Sermon for Sexagesima, 5:00pm Choral Evensong, St. George’s, Halifax
admin | 31 January 2016“How readest thou?”
At the heart of the Common Prayer tradition is the Eucharistic lectionary, a creedal way of reading the Scriptures and one which, at the very least, has the virtue of being able to say what the Scriptures are and why and how they should and can be read, a lectionary, too, which is at once catholic and ecumenical.
We meet for Evening Prayer, a wonderful service which provides us with the luxury of luxuriating in longer passages of Scripture than that to which we are ordinarily accustomed and especially for extended passages belonging to the wonderful narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures, such as the story of Joseph which we begin to read tonight. But the Gospel this morning about the parable of the Sower and the Seed provides the interpretative framework. It complements the question raised in this evening’s second lesson, “How do you read?” “Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God.” There is a parable and there is its interpretation. The parallel to tonight’s second lesson could hardly be clearer. The force of the question, “how readest thou?” could not be greater.
The year 2015 marked the 30th anniversary of The Book of Alternative Services here in Canada and in some sense the anniversary of the founding of The Prayer Book Society of Canada. The conjunction of the two is at once necessary and unfortunate. What was unfortunate is that it appeared that the Prayer Book Society arose and exists essentially in reaction to institutional authority, particularly, the Bishops in their mistaken and misguided attempt to impose the new alternative liturgies upon parishes over and against the constitutional principles of the Anglican Church of Canada and the doctrinal magisterium of an Anglican Christian identity embodied in the principles of the Common Prayer tradition. What is necessary is the task of upholding and reclaiming the fullness of our spiritual identity and life.
There was, to be sure, the lamentable reaction of many supporters of the Prayer Book whose secret desire was for an exomologesis, a public confession, if not an auto-da-fe, of the Bishops of their folly and their repentance, if not in sackcloth and ashes, at least in cope and miter, by throwing the wretched Green Book, as some styled it, into the fire. On the other side, were those who, like Archbishop Garnsworthy, viewed the Prayer Book as the Red Monster! Interesting times, to be sure, and a legacy of confusion such as in this Diocese about the inability to distinguish between what can be commanded and what can only be commended. It was one thing to commend the BAS; quite another thing to command its use.
The BAS was, in many ways, a good thing; it corralled and contained the wildness of liturgical experimentation rampant in parishes and dioceses at that time. Paradoxically, it was the Prayer Book Society of Canada that provided its justification as an alternative, not a substitute or a replacement for the Prayer Book, and as dependent upon the teaching authority of the Prayer Book.
The first was an obvious point and yet even about that there continues to be a struggle. The second is more of a challenge and remains so. The critical point has yet to be fully grasped. “How readest thou?” speaks to that deeper issue.
The question highlights the necessity to understand the nature of Revelation and the way in which Revelation is mediated to us first in the Scriptures themselves and secondly through the pattern of reading that is based upon nothing less than a philosophical reading and understanding of the Scriptures, the Scriptures as philosophically thinkable. The BAS did not arise out of a vacuum. It was shaped and formed by several impulses: ecumenism, liturgical experimentation, and most of all, modern biblical theology which thought to transcend the denominational differences and tensions between the churches especially of the West through what can only be described as a ‘scientific’ way of reading the Scriptures.
None of those impulses remain in any real sense apart from a general and unthinking acceptance of the premises of modern biblical theology. While the confluence of these three strands held great promise in the decades of the sixties and the seventies, the dominant influence practically speaking was the liturgical expression of the reforms of the Vatican II council of the Roman Catholic Church which came to light in 1968. The central plank of those reforms liturgically was the Roman Catholic Church’s embrace of the assumptions of modern biblical theology. What were those assumptions? Simply put, the jettisoning of the metaphysical and philosophical character and content of the classical and ecumenical lectionary of the Western Church which was developed out of the creedal traditions that shaped catholic orthodoxy; jettisoned in favour of a supposedly historical reading of the Scriptures which is utterly incapable of saying what the Scriptures are, having abandoned the philosophical logic upon which such a determination can only be made. Instead of the theology of Revelation, there is only historical relativism.
Ironically, this has led to the spectacle of a complete fragmentation of the corporate reading of the Scriptures. For what was lost to the Roman Catholic Church was also lost by every other Church in the Protestant world. In a profound way, the only hold-out was The Book of Common Prayer but only in parishes which didn’t substitute its lectionary – the readings for the Eucharist – with the new lectionaries. I have to stress lectionaries. For there are a plethora of them; there is no unity. There was more unity in terms of a somewhat common creedal way of reading the Scriptures before these mid-century iconoclasms than what has come after it. There was need for a Prayer Book Society long before the appearance of the BAS and there is a need for it still today precisely on the basis of this question, “How readest thou?” I hope that we can say with Prospero to Alonzo in the Tempest, “let us not burden our remembrance with a heaviness that is gone.”
More recently the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks has written a compelling book which complements Jesus’ question, ‘how readest thou?’. Not in God’s Name provides a most thorough and wonderful examination of The Book of Genesis with respect to the necessary interaction of Jewish, Christian and Islamic theologies in terms of the overarching theme of repentance, a theme which has its explicit reference in the great traditions of spirituality belonging to each religion. It is a masterpiece that illustrates the primacy of the question, ‘how readest thou?’
Genesis is a set of stories about brothers: Cain and Abel, Abraham and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. Through the various spectacles of sibling rivalry, God forges a people for himself through whom his will for all peoples is proclaimed. But are we willing to listen and attend to these stories?
Consider the story of Joseph. Joseph was the beloved son of Jacob by his beautiful wife Rachel. Rachel, the love of his life, only bore Jacob two sons, Joseph and Benjamin, in his old age, before dying in childbirth at Benjamin’s birth. Apart from Joseph and Benjamin, the sons of Jacob and Rachel, there were the other sons of Jacob by Leah as well as some sons from the handmaidens of both Rachel and Leah. These are the stories belonging to the origins of the twelve tribes of Israel; stories, too, that pit human presumption and desire against God’s will and purpose, as if God could be made subject to human folly and human ambition. Somehow the providence of God is accomplished in spite of ourselves, even more profoundly, it is accomplished in and through our follies and wickednesses.
Joseph, the story goes, had managed to become an annoyance and a nuisance to his other brothers, particularly since his dreams seemed to suggest his rule and power over them – the story which we hear in this evening’s first lesson. As a result, the brothers conspired to get rid of him, casting him into a dry well and then selling him into slavery. Placing the blood of a lamb on his coat, they informed their father, Jacob, that Joseph was dead. Meanwhile, sold into slavery, he ended up in Egypt where, having spurned the sexual advances of Pharaoh’s wife, he was nonetheless falsely accused and thrown into prison.
While in prison, he came to Pharaoh’s attention as an interpreter of dreams. Successfully interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams, he was rewarded with the portfolio of Minister of State, we might say, and was put in charge of domestic affairs. In that capacity, or at least its Egyptian equivalent, he saw to the storing up of wheat and grain during seven years of plenty in anticipation of seven lean years. During those years of famine, the sons of Jacob, also known as Israel, came down to Egypt looking for food. So Joseph finally encounters his brothers who had betrayed him. What will happen? They are at his mercy.
Through the device of a cup, the brothers are brought back to Joseph. What will he do to them? After all, they had betrayed him and sold their own brother, the beloved son of their father, into slavery. What will transpire? Revenge? No, instead, reconciliation, but only through the conviction of recognition. The cup found in their sacks serves as the instrument that brings them into Joseph’s hands and into his presence for judgment and mercy. The scene is exquisite in its tenderness. Joseph, unable to contain himself, reveals himself to his brothers. They are at once convicted of their betrayal of their brother and yet are made to realize that God has accomplished a greater purpose through their evil. “I am Joseph, your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now, do not be dismayed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.” A powerful and eloquent narrative and one which shapes the experience of the Christian Eucharist.
Jonathan Sacks shows how these stories relate to the interplay of Jewish, Christian and Islamic understandings. For all three religions there is a sense of something learned in and through the rivalries of brothers each vying for their father’s affection perhaps, each wanting to be the other or to supplant the other, and yet each learning the profounder lessons of teshuvah, metanoia, and tawba, to use the terms for repentance belonging to Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic respectively. What is wanted is a change of heart and mind, a returning to the very principle of our life and being from which we have turned away. Repentance, the Anglican Divine, Lancelot Andrewes reminds us, is a redire ad principium, a circling back to truth.
The story of Joseph makes this especially clear. His brothers indeed sought his annihilation but “God sent me before you to preserve life.” God and only God, as Augustine remarks, can make good out of human evil.
In a world and culture where there is no God and no nature, we are left to the terror and despair of ourselves, a terror and a despair because to make sense of ourselves and our world requires a world of thought and of others who reason and think. Without that there is only the tyranny of the will and the emptiness of the self. The intellectual – ourselves as self-conscious and as knowers – participates in the intelligible. If that is left out of the equation, we are empty and adrift, left to “the devices and desires of our own hearts” as the Confession so perfectly puts it, unable to say what anything is let alone who we are, not unlike the certain man who lies wounded and half-dead on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.
The question, “how readest thou?” belongs to the telling of a quintessentially Christian story, the story of the so-called Good Samaritan, a story which is meant to awaken a metanoia in us that leads to compassion and care. How we read leads in turn to how we act – acting out of compassion for the forms of our suffering humanity, recognizing the other in us, and compelled to mercy, recognizing our neighbor as our brother in God; in short, our love of neighbor as belonging to the love of God. “How readest thou?” is the question that catapults us into the mercy of God.
“How readest thou?”
Fr. David Curry
Sexagesima, Evensong
St. George’s, Halifax
Jan. 31st, 2016
PBSC NS PEI