by CCW | 9 February 2014 14:57
Epiphany season ends this year not with a bang or a whimper but on a note of reflective judgment. Epiphany season is about the making known of God and about what God wants for us. That alone is an astounding matter. It centers on the idea of revelation, that there are things God wants us to know and which are revealed to us. That says so much, on the one hand, about the truth and the dignity of our humanity, and says so much, on the other hand, about the truth and the mystery of God, the God who makes himself known to us so that his life can live and move in us. This is an astounding wonder.
The idea of God’s revelation of himself and his will for us means that something about ourselves is revealed to us. We are in these stories individually and institutionally, as it were. Something about the dynamic and nature of human institutions and human personality is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures. We are made aware of something beyond ourselves, a principle of absolute goodness and truth to which we are held accountable and without which we have no freedom and no real dignity. That we close our ears to this is our folly and our wickedness; judgment itself.
Judgment. We are uncomfortable about the idea of judgment and well we should be. In our day, judgment is about being judged by others without any recourse to the question, “upon what basis?” What are the principles that inform our moral, social and political discourse?
We live in a world of wheat and tares, wheat and weeds, as it were, and it is not always easy to know which is which or even which are we. That is why we are given sage advice by Paul in the Eucharistic epistle for today to forbear and to forgive one another and by Jesus in the Gospel parable to let both wheat and tares grow together until the harvest. “Whatsoever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus”, Paul says, and that suggests a check upon our judgments of ourselves and one another. In a world where we are constantly being told what to say and what to eat, what to do and what to think on the basis of mere assertion and arbitrary authority, it is good to be reminded of God’s judgment rather than ours. It is to be returned to the Lord who has made known himself and his will for us. There is a kind of intellectual and principled accountability.
That is exactly what Epiphany has been all about. And yet, as Amos especially reminds us[1], it is exactly what we can so easily ignore and forget, deny and reject. His strong words are a strong reminder of God’s Word and Will revealed to us in the witness of the Scriptures, if we are willing and ready to feed on that Word and let it live in us, “let[ting] the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”, as Paul puts it.
We have as Church and culture despaired of God’s Word, preferring instead to be conformed to the world and its ways, desperate as an institution to have the world’s attention and its approbation only to find ourselves the target of its scorn and hate. And yet, this is surely part of God’s judgment upon ourselves or, at least, perhaps we can be open to that possibility, recognizing that we have not always spoken the truth in love and that we have frequently if not always been fallible in our encounters with others. Whether it is the Church or the UN, it is all a kind of moralizing self-righteousness. We are often selective in our judgments, using the faults of others to promote agendas of our own. We forget the greatest of all the great words; “let him who is without sin cast the first stone”.
The measure is not about being popular in the eyes of the world. The mission is not simply about this or that issue of advocacy for such things really belong to our contemporary confusions and uncertainties about what it means to be human. The challenge is something greater. It is about reclaiming a thoughtful and theological understanding of who we are in the sight of God. That will require our willingness to hear the very things to which we have closed our ears.
In our second lesson at Morning Prayer[2], Jesus is at pains to point out exactly what he is teaching. The strong claim is that “my teaching is not mine, but his who sent me”, that he is not speaking on his own authority, thereby seeking his own glory, but as one “who seeks the glory of him who sent him”. Truth lies in a kind of accountability to a principle, in this case, the principle of God and the revelation of his word and will. Jesus places his own testimony in the context of the Law. “Did not Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law.” Strong stuff that names our hyprocisy. The dialogue and the encounter in the temple here is very intense. It turns not just on what Jesus is teaching but upon who Jesus is, upon his relation to the Father, and upon the presumption of human judgment. At issue is not merely the avoidance of judgment but the making of right judgment.
That there is debate and confusion about who he is and what he is saying is obvious. It goes to the issue of the limits of our knowing in part because of our sinfulness but also because of the limits of human knowing. We are constantly being challenged to grow into a larger understanding. It isn’t possible without the recognition on our part of our ignorance and folly.
Which is why Amos’ prophecy is so important. Four visions of judgment precede our lesson: judgment by locusts, judgment by fire, judgment by measurement – the plumb line – and judgment by decay and rot in the image of a basket of summer fruit, the point being that such fruit cannot last but must swiftly rot away. This is the imaginative context for his strong words of condemnation against the institutions and individuals in his world and day. His words are a strong indictment of the rich in their neglect of the poor because of their obsessive interest in shallow materialism and a powerful critique of the official prophets of his day whose self-interest overrides their commitment to God’s truth. It is a critique, too, of immorality and of pretentious but empty piety. What is the underlying problem in Amos’ view? We have stopped our ears to the word of God.
Amos sees this as itself a judgment. “Behold,” he says, “the days are coming when I”, the Lord God, that is to say, “will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord”. The famine of the hearing of the word is God’s doing! Why? Paradoxically, to make us listen again!
It is a powerful statement. But like the Gospel story, they are understood not to be simply the words of Amos but God’s word, just as Jesus claims to teach nothing more than the teaching of the one who sent him. Both are laying claim to a teaching which is not merely of human invention and fancy but absolute and divine. Their words make known to us what God wants us to know. In the case of Amos, the words are a kind of wake-up call to how we are seen in the eye of God; in the case of Jesus it is about the radical nature of God being with us in the intimacy of his humanity that allows us to see ourselves not only as sinners but as redeemed.
How will we hear and learn again? Sometimes it takes the experience of the famine and the emptiness of ourselves to turn us back to the one whose words are the food and drink of our weary souls; the bread and wine of grace and salvation to a weary and empty world.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 5, 2014
Morning Prayer (Year II)
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2014/02/09/sermon-for-the-fifth-sunday-after-epiphany-1030am-morning-prayer/
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