Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity
“Brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant”
Ignorant about what? Ignorant about what belongs to the nature of our identity in Christ. But, we are, I am afraid, only too ignorant. And because of our ignorance we are easily “overthrown in the wilderness” of our lives, both individually and corporately. The good news is that even the things of our ignorance can be used to bring us to understanding, to the understanding of the good and to the doing of all “such things as be rightful”, as the Collect puts it.
In the witness of the Scriptures, we have the stories of the ignorance of our humanity written out for us to read just so that we will not be quite so ignorant. “These things”, Paul tells us in his to First Letter the Corinthians, a people remarkable for their willful ignorance, we might say, “were our examples”. And they still are “our examples”. What things? The things belonging to our identity in the body of Christ which we have ignored and denied. But in making such things known to us, we may learn “not to lust after evil things, as they also lusted”. He has in mind the stories of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness; in particular, the stories of disbelief and complaint on the part of Israel towards Moses and, more significantly, towards God.
Paul is doing two things here. First, he is saying that these formative stories of the people of Israel are things from which we can learn. They are “our examples”. Secondly, he is saying something even more significant. He is saying that we are in these stories. The Old Testament stories actually belong to the story of our life in Christ. Paul sees in the wilderness journeys of the ancient people of Israel something which both anticipates and participates in the definitive journey of human redemption signaled and accomplished in the passion of Christ. He is providing an interpretative approach to the reading of the Scriptures.
