Sermon for Sexagesima

admin | 19 February 2017

“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart,
having heard the word, keep it and bring forth fruit with patience.”

The parable of the sower and the seed focuses our attention on the quality of the ground upon which the Word of God is sown. It recalls the story of the Fall. The ground is cursed. Adam, who at once signifies our humanity collectively and as an individual, is told “cursed is the ground because of you, in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” The ground is cursed because Adam and Eve succumbed to the beguiling wisdom of the serpent and thus lost the ground of their standing with God. The ground of creation becomes the place of alienation from God. Our labour, as we saw last week, is based upon this sense of separation yet becomes a part of the work of redemption. We are returned to God but only through our awareness of our connection to the ground, to the dust of creation.

Recall the story from Genesis. In a lovely image, God is said to have “walked in the garden in the cool of the day”, but where were we? We had hidden ourselves from his presence. Why? Our fear is the beginning of an awareness of our self-willed separation from him. It is important to understand something of what this means.

The story of the Fall seeks to explain the origin of sin and evil, of suffering and death. It locates the problem not in the material universe – the problem is not with the dust of nature – but in the disobedience of man. As disobedience, it is an act of the will against what is known as good. Creation as a whole and in its individual parts is emphatically and unambiguously declared to be “good”; in fact, “very good.” The commandment given to man – and only to man – is also by definition good. It is implicitly known as good.

Alone of all creation, the Adam – our humanity – is said to be made in the image of God. Less abstractly but in a complementary image, man is said to be “formed from the dust” and to have had God’s spirit “breathed into him”. He is a spiritual creature with a relation to every other created being and with a special relation to the Creator. The Fall is about the disorder of that relationship. As made in the image of God, man is capable of knowing God. Hence he is given to name the things of creation, which is to say, he is capable of knowing God’s knowing of the things he has made. And he is given a commandment.

What about the serpent? In the form of the story, the serpent is the occasion for the disobedience through the raising of questions. As such the serpent signifies the agency of man’s reason. The problem is not with the raising of questions per se but with the direction or the intent of the questions. For the questions of the serpent do not seek an understanding; to the contrary, they seek to undermine what is known as good, though not known as known. The serpent’s questions insinuate doubt and instigate revolt. Adam and Eve prefer the lie of their wills to the truth of God’s will. The rest, as they say, is history, “of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree,” as Milton famously put it.

It is our history. This discomforts us. It doesn’t seem fair, after all, that we should suffer things like colds, flues, aches and pains because of Adam and Eve long ago. It doesn’t seem fair until the lesson comes home that ‘they’ are ‘we’. We are in the story. This is our story. What we do and what others do have consequences for everyone. The point is very simple. We turn towards the ground of our self-will and away from God.

Yet the ground remains God’s good ground. He made it. What will we make of it? The story of the Fall mercifully contains the promise of redemption as well. The toil of Adam and the pain of Eve are not external punishments but just consequences which have in them redemptive lessons. “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return,” are the very words which belong to The Imposition of Ashes on Ash Wednesday.

We are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. The ground of our lives becomes more than simply the place of our opposition and separation from God. The ground is to be the place of our being recalled to God. The labours of our lives become the occasions of our learning the lessons of God’s will for us. The lessons are learned through the fact of hardship and toil and in the face of suffering and death. Yet the ground holds the promise of redemption.

It may be the place, too, of the making manifest of the works of God in us. For however much suffering and death are inescapably connected to our sins and the sins of others, there can be no simple equation between the particular sins in our lives and the particular forms of our suffering. The Fall simply shows our reason as turned towards the dust like the serpent whose curse is to creep upon the ground; “upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat”. Our wisdom, as John Donne calls it, is “a creeping wisdom,” deceitful and serpent-like. At the very least, our understanding is dust-covered. We cannot be sure that we truly know ourselves let alone presume to judge others.

The mercy is that God knows us in his love for us. The works of God are made manifest even in the ground of our opposition to God. God’s works a greater good out of human folly. “Then shall the fall further the flight in me”, as the poet George Herbert puts it, not our flight from God when we were hiding in the garden, but the flight of our return to God.

The gospels are full of the wonderful stories of God’s redemptive work in the mercies of Christ Jesus. Jesus writes with “his finger on the ground” we know not what. We only know what he says to those who in their self-righteousness condemn a woman for adultery. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” “And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground,” again we know not what he wrote, only what he says to her: “Go and sin no more”. And Jesus makes out of the ground of our accusations the ointment of salvation in the story of the healing of the eyes of the man blind from birth, a story which follows almost immediately upon the story of the woman taken in adultery. Why? “That the works of God might be made manifest in him”. Jesus is the stricken rock out of which pours forth the life-giving water, the sacraments of the Church.

The cursed ground of our disobedience becomes the place of our participation in the life of God. But only if we will be that good ground “that in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it and bring forth good fruit with patience.” It is the challenge of our lives in Christ, the challenge of our Parish in uncertain times, the challenge concentrated for us in the season of Lent for which these ‘gesima’ Sundays prepare us.