In the world ye shall have tribulation;
but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world
Jesus’s words seem to imply a conflict between the things of the spirit and the things of the world. But that would be, I think, a mistake. Rogation Sunday is really part and parcel of the Easter message which is not about a flight from the world but the redemption of the world. That is an essential feature of redemption, about our being returned to God and abiding in his love. We only live when we are alive to God. Our relation to the world belongs to that understanding. The world is God’s world. Redemption cannot be a negation of creation but its fulfillment.
Rogation Sunday provides us with a wonderful theology of the land. We are greatly exercised and concerned about our relation to the land, to what we call the environment. But how we use words greatly affects our thinking and our living or acting, a point which The Epistle of St. James clearly indicates. “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only.” What does it mean to be a doer of the word? It means actions, yes, but actions that are themselves words in motion. We are to act upon words that are heard and if heard, then words that are spoken and proclaimed. The Epistle points us to a fundamental feature of the Christian religion and beyond, namely, the idea of a way of life predicated upon a way of thinking.
What kind of way of life? A way of life which embraces an ethical approach to the land in which we are placed. Rogation refers to prayer, to the prayer of asking. That immediately challenges our assumptions about our relationship to the land and to one another by bringing both into relation to God. It challenges the various assumptions that belong to our understanding of ourselves in relation to the natural world.
Eight years ago in 2010, someone somewhere schlepped off a farm one day and moved into a city and suddenly the world tilted and changed. Globally speaking, 2010 marked the moment, statistically, when there were for the first time in history more people living in urban settings than in rural places. This profound shift has lead to a raft of different questions and concerns, one of which is what is called the ‘nature deficit,’ a sense of disconnect with the natural world. This modern malaise is wonderfully captured in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, God’s Grandeur.
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
The natural world as marked by human activity is a world from which we are more and more removed. It contributes to our unease and our uncertainty.
In another poem, Binsey Poplars, Hopkins signals the essential ambiguity that has become our modern anxiety about our relation to nature. As beings in the world we cannot help but leave our mark. The essential question is: what kind of mark? The poem reflects on the cutting down of a grove of poplars on a river bank, think of it as a version of clear-cutting. “All felled, all felled, are all felled … not spared, not one.” Then comes the question, the concern. “O if we but knew what we do/ When we delve or hew…/ Where we, even where we mean / To mend her we end her, / When we hew or delve:/ … Strokes of havoc unselve / The sweet especial scene, /Rural scene, a rural scene,/ Sweet especial rural scene.” The intent to make things better often has precisely the opposite effect; our efforts often destroy what we seek to amend or make better and lead to a loss of self as well. We unselve ourselves when we fail to honour the land in which we are placed.
As the philosopher, poet, and farmer, Wendell Berry astutely notes, when we reduce “the concept of country, homeland, dwelling place” to“‘the environment’ – that is, what surrounds us … we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves.” “We have given up the understanding” of our intimate and necessary connection to the land and to the forms of our interdependence upon the land in which we are placed. “Our culture,” he argues, “must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other.” A proper sense of culture is about our cultivation of the land. This is the rogation theme which cannot be the destructive manipulation of the land. It has to be about doing good for the land as belonging to “the good of the whole of creation.”
That sensibility connects to the Gospel. The overcoming of the world is about overcoming this false separation of ourselves from the world as separate from God. It is about the returning of all things back to God. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father,” Jesus says. Everything is gathered into the primacy of that relation. In that lies our freedom, our responsibility, our human dignity, and our contemporary challenge. It is captured in the Collect where we pray that “we may think those things that be good” so that “by thy merciful guiding [we] may perform the same.” Our thinking and our doing are grounded in God, “from whom all good things do come.” It is that understanding which we have lost and need to reclaim for our souls and for our lives in the land. Doing good for the land in which we are placed is about our participation in the goodness of God. It is profoundly sacramental and as such recalls the primacy of the ethical in our engagement with nature.
This is the meaning and point of our liturgy. It is the meaning of the sacraments in which the things of the world, such things as water, and bread and wine become the instruments of heavenly grace that unite us to God and signal the presence of his grace and life in us. Far from being a flight from the world, Rogation Sunday belongs to the gathering of nature and our humanity to God which will culminate in the Ascension.
So, too, this morning, we have the baptism of Rhett, a child of the land, a son and grandson and great-grandson of our farming communities. Baptism is explicitly about new life, new birth, about being born again, to use the common phrase. Does that mean a repudiation of nature, of the world? No. But it does mean a repudiation of the world as standing against its source and end in God, a renunciation of “the world, the flesh and the devil.” That means all that stands in opposition to its origins and truth in the goodness of God.
Those renunciations belong entirely to Christ’s overcoming of the world in its opposition to God. Baptism is about the granting to Rhett “that which by nature he cannot have,” because it is what is given by the grace of God. To use a famous phrase, “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” This is what we are witnessing in Rhett’s new beginning and new birth just as Rogation Sunday recalls us to our labours and work in the land where we have been placed, the land which we are called to honour and respect as being the good land of God’s creation, the land which is gathered to God in prayer and praise and through our labours in the land. You work the land, you prepare the ground, you plant the seed, you nurture its growth, you await the harvest. And so too with our lives, with Rhett’s life.
It has its beginning in what presupposes its continuing, a continuing in the nurturing of this new spiritual beginning. For Rhett as for all of us, it is about growing up more and more into the likeness of Christ, growing up into who we are in Christ by virtue of the grace of baptism. There is for him and for us the overcoming of our opposition to God and his world. There is for him and for us the new orientation and direction of our lives to God and with God. There is for him and for us the growing up into who we are in Christ.
It cannot be at the expense of ourselves and the land in which we are placed but only through the gathering of all things to God in prayer. He is the good in everything. The challenge is for us to hear this and to act upon what we hear. That can only happen when we attend to the holy places in the land, the holy places which remind us of our vocation. Our lives are to be lived for God and for one another in and through the land in which we are placed. Our thoughts and actions are grounded in the comings and goings of God. Such is redemption. Such is the meaning of our life in Christ.
In the world ye shall have tribulation;
but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world
Fr. David Curry
Rogation Sunday, May 6th, 2018
10:30am
Baptism of Rhett Howard Clyde Oulton