy us. Our problem, it seems, and the cause of our anxiety is that we are often too careful, quite literally, too full of cares about the wrong things and/or in the wrong way. It is not too much to say that out of self-preoccupations arise no end of disorders and troubles: anger and depression, recklessness and stupidity, meanness and selfishness.

The cares of this world beset us but Jesus would have us view the world and its cares in a new way. The passage here from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount recalls us to the great and grand theme of God’s Providence by way of reference to Creation and the Fall.

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“Be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods
or worship the golden image which you have set up.”

We know them better, perhaps, by their Hebrew names from the canticle, the Benedicite, Omnia Opera, taken from the Apocryphal book, the Song of the Three Young Men, regarded as an addition to the Book of Daniel between verses 23 and 24 of this evening’s first lesson from the 3^rd chapter of the Book of Daniel. The canticle, appointed for use at Morning Prayer, speaks of Ananias, Azarias, and Misael. Here they are known by their Persian or pagan names of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, colourful and memorable names, to be sure.

And a colourful, memorable and powerful story. But then, that is a feature of the Book of Daniel, a book comprising six stories and four dream visions, a book which has bequeathed a number of memorable commonplaces which are, perhaps still with us even in our biblically illiterate era. We still speak of “feet of  clay”, of “the writing on the wall”, of being “in the Lion’s den”, and, for the historically minded, perhaps, “the king’s matter” – a reference from the Book of Daniel delicately applied to Henry the VIII with respect to his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Written during the Hellenizing reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, following upon the conquests of Alexander the Great, the stories are set in an earlier period of persecution and conquest when Israel was in captivity in Babylon.

They are stories of courage and conviction, stories which reveal the primacy of faith and the worship of God in his majesty and truth over and against the tyranny and overreach of worldly powers and potentates. Here Daniel’s companions are put to the test about their primary allegiance: to God or to the image of the King Nebuchadnezzar who ordered that at “the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music” everyone was to fall down and worship the golden image? Failure to comply meant being cast into “a burning fiery furnace”. Charmingly and colourfully told, with the fourfold repetition of the cacophonous command, for instance, it concentrates an all important question of conscience. What do you really value? Or to put in the language of Matthew from tonight’s second lesson, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” What do you treasure? Which is a way of asking what do we really worship? God or ourselves in our practical, hedonistic and economic pursuits?

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“Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful”

These words of Joel the Prophet sound a particularly fitting and providential note on this Sunday which is designated in the Anglican Church of Canada and beyond as “Back-to-Church Sunday.” What Joel’s words remind us is that back to Church really means back to God. “Return to the Lord, your God.”

In so many ways, this is the problem that the Churches confront in our contemporary culture. While God may or may not be a believable concept, the Church certainly is not. Beset by scandals and decay, despair and demographical decline, there seems nothing positive and attractive about the institutional church, especially in the face of the feel-good culture of the contemporary smorgasbord of “spiritualities.” And yet the words of Joel, within the context of our liturgy as a whole, speak profoundly to the discontents and fears of our increasingly anxious and fretful world. All our vaunted certainties have crumbled into the dust of uncertainty.

The progressivist myth that things are always getting better and better is simply not true and no longer credible, however much we try to cling to it. It is, perhaps, in that context that Joel’s words here have a kind of resonance for us and signal the possibilities of a new beginning.

For that is what the Prophets of Israel are always about. Their words, which sometimes seem so harsh and uncompromising, are the strong wake-up call that we desperately need to hear, now and always. They recall us to the most primary relationship in our lives: God, without whom there is nothing and we are nothing. In a way, we know this and in a way, we don’t. What gets in the way?

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“And one turned back… giving him thanks”

God is extravagant with his mercies; we are miserly with our thanks. There were ten “that lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us”. But only one turned back “and he was a Samaritan”. In short, there are many who cry out for mercy but few who return to give thanks.

To give thanks is more than good manners; it is to acknowledge the mercy freely given and received and to esteem the giver of the mercy freely and supremely. No doubt we have good reason to cry out for mercy like the ten lepers and yet God’s mercy is not given simply for us to take and run away with it. In returning and giving thanks we are more than healed; we are saved or made whole for then we enter into the motions of God’s own love: the going forth and return of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. We enter precisely into the thanksgiving of the Son to the Father. That is the greater mercy and point of all God’s mercies towards us.

It is the point of this gospel story and the signal note of all our liturgies – “Lord, have mercy upon us”. Our “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” arises only out of a due sense of all God’s mercies. And if we should think the actions of one Samaritan to be bit extravagant and a trifle excessive – not only “turn[ing] back” but “glorify[ying] God with a loud voice” and “fall[ing] down on his face at [Jesus’] feet, giving him thanks;” in short, making a bit of spectacle of himself, we might think – then we have only to reflect for a moment upon the extravagances to which our liturgy regularly calls us.

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