Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity

admin | 26 July 2015

“Ye shall know them by their fruits”

Actions, it seems, speak louder than words; at times, actions even seem to invalidate our thoughts and words. Such is hypocrisy – the gap between our expressed intentions and our actions, our saying one thing and doing another. This morning’s Gospel seems to affirm the priority of action. Not only shall we be known by our fruits but it might even seem that our words are empty and meaningless. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.”

But that would be an incomplete view of what is set before us in these readings. The Gospel is really calling us to act according to who we are in Christ. Who we are in Christ is signaled profoundly in the Epistle reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. “You have received a spirit of sonship … we are the children of God,” he claims, “and if children, then heirs; heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ: if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” This is powerful. Our actions should reveal our identity in Christ. We should be known by our fruits, our actions in accord with our vocation and identity as Christians.

This is the constant theme of the Trinity season illustrated constantly in the relationship between the Collects, Epistles and Gospels. It is all about acting upon what we have been given to see about our humanity as redeemed in Christ. It is all about actions in accord with words and not the divisions between them. For if we are simply what we do – if who we are resides simply in our actions – then we are doomed to despair.

Actions have consequences. This is a truism. Of course, actions have consequences and, of course, actions can be seen to reveal intentions and thoughts. But think about it for a moment. If you are defined simply by your actions then who are you? Shall we tally up the score? How many good things versus how many not so good things? Meanness versus kindness? Harm versus helpfulness? “The good that I would do, I do not do,” Paul famously reminds us, “the evil that I would not do is what I do.” On this score, our actions condemn us. They are not always in accord with what we know and want to do that is right and good and true. Such are “the devices and the desires of our own hearts”.

The problem about saying that our actions define us is that it condemns us to our faults and failings. We are not complete and perfect. We know this and so simply saying that actions define you is incomplete and ultimately self-defeating. For it would mean that you are just as much the wrong that you have done as whatever good you have done. It condemns us to our actions as if our actions were simply everything. This is to forget two things about our humanity: first, that we are finite creatures, limited and imperfect; secondly, that we are sinners. More importantly, it is to forget and to forsake the theme signaled in the Collect – the theme of divine providence. There is something more than just ourselves in our thoughts and actions, something more that belongs to the challenge of our lives, namely, the struggle to act in accord with what we believe which can only happen by the grace of God. Left to ourselves and to the primacy of our actions our lives are all a shipwreck.

“How came we ashore?” Miranda asks her father, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s drama, The Tempest. He was the Duke of Milan but preferred his books in the study of natural philosophy to the mundane duties of running his dukedom which he delegated to his brother. Betrayed by his brother in cahoots with the King of Naples, Prospero and Miranda have been set adrift on the seas on a derelict raft and have washed up on an island – “the Bermoothes” – Bermuda, as it turns out. Not such a bad place to come ashore, I suppose. Miranda at the time was three. Now at fifteen she is to learn who she is: the daughter of the Duke of Milan! Prospero’s answer to her question “how came we ashore?” is “by providence divine.”

The play explores the ambiguities of Prospero’s intent. His knowledge of nature seen in the eyes of the Renaissance is a kind of magic – white magic. It belongs to early modernity in different ways to see knowledge as conferring a power over nature. We are only too well aware of the deadly consequences of such knowledge in our own times. Prospero conjures up a storm, a tempest, to bring his betrayers to the island and under his power. To what end? Revenge? Or something more? Reconciliation? There is a nice sense here of the interplay between natural and moral philosophy something which belongs to the current struggles in our contemporary world. On the ship are not only his betrayers but also the son of one of his betrayers, Ferdinand, the son of Alonso, King of Naples. As well there is the noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo, who gave Prospero his books as he was being set adrift. The play unfolds the love theme between Ferdinand and Miranda and leads to forgiveness and reconciliation – interestingly enough, forgiveness and reconciliation even towards those who show no remorse, no change, such as Prospero’s brother. Somehow grace is greater than even those who resist it; even they are sustained by what they refuse to embrace. That is their contradiction and their condemnation.

The Providence of God is the condition for true human freedom. Our actions can only really have meaning in an intelligible world, the world which God has made and which exists for something more than our whims and fantasies. And we are part of that world, part of creation, indeed a special creation, having been made in the image of God. For Christians, the Providence of God is written in the story of Christ. And we are meant to read our lives and our actions through the story of Christ in us. The poet George Herbert in a poem called Providence notes that it is our human vocation to write about the Providence of God which “strongly and sweetly” moves all things, a reference to The Book of Wisdom and to Boethius’ great 6^th century treatise, The Consolation of Philosophy. “Man is the world’s high Priest,” Herbert says, the one whom “of all the creatures both in sea and land … thou hast made known thy ways. And put the penne alone into his hand, And made him Secretarie of thy praise.” The poem then explores the large range of the theme of Providence which is about the essential goodness of the created world, the divine reason which runs through all things.

“O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason,” Boethius says while languishing in jail falsely accused and about to be executed. He is comforted by Lady Philosophy who appears to him, her dress bearing two Greek letters, theta and pi, representing the theoretical and the practical, a ladder joining them but her dress is torn; there is a gap between human thought and action. Carrying a book and a scepter, she comes to teach him about the divine reason which overarches and underlies all human thought and action.

Shakespeare plays, too, with these themes. It is indeed “by providence divine” that they have come ashore. It is indeed “by providence divine” that there is reconciliation and forgiveness despite the actions of betrayal. In a marvelous scene, Miranda and Ferdinand are playing chess. She accuses him of playing false; he protests but she replies “yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, And I would call it fair play.” We are all “one of the false ones” as Shakespeare puts it in another play. Somehow love and grace triumph over ourselves in spite of ourselves and call us to the possibilities of “a sea-change into something rich and strange”, something beyond simply our actions which betray us, something which calls us to who we truly are, to our sonship in Christ.

Providence is written out for us to read in Christ and in our lives in Christ. Gonzalo reads and recognizes the providence of God at work, first, in uniting Ferdinand and Miranda, and second, in reconciling Prospero and Alonzo. It is “by providence divine” which has, he says, “chalked forth the way/ Which brought us hither,” an image which is about writing. Lost, we have been found in the Providence of God “and all of us ourselves when no man was his own”.

To be convicted about what is false calls us to what is true. Our challenge is to want what God wants for us knowing our failings but without trying to justify them or ignore them. To the contrary, the Gospel challenges us to be true to who we are in Christ. The fruits of our actions are meant to reveal Christ in us. It can only happen “by providence divine,” praying that God may “put away from us all hurtful things, and give us those things which be profitable for us.” We have to want to be who we say we are – the children of God.