Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
“Be not anxious”
We live, if not in interesting times, according to the familiar Chinese proverb, then certainly in anxious times. I do not need to chronicle the different things which belong to the anxieties of our world and day. Certainly it has been an anxious time for all of us in Windsor and for some far more than for others at the loss through fire of Edgehill. 2016, I have been saying, is the year of Edgehill referring to the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Edgehill Church School for Girls, an institution closely connected to this parish. And while Edgehill as an institution has been amalgamated with King’s Collegiate School since 1976 to form King’s-Edgehill School, the building itself still stood as visible reminder of times past and was an iconic structure in the landscape of the town. Some of our parishioners were living at Edgehill and have suffered great losses. I will keep you informed about what help might be needed for them.
So anxious times indeed. Yet, as Providence would have it, anxiety is the word that confronts us in the Gospel for today, though to talk about anxiety, it seems to me, only runs the risk of increasing our anxieties. The Gospel, however, provides the only and real counter to all and every form of anxiety. The word itself is of rather modern provenance, really only appearing in the 17th century and really only taking on a whole freight of meaning in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the phenomenon of existentialism and the psycho-analytic philosophy of Freud. The German word, angst, has entered into our ordinary discourse; this is anxiety weighted with a whole lot of other concerns, what I would call anti-philosophical assumptions. It has to do with how we see the world: as empty and meaningless, indifferent and even hostile to the human condition; in short, as almost evil, or as essentially good and wonderful, a place of beauty and truth because it is God’s world of which we are an essential part. That difference in how we see things makes all the difference for our lives.
It was not until 1959 that the word anxiety appeared in the Prayer Book Gospel reading for this Sunday. All of the Epistles and Gospels in English were taken from the King James Version of the Bible in the mother book of the Common Prayer tradition, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Before that the English translation of the Scripture readings in the English Prayer Books was derived from the Great Bible which, like the 1611 King James Version, too, was largely informed by William Tyndale’s English translations of the 1530s. Only the Psalms have remained in Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translation in the Great Bible, probably because of their quality of memorability and poetic power. But what was the word in the Great Bible and in the King James Bible now rendered as anxiety in our Prayer Book? “Be not careful.” Wow!
