by CCW | 8 February 2015 15:13
Sometimes it is hard to know about what to preach given the parade of events that appear each day and each week, events that cry out sometimes to be addressed. I don’t pretend to have the answers but there are the questions. What to make, for instance, of President Obama’s gratuitous swipe at Christianity in an attempt to absolve Islam of the latest fundamentalist atrocity committed by the militant ISIS in burning alive a Jordanian pilot? Or what to make of the Supreme Court’s decision about assisted suicide? As Fr. Raymond De Souza observes[1], there are questions here about whether Canada has abandoned the legal principle that every life is a good to be protected and has embraced the idea that suicide is a social good and that the law no longer upholds the particular obligation to protect the weak and the vulnerable. These are serious questions. As Rex Murphy notes[2], the President’s swipe at Christianity is a straw man argument, actually, “the logical equivalent of an entire thatched roof of those stuffed puppets,” as he puts it in his own inimitable way.
So much to think about. But how? Ultimately, through the optic of the Scriptures doctrinally understood that challenge us about our humanity in relation to God. And so it seems best to focus on the readings for Sexagesima that encourage us to be “the good ground” namely, those that “in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience”. Perhaps, that is what best speaks to our contemporary concerns. It is about finding a way to think through the confusions that beset us. It means, at the very least, our patient attentiveness to God’s Word proclaimed and celebrated.
The ‘Gesima Sundays’ mark the transition from learning to living, a turn to the practice of the virtues as transformed by divine love to become the means of our participation in Christ’s work of human redemption. That work is the project of Lent, the pilgrimage of love that brings us to “the book of love opened out for us to read” (Lancelot Andrewes[3]) on the cross of Good Friday. Already we are being turned towards Holy Week and Easter.
Today the virtues of courage and prudence are set before us in the Epistle and Gospel respectively. This focus on the classical virtues as transformed by divine love to become forms of love locates the ‘Gesima Sundays’ within a larger tradition of ethical thinking. They connect to the great ethical turn in philosophy by Socrates via Plato and to the idea of philosophy as something lived, the idea of the good life.
Such ancient interests speak to our modern concerns. What is the good life? It is a pressing question in our current circumstances economically, politically, socially, environmentally, and, certainly, religiously. The Christian Faith, it seems to me, has a lot to contribute to our current distresses even if nothing more than to raise the necessary ethical questions, the questions that are rooted in an understanding of the dynamic between God and Man in Jesus Christ. “I am come”, Jesus says, “that they may have life and have it more abundantly.” He doesn’t mean more and more of everything materially but spiritually and ethically.
It means a kind of thoughtfulness in the face of the fearful thoughtlessness of our world and day. It all comes down to matters of essential faith and not social prestige and standing in the community. The Churches do not exist to be reflections of ourselves to ourselves but to place us with one another in communion with God. God is not simply our humanity writ large as some have imagined. God makes himself known to us in his sovereign freedom through the pageant of revelation. We are part of a wonderful tradition of doctrine about God through which we learn something about ourselves and the good life, the good life now of our life with Christ.
Learning as living, living out what we are learning. This is the focus of the ‘Gesimas’ and more. It is the challenge for the contemporary church.
Today’s readings[4] present a kind of paradox. Despite the transition from learning to living, the ‘Gesima Sundays’ are also all about instruction, about learning. Here Christ teaches us through parables, not through deeds and actions. What he is teaching speaks to the actions of our lives on the ground, as it were, in the communities where we are placed and, even more, to ourselves as ground. A powerful metaphor, it connects us in our disconnected age to nature and to God. “The seed is the word of God” and we are “the ground”. At issue, is what kind of ground?
The ethical teaching here is quite profound. It challenges us directly about the good life. More than just a parable, however, Jesus provides us with the interpretation. The disciples ask, as perhaps we do, “what might this parable be?” What does it mean to talk about “a sower going forth to sow his seed” which falls if not into a maritime snowbank but “by the way-side”, then “upon a rock”, then “among thorns”, and then, and only then, “on good ground”? Without the interpretation we might get the general idea that you aren’t going to have much of a harvest unless you plant wisely. Farming, after all, requires prudence, an active and practical wisdom that guides our actions, especially with respect to the soil, the ground of our planting.
The interpretation catapults us into something much more profound and does so in ways that recall at once the forms of Socratic questioning that uses everyday activities such as shoemakers, cooks, shipbuilders, shepherds and other techne, meaning skills, to open us out to a higher way of thinking, pushing things analogically, and to what will be an integral feature of Christianity, namely its sacramental character, the way in which the things of this world and the things of human labour become vehicles of divine grace. In both the teaching calls us up higher rather than reducing things downward.
The interpretation of the parable is quite clear. The metaphors of agriculture are applied to our lives with God. God is imaged as a farmer who plants his seed, “the seed”, we are told, “is the word of God”. Do we have regard for that idea, the idea of “the word of God”? Does it mean anything to us? Does God mean anything to us or is the church simply a social entity, a gathering of people with whom we are comfortable and have grown up with together? It is that, to be sure, but I hope it is something much, much more. That something much more has to do with the spiritual realities of living and dying, the patterns of Christian faith that belong to our life here but also connect us to a greater and a living community that extends far beyond our local scene. To have a hold of that vision is saving grace.
The interpretation of the parable makes it perfectly clear that we are the ground into which the seed of God’s word is sown. The interpretation of the parable challenges us about what kind of ground are we, making it unmistakably clear that something is required of us. The wayside ground is about going along with the world, hearing with our ears but without anything taking root in our hearts; the devil snatches us away because we do not let the good take a hold of us in our lives. The rocky ground, too, is about not persevering with what has been sown in us; not resisting temptations of one sort or another. The thorny ground especially speaks to our frantic and frenetic age of endless busyness and distraction, our inability to stop and think and, even more, our desire to equate the good life with the “riches and pleasures of this life”. The reality is that we are consumed by cares and worries. We are not happy and cannot be.
So what is left? Only the good ground which is “an honest and a good heart” which is about nothing less than “hear[ing] the word, keep[ing] it, and bring[ing] forth fruit with patience”. How is that to happen? Only through our prayerful attentiveness to what belongs to the patterns and practices of our life together with God in Word and Sacrament. It is about living what we are constantly learning. Therein lies our joy and our good, even the good life.
Fr. David Curry
Sexagesima 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/02/08/sermon-for-sexagesima-3/
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