by CCW | 24 January 2016 15:00
January, the forgotten poet of Stanley, Nova Scotia, Alden Nowlan, remarks, signals a truth about Maritime winters, “a truth that all men share but almost never utter. This is a country where a man can die simply from being caught outside.” He was speaking about this kind of week and day here. Charles G.D. Roberts, a celebrated Canadian poet from New Brunswick and a professor at King’s College when the University was located here in Windsor, captures the winter scene as well in a poem entitled The Winter Fields written for the Centenary of Shelley in 1890.
Winds here, and sleet, and frost that bites like steel.
The low bleak hill rounds under the low sky.
Naked of flock and fold the fallows lie,
Thin streaked with meagre drift. The gusts reveal
By fits the dim grey snakes of fence, that steal
Through the white dusk. The hill-foot poplars sigh,
While storm and death with winter trample by,
And the iron fields ring sharp, and blind lights reel.
“Winds here,” he says. I like to think that “here” means the winter fields of the environs of Windsor. But while the octet – the first eight lines of the sonnet – evokes the harsh realities of winter, the sestet, which completes the sonnet, opens us out to another reflection. Hid “in the lonely ridges, wrenched with pain” of the bleak mid-winter landscape is “the germ of ecstasy – the sum/ of Life that waits on summer, till the rain/ Whisper in April and the crocus come.” Lurking beneath the snow and ice of the cold death of winter lies the hope of spring – “the sum of Life that waits on summer”.
These poetic reflections complement the Scriptural readings for this Sunday, a day designated and adorned with what might seem to be a rather antiquated and awkward term, not a little mysterious and strange, Septuagesima. It signals a shift in emphasis. The contemplations of divinity that are so much a strong feature of the Epiphany season with its concentration upon the essential divinity of Jesus Christ give place to the ground of creation, to the vineyard of human labour and work.
There is a kind of progression from the central aspects of the Epiphany with its emphasis on the nature of God to the so-called ‘Gesima Sundays’ that turn us towards Lent and Easter. Sometimes known as the pre-Lenten Sundays, they already herald the near approach of Easter, signaling by their Latin names the number of days before Easter, before the celebration, we might say, of that greater spring of our souls and lives in Christ’s Resurrection, the triumph of the greater life of God over each and every form of death. Both Epiphany and the ‘Gesima Sundays’ teach us something about our humanity as illumined by the light of God’s grace and glory such is Epiphany and about the dignity of human labour such are the ‘Gesima Sundays’.
With Epiphany we learn that our humanity is made capable of God and that our highest good is found in the contemplation of God. “Did ye not know,” Jesus says in a kind of gentle rebuke to Mary and Joseph, “that I must be about my father’s business?” Or as another way of translating it suggests, “in my father’s house.” “They found him in the temple,” Luke tells us and, as Origen remarks, “so must we.” Epiphany reveals God to us and signals the purpose of that revelation, namely, human redemption. As the miracle story of the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee so powerfully teaches, human redemption is about our social joys with God and with one another.
Wonderful. But does that mean that human life is all party and pleasure? No. This is where the ‘Gesima Sundays’ come in. They remind us of the dignity and the truth of human labour in the vineyard of God’s creation. They recall us to the interplay of nature and grace in human lives and actions. They show us how the natural or classical virtues of temperance, courage, prudence, and justice are transformed and perfected into the forms of love. They provide a wonderful picture of the same theme which we saw last Sunday, the idea that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” (Aquinas). And so here our labours cannot be measured by the limits of human justice but by the greater justice and charity of God. In a way that must seem to be more than a little disturbing, Septuagesima Sunday especially teaches us that the point of our labours does not lie simply in worldly rewards or corruptible crowns. There is an intrinsic worth and value to our labours that cannot be measured. They are ultimately about our life with God in the good order of his creation and as subject to his will and purpose for us and our world. It is “his vineyard,” after all.
This challenges the technocratic exuberances and arrogances of our contemporary world. We are, it seems, utterly enamoured with what technology can do for us oblivious to its limitations and dangers. Even the physicist Stephen Hawking recently noted that it is the advancements in science and technology that most threaten our humanity, citing nuclear war, global warming, and genetically engineered viruses. But apart from those dangers there are others, too, that raise all kinds of questions about what is the real good for our humanity. The current interest in robots and automation is a case in point. It is one thing for machines to enhance and improve human labour; quite another to replace human labourers altogether. Is hedonistic leisure – a life without any work or labour – really good for us?
It seems to me that the ‘Gesima’ turn to our labours in the vineyard of creation is of the greatest significance. Leisure in its older sense – the term is scholé from which we get the word school – frees us from certain necessities such as the provisions for food, shelter and clothing but only to liberate us to thought and study, another kind of labour that opens us out, as Epiphany shows, to a higher kind of pleasure, the joys of learning, the joys of prayer and praise. Liturgy is our work, for example, that extends into the mundane activities of our everyday lives. Every form of work is about our commitment to one another and to God, working with the good order of creation and discovering in that work a deeper knowledge of ourselves, a love for God and for one another. Our labours as the ‘Gesima Sundays’ teach us are really all the labours of love! The love of God and the love of one another.
Work can be degrading and demeaning, to be sure, but there is also a dignity and a spiritual truth to our work. Lose that sensibility and you have lost something of what truly makes us human.
There is, too, I think another problem in our unthinking embrace of all things technological. It is a false ontology. We forget that we are the maker in our subservience to the things we make. Our power over nature results in an enslavement of ourselves to what we can do with nature as well as the presumption to think we are God. There is a deep problem in thinking that changing nature, including human nature, is more important than knowing and understanding nature, the turn taken by Sir Francis Bacon, the father of empirical science, the problem about which we should be better able to see now. There is always the question about what kind of change?
The maker is always distinct and separate from that which he makes. This realization, too, should awaken us to another essential feature of the ‘Gesima Sundays’ – to God as Creator and to us as labourers working with and for God to his glory and for the good of his church and people. The Epiphany theme of God as “the Creator and Preserver of all things visible and invisible” underlies the purpose and nature of our work.
Our labours are not without spiritual purpose. Hedonism – the philosophy of sensual pleasure – does not constitute the real truth and dignity of our humanity. Labour becomes something more than just working in the heat of the day or in the cold of the bleak mid-winter. Through our labour as works of virtue we share in the life of Christ. Our labours become the forms of love. Faith, hope and love are the great three, the greatest of which is love.
A vineyard. The Gospel parable is quite profound. A vineyard is already part of creation transformed, a change from chaotic wildness to something purposive and good. It signals the true nature of our engagement with God’s creation and opens us out to how our labours are really about our participation in God’s will and purpose. God seeks for us to work in his vineyard to produce the very best that we can. He looks to us to bring forth “grapes”, not “wild grapes”, as Isaiah puts it in an especially powerful passage. “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting; and he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry!” (Isaiah 5.7).
The ‘Gesima Sundays’ recall us to the positive purpose of our labours that counter the violence and the injustice that our exuberance and arrogance can so easily create. They recall us to what belongs to human dignity, to the dignity of human labour as labours of love.
Fr. David Curry
Septuagesima Sunday
January 24th, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/01/24/sermon-for-septuagesima-7/
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