Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 10:30am service
“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Where are our hearts? What do we want, really and truly? Do we want what is really and truly to be wanted? Do we know what that might be?
We do and we don’t. What is really and truly to be wanted is the “Father’s good pleasure” bestowed through the good virtue of the Mother: the good pleasure of our heavenly Father; the good virtue of Mother Church. But we are all caught, in one way or another, in the ambiguity of our desiring.
There is our wanting, first, this thing and, then, that thing, each with an absolute desire, only to discover that no one thing can really satisfy. “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee,” Augustine said long ago, or as Mick Jagger put it somewhat more recently, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” The double negative is simply part of the double-sidedness of our desiring. We don’t know what we want – is it this or is it that? – because we don’t know what is really and truly to be wanted. Jesus calls this condition of ours, “anxiety”– at least that is the modern English word, at least since the seventeenth century for the state of our distractedness. We are distracted because we are literally “divided in our minds.” How much more so in what Alan Jacobs has called “the age of distraction”?
It is a powerful image really. Our eyes flit quickly from one object to another unable to focus on any one thing. We are distracted and often beside ourselves; in short, divided in our souls. Against this, Jesus, in Luke’s account, would gently recall us to ourselves. He would recall us to what is really and truly to be wanted in which everything else must find its place. He gently but firmly reminds us of the Providence of God, of God’s providential care for us. God sees all things in his single-minded love for us.
