Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, 10:30am Morning Prayer
admin | 20 October 2013“For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be
an image of his own eternity”
The long Trinity season runs out in a series of reflections on wisdom. It is on this Sunday that we begin to read in the Sunday offices of Morning and Evening Prayer from the Books of the Apocrypha.
This follows an ancient understanding about the role and place of those books in the doctrinal understanding of things. At the heart of the Protestant reformation was a new sensibility about the primacy of Scripture and the nature of its interaction with tradition and reason in determining the teaching or doctrine of the Church on matters of essential faith, on matters of morals, and on matters of polity or church government. As a consequence, there was debate and question about a collection of books that arose between the time of the setting down of the Old Testament – the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures – and the period of the Christian New Testament. The debate had largely to do with the claims about certain teachings alleged to be based upon these texts to which the Reformers took exception.
For some Protestant Churches these books are not regarded as part of the Scripture. For others, like Anglicans, for instance, these books are received and read not “to establish any doctrine” – meaning essential or creedal doctrine – but “for example of life and instruction of manners” as Article VI of the Thirty-nine Articles states. In this the Anglican Churches understand themselves to be following the example of Jerome, the great translator of the most influential and famous version of the Bible, the Latin Vulgate, which was the Bible for more than a millennium for the western and European world. Anglicans read the Apocrypha or are encouraged to do so as complementing the Old and New Testament.
In a way this is necessary in order to make sense of the New Testament, since there are several instances where the New Testament writers make explicit reference to events and ideas found in the Apocrypha. Such is the argument for the inclusion of Apocryphal texts in the public reading of Scripture in the life of the Church. But there have been Anglicans of an Evangelical persuasion who would not be persuaded about reading from the Books of the Apocrypha and so for the sake of those of tender conscience, the Prayer Book (Cdn., 1962), makes provision for alternative Old Testament passages to be read instead on the last Sundays of the Trinity Season. This reveals what was once a typical kind of Anglican compromise, a kind of principled accommodation to different theological sensibilities, even a kind of wisdom, at least practically speaking, it seems to me. It is an approach, perhaps, that has been lost in our church for some time.
This morning our first lesson is from The Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. And what is the wisdom here? It is an astounding passage that speaks to our contemporary confusions. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” the poet of modernity, T.S. Eliot, asks. “The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries/Bring us further from God and closer to the Dust”. He could be commenting on this passage. As a culture and a church we are lost in a sea of information, a vast array of random bits and bytes of facts and opinions, where knowledge is a rare commodity, and wisdom even rarer, for there is no meaning, no purpose to our existence and being. Which is why we need this strong argument about wisdom.
We need to think God again which is not about making God subject to our thoughts but about raising our thoughts to God. In a way, the books of wisdom within the Apocrypha help us to do that. They help us to think the wonder and the mystery of God.
The lesson from Wisdom provides a counter to certain aspects of contemporary atheism. It captures the fatalism and despair that belongs to a materialist conception of the world and of the mind while revealing as well the incredible hostility against the intellectual and spiritual understanding that belongs to religion and morality.
The passage offers ancient wisdom that can be read in parallel with Plato’s Republic. Without wisdom there is only despair, death, and angry destruction. “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions,” they say. Who are ‘they’? They are described as “the ungodly,” but, more intriguingly, they are said to be those who “reasoned unsoundly” (Wisdom 2.1) and who “were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them, and they did not know the secret purposes of God, nor hope for the wages of holiness, nor discern the prize for blameless souls” (Wisdom 2.21,22). What they have willfully ignored, it is suggested, is precisely the teaching that God created man for immortality and to be “an image of his own eternity” (Wisdom 2. 23).
Is this judgmental and harsh or honest and direct? I find it hard to believe but it seems that there are those within and without the church who may actually think of God as an angry old man with a long white beard. In reaction some want to embrace the wonder of the world but is the world God? Does the world account for itself? A materialist conception dogmatically insists that it does, only to insist, too, that we are “born by mere chance,” that we are mere composites of dust and ashes “because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts. When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air.” In the face of this fatalism, hedonism – the philosophy of pleasure – seems the only recourse. “Eat, drink and be merry,” we might say; enjoyment is our portion and our lot. We can, I think, feel the seductive charm of this view and recognize, too, how it is deeply embedded in our own culture. Is the enjoyment of “the good things that exist” wrong though? Of course not. But what happens if we think that nothing else matters beyond physical pleasures? Is that really an adequate view of our humanity? Are we defined simply by our physical pleasures and needs?
What is intriguing in this passage is where this self-interested pleasure leads. It leads to violence against the “righteous poor man”, “the widow” and “the aged”! That may seem rather harsh and judgmental but the logic is this. We can only pursue our own pleasures and self-interest at the expense of others. It all comes down to what we can get away with; “let might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless.” Might equals right so beat up on the poor, the weak and the elderly. We might call it the angry atheist syndrome. There is no justice, no truth, no God. This stands in complete contrast to the idea that we are made in the image of God and that we are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. At the very least, we have two completely opposed views of the world and our humanity.
The despair of God is partly about an ignorance of the spiritual nature of God but it is also about our wills acting against God. The righteous man becomes the inconvenient truth, the inconvenient truth that the law is our good, that we are the children of the Lord who are called to a certain way of life, and that God is our father for “he created man to be immortal and made him to be an image of his own eternity.” The image points us beyond the confines and limits of this world to the eternity of God. “The chief end of man,” as the Presbyterian Westminster Confession so wonderfully puts it, “is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
The first article of our Anglican Thirty-nine articles is entitled “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity.” It begin by stating that “there is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.” This is actually the ancient wisdom of Jews, Christians and Muslims, the ancient wisdom, too, of the great pagan philosophies of antiquity. It is what is denied by ancient and modern materialist alike, a denial that can lead to angry despair. The article goes on to say that “in the unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” In other words, the names of God as Father, Son and Holy Ghost cannot be taken in a physical sense any more than the images in art can be taken in a literal sense without being idolatry. God makes himself known through the things of this world without being reduced to them. Such is the great Christian mystery of the Trinity. It opens us out to a grander and larger vision of our humanity, to the divine wisdom which shapes our wills and orders our souls.
“For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be
an image of his own eternity”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXI, MP 2013