by CCW | 4 October 2015 14:42
“There was war in heaven,” we heard on The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels just past. It is a daunting prospect to hear about war in heaven. Surely the endless parade of wars on earth is more than enough to disturb us, let alone the thought of war in heaven. For however we conceive of heaven, war would not seem to be part of the picture. And yet, the idea of war in heaven connects wonderfully to the readings of this day. We are being taught about love in the face of all of the enmities and divisions, all of the wars of our world and day, and, above all, love in the face of the wars in our own hearts.
The Collect for today echoes the demands of the baptismal service wherein we “renounce the devil and all his works,” “the vain pomp and glory of the world,” and “the sinful desires of the flesh,” reminding us of the necessity of God’s grace for us in the living out of our lives in order “to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil.” These are the very things that have been renounced as the precondition for professing Christ and being baptised in the name of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Baptism is about the triumph of God’s love over and above the limits of all our human loves. That, in a way, is the point, a point which is easily overlooked and forgotten. We forget that our loves are incomplete. We forget about the easy animosities in our own hearts and souls, the wars within each of us. We forget about sin and evil.
Baptism is a strong reminder to all of us of our Christian identity and vocation. It is about the triumph of God’s love and goodness over all that stands against the truth of God, absolutely all, past, present and future in the whole of human history and experience. The ultimate expression of that principle of opposition to God is the devil, Satan, Lucifer, that ancient serpent, who embodies the contradiction of all and every sin. Think about it for just a moment. Lucifer means light-bearer. That is the meaning of his very creation and the very vocation of his being. But what happens when he denies his creatureliness and his calling? He becomes the prince of darkness and the prince of lies, a study in absolute contradiction. He exists in his own denial of his very being and the purpose of his being. Such is darkness rather than light. And such is the darkness in us and in our world, a world that abounds in no end of evil and sorrow and suffering.
If we are going to begin to understand this world of ours in such sorry and dismal disarray, it will mean a deeper way of thinking than pointing the finger of blame at other cultures, religions, politics, socio-economic conditions; in short, other peoples. It will mean looking at ourselves. It will mean discovering, no doubt with a sense of sadness, the Fall in our own hearts. You and I, all of us, if we are honest, know exactly what St. Paul so clearly and concisely notes, namely, that “the good that I would do, I do not do; the evil that I would not do is what I do.” Our hearts are divided. There is a war within.
Yet this is the good news! The good news is to know about the war and the tensions in our own hearts and even in our own world and day. For without that knowledge, deeply known and deeply felt, there can be no love and no knowledge of the truth of God. The story of the Fall, the story of Adam and Eve, is lived out almost every day in each of our lives. The truth of God is discovered through the betrayal of truth that awakens us to self-awareness and to the desire for goodness of God. Truth is discovered through the betrayal of truth in the awakening to self-consciousness.
“There was war in heaven,” John tells us in his marvellous vision of the cosmic dimensions of the struggle between good and evil. There was war, not there is war. He is reminding us of the ultimate triumph of good over evil, a triumph expressed in Christian terms as accomplished, not by some heroic angelic might, but “by the blood of the lamb,” a reference to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. There we see the full meaning of sin’s folly and its full overcoming. For what is Christ’s crucifixion really all about? Our foolish and vain attempt to obliterate God from the horizons of our minds and hearts. Such is our darkness but the goodness of God is far greater. Out of our evil he accomplishes our good, our salvation, our redemption. We are returned in Christ to the truth and the goodness of God who seeks what is best and right for us. It is what is wanted for all of us.
Our Gospel story this morning shows us how love is proclaimed in the face of hostility and enmity, the very thing that Michaelmas, too, proclaims. The whole 12th chapter of Mark’s Gospel captures this idea concentrated for us in these passages from that chapter. The chapter begins with a parable about a vineyard that has been let out to tenants. The master of the vineyard sends several servants, one after another, “to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard,” some not all. They are either beaten or killed. Finally, the master of the vineyard sends his “beloved son” but him, too, they take and kill. It is a telling tale against us in the perversity of our humanity, a tale about the reality of the wars and evils in our hearts. The beloved son in the parable is an explicit reference to Christ and to the meaning of his coming. Love in the face of all and every evil.
The chapter goes on to identify the concrete forms of hatred and animosity encountered by Jesus in such New Testament types as Pharisees and Herodians, Sadducees, and scribes, all of whom engage him in disputation, all of whom he refutes and criticises. He is the Son of God whom our humanity rejects but as the Gospel story makes clear the love of God is the first and greatest commandment requiring the whole of our being and as the condition for our lives with one another. We learn this in the awareness of our own hearts of division. To learn it is to discover, as Jesus tells the scribe here, that you are not far from the kingdom of heaven. The chapter ends with a warning about human presumption and with the story of the widow’s mite. Others gave out of their abundance but she out of her poverty gave all she had; in short, she illustrates the Gospel theme about loving God with the whole of our being. A powerful and thought-provoking chapter.
How is this love to be accomplished in us? Only by our openness to what the Scriptures proclaim and the Sacraments provide about the grace of God in Jesus Christ. For we are only aware of ourselves as selves in our separation from the truth of God. That is the beginning of our being turned back to him in love and service, knowing our sins and failings, to be sure, but knowing even more the triumph of God’s goodness and grace and seeking for that in our lives day in and day out. Such is the journey of the soul that continues for each of us. It is all about the divine love which is always greater than our human loves, the love that is proclaimed in the face of all of the wars of our world and our hearts.
In the current world of unfettered global capitalism what is missing is any kind of ethical sensibility and discourse of meaning. If profit is God, then ‘the end justifies the means’ and ‘might is right’, an old tale albeit now in modern dress. There is no ethical principle. Can anyone really be surprised then that Volkswagen compromises on carbon emissions? Is there anything ethical about Google? Every time you use Google, Google is using you and for the ultimate expression of the unethical – the construction of knowledge without knowers. In short, what is absent is an ethic of action rooted in compassion, love, the very thing that we have seen in the Scriptural readings the past several weeks. In other words, the counter to our dis-ease and distress is before us. It is about the divine love.
The tragedy of our churches and culture is that we deny this. This, then, is our death, the death of God in us. Yet God is greater than our hearts of denial and enmity. Love triumphs and only so do we live, endlessly born anew in the grace of Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVIII (Michaelmastide)
October 4th, 2015, 8:00am
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