Year: 2013

“The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit and life”
(John 6. 63)

“Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage”

These are the opening lines of a wonderful poem by George Herbert called Prayer (1), a poem which presents a collection of images, biblical and natural, domestic and exotic, historical and experiential and which ends with two words, “something understood.” Prayer is something understood in and through the images of our journey in faith to God and with God.

It speaks, I think, to the rich marvel of today’s readings from Galatians and the Gospel according to St. John. There is a banquet in the wilderness. “Prayer the churches banquet” happens in the wilderness of human experience.

The theme of the wilderness is a fundamental feature of the season of Lent. By extension, the wilderness is a profound and important metaphor for the journey of our souls in faith.

The wilderness in the biblical accounts is the place of revelation: God reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush in the wilderness as “I am who I am.” The whole exodus is about the going forth of the people of Israel into the wilderness. There the Law is given to them. The wilderness is the place of the giving of the Law and the context of the giving of the Law is liberation; the law itself is about a greater freedom, a freedom to God. “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” the Ten Commandments begin.

This sense of liberation ultimately finds further expression in Paul’s evocative description of Jerusalem as the city which “is above”, which “is free” and which is “the mother of us all.” This passage takes us back to Quinquagesima Sunday where Jesus tells us that “we go up to Jerusalem.” What does that mean? It means learning to live from God’s Word and will.  It is in the wilderness that the people of the Hebrews become the people of the Law, after all, learning what it means to be God’s people, defined by the intellectual and spiritual realities of God’s word and will. How much more so when we are in the wilderness with Christ, learning about the darkness of our sinful hearts and about the light of Christ’s love?

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“God, be merciful to me a sinner”

The theme of divine mercy triumphs over human presumption and folly. Divine mercy, however, makes no sense whatsoever if we do not know ourselves to be, in fact, sinners. In a way the shadows of the Cross reach backwards as well as forwards. We are illumined, paradoxically as it may seem,  by the shadows of the Cross.

There is the grace of revelation and the grace of redemption and nowhere, perhaps, is that seen more wonderfully than in the 18^th chapter of the Book of Genesis both in terms of this morning’s lesson and in terms of what precedes it, namely, the encounter between God and Abraham under the shade of the oaks of Mamre, a scene in which God gives the promise of a son to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, the proverbial ‘promised son’. God appears to Abraham in threefold aspect and Abraham prepares a meal for them and waits upon them. The scene becomes the basis for the icon of the Trinity in Eastern Orthodoxy, an image at once of the Eucharist and the Trinity, the communion of our humanity with the communion of God. All under the shade of the oak of Mamre for such is the grace of revelation which in turn signals the grace of redemption which is what we see in the story which immediately follows and which is our first lesson this morning.

We are presented with a most remarkable exchange between Abraham and God about human wickedness and divine mercy, about the power of righteousness and the powerlessness of sin. The question has to do about Sodom and Gomorrah, cities which are the proverbial images for all that is wicked and perverse, a wickedness and perversity that has very much to do with our hearts of judgment and self-righteousness.

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“He that is not with me is against me: and he that
gathereth not with me scattereth”

It is an intriguing and, to my mind, a terrifying Gospel. It signals the moment of the most intense kind of darkness in the Lenten journey, at least before the heart-rending darkness of Holy Week. And yet, there is a great good for us in the discovery of the “dark wood” of the soul, as it were, a light in the darkness. It is about awakening to the light of Christ without which we are simply in darkness and despair. It may be, like Dante, that we shall discover there “a great good” precisely through the darkness of the “dark wood” of the soul.

The Gospel shows us the picture, the terrifying picture, of the despairing soul. And what is at the center of that darkness and despair? Simply ourselves as divided against ourselves. Simply ourselves as presuming upon ourselves to fix ourselves and everything else around us. Simply ourselves, too, when we are buried in our own griefs and sorrows for that, too, is really all about us. The devil is in us when we forget about who we truly and fundamentally are in the sight of God. We become the enemies of God, our souls divided against ourselves because we are separated from God.

This is the great truth and insight of the great religions. Our humanity is radically incomplete without God. That basic insight is intensified in the Christian understanding; we are more than merely incomplete, we are destructive and dangerous to ourselves and to others. This is where Jesus’ stark words come fully into play. “He that is not with me is against me.” There is, we might say, no neutral ground, no place for indifference. It is a matter of being with God or being against God. Without God there is simply a great emptiness within the human soul, a God-shaped hole, we might say, in our very being.

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