Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
“Young man, I say unto thee, Arise”
Michaelmas daisies and burning bushes abound in the softness of autumn – even if the burning bush is one that has been hacked to pieces on the corner of the Parish’s property! Michaelmas daisies and burning bushes are, to my mind, strong and visible reminders of the primacy of spiritual and intellectual matters. No doubt, this week will inaugurate a great parade of pumpkins. I am a little less certain what things pumpkins remind us about matters spiritual and intellectual.
The Michaelmas daisies remind us of Michaelmas, the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels celebrated at the near end of September. The Angels are very much part of the larger spiritual company defined by the worship and love of the God who has revealed himself to us and in whose life “we live and move and have our being”. The burning bushes of autumn recall the essential moment and story of revelation: God makes himself known to Moses as “I AM WHO I AM” through a burning bush, which not only gets Moses’ attention, but is not consumed, not burned up. We stand on the holy ground of divine revelation. God reveals himself in his truth and majesty – “I AM WHO I AM” – but he does so through the things of nature. The natural world, too, is used as the vehicle of God’s revelation. In this lies the logic of the sacraments and our liturgy. It means that even pumpkins can remind us of the God who creates and redeems, whether or not paddling a pumpkin in the Pisiquid puddle on the Thanksgiving weekend.
God creates “out of nothing”, late Judaism and Christianity affirm, meaning that what is and what comes to be is not shaped and formed out of pre-existent matter but comes to be radically out of the mind and will of God. God after all is no-thing; not one thing among many things, but the cause and principle of all things. The revelation of God to Moses in the burning bush is the real starting point for the doctrine of creation. God is not a burning bush. He is not to be confused with anything in the created order. But, then, there is the Greek view that “nothing comes from nothing”. It belongs to Christianity to unite these two opposed concepts.
