by CCW | 5 October 2014 15:46
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.
I have a deep affection for the story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain. It compels on so many levels. It is about the deep compassion of God for our humanity and teaches us so much about what God seeks for us precisely by making something out of nothing and something from something. Jesus comes to the little city of Nain. He meets a funeral procession. The body of the only son of the widow of Nain is being carried to his grave. It is a touching and heart-rending scene. Jesus is the stranger who comes near – not unlike the story of the certain Samaritan. And something happens. Something happens out of the nothingness of human grief and sorrow. He sees the widow. And when he saw her, “he had compassion on her.” His look is everything.
It is about how God sees us. His look and his word are new life and a renewal of life, creation and resurrection. He makes something out of our nothingness, making our nothingness something itself.
Wonderful, but perhaps equally wonderful is what he says to the widow before he speaks to her dead son.
In this story, Jesus is saying something very important to us. Grief and sorrow there will and must be but it need not and must not define us. When we let it define us we are truly dead – dead to ourselves, to God and, strange to say, to our loved ones for whom we are in sorrow. The problem actually is that grief and sorrow become altogether about us, altogether at the expense of ourselves and all others. Jesus’ words here are the strong words of gentle compassion. He means ‘do not always be weeping’. Why not? Because in the grace of revelation, there is something more, something which God and God alone can make out of our griefs and sorrows, out of our worries and anxieties, out of our sins and follies, out of death, out of all the forms of our nothingness. Such is creation and redemption.
“Nothing is but what is not,” Macbeth says, as he ponders the question about becoming king, a possibility that cannot be considered without the thought of murdering the present king. The nothingness of evil is what is in his mind though “nothing is but what is not,” at least, not yet. In his thought, murder is “but fantastical” – a fantasy, something which is not real – and yet it shakes his whole being and sense of what it means to be human. Nothing is and yet is. It is really a question about what we are willing to think and consider, about what we love and desire, about what we look for and towards. Here we are reminded of God’s look of compassionate gentleness that challenges us about how we look upon one another and how we look upon God. In the revelation of Jesus Christ we are reminded of what God seeks for our humanity. We are reminded of who we are in the sight of God.
The question for our church and culture is whether we are capable of thinking and feeling anything.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 16, 2014
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2014/10/05/sermon-for-the-sixteenth-sunday-after-trinity-4/
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