by CCW | 14 October 2018 15:00
These are strong words which complement wonderfully the strong and disturbing words of the Gospel. On the one hand, there is an invitation to a royal wedding – what’s not to like about that? – and yet, on the other hand, after the refusal, the denial even to the point of violence about that invitation, someone who is gathered in from the high-ways is cast out for not having a wedding-garment! The parables of the Gospel are not always easy to understand! They always challenge our assumptions. That is the point. They do so by opening us out to a larger and more comprehensive understanding.
In a way, it is has everything to do with “redeeming the time,” a concept which is about more than just making the best of things. It is, instead, about seeing the good and acting accordingly. We see, as Paul and Aristotle and others have observed, but “in a glass darkly.” It is an important insight about the limits of our knowing, on the one hand, and the realization of a deeper darkness in the heart of our humanity, on the other hand.
Walking circumspectly. What does that mean? Walking carefully, paying attention to where you are and what is happening, walking while looking around you; in short, walking thinkingly or thoughtfully. The word in Greek relates to the term used for Aristotle’s school of philosophy, the Peripatetics, thinking while walking. It gives a whole new and deeper meaning to thinking on one’s feet!
Walking circumspectly is a feature of this very building and its spiritual purpose. Just above the main doorway in the narthex leading into the Church is a curious phrase from Ecclesiastes. “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God.” I have often wondered why no-one has ever asked me about what that means. I can only surmise that perhaps they have been looking down at their feet literally and so are completely unaware of what was over their heads.
The passage pertains to the purpose of this spiritual and holy place. And like many biblical passages and sayings their meaning is often found in what follows which helps to explain the image or metaphor. So with this phrase. What follows the line about keeping your feet is to “be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of fools: for they consider not that they do evil.” You can see the connection to Ephesians, being “not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time.” In other words, we enter into the holy place in accord with the intention and purpose of this place, namely, to learn and be attentive to the things of God, to “be meet partakers of those holy mysteries” (BCP, p.89), even “worthy partakers” (p. 90). It reminds us to be thoughtful and prayerful not mindless and indifferent. In terms of the Gospel parable, this refers to the “wedding-garment.” It is about coming prepared or at least being willing to enter into the preparations that the liturgy itself makes for us to engage with God and with one another.
Could there be a more explicit counter to the digital social media culture that quite frankly consumes and obsesses us all? No circumspection in being tied to your phone and to the way in which its apps and programmes chosen and willed by you define and determine you in ways beyond your own knowing. No keeping your feet on twitter and facebook. Jaron Lanier’s book “Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” points out graphically and compellingly the problems and the dangers of our use of social media. We are being manipulated. He is no conservative reactionary but someone who has deeply invested in the digital world only to discover its dark side.
But that is the point of today’s readings, too. They acknowledge the dark side of our humanity, the deep contradictions that lie at the core of our being through our thoughts, words and deeds. The profound and perhaps the greatest virtue of Christianity is found in the doctrine of original sin. “As paradoxical as it might seem,” G.K. Chesterton remarked, “the great good news of the Gospel is the doctrine of original sin.” How so? Because you can’t know evil without a prior concept of the good.
I love the modest yet principled way in which Article IX[1] of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion states that teaching. This is by no means an appeal to sectarian religion. To my mind, this article captures rather nicely and compellingly a high view of doctrine that complements both Roman Catholic and Protestant sensibilities. The key phrase is the idea “that man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit.” The consequence is “wrath and damnation,” or to put in other words, the misery of human experience when we think we are left entirely to our own devices; devices now in a double sense – “the desires and devices of our hearts” as well as the literal devices of our digital world. The idea of wrath and damnation, frightening as it might seem, is actually comforting because it counters the idea, the profoundly narcissistic idea, that there is nothing more than us. As if we are all. Such things only lead to the problem of conflict narratives in a culture of competing fascisms, the manipulations of power at the expense of truth.
The only thing that is us and entirely us is sin, a point which Augustine knew and bequeathed to our western tradition but which has been conveniently and sadly ignored. It is a kind of paradox: for even sin reveals our dependence upon God and the goodness of his order and truth. That is why the doctrine of original sin, that all of us bear a fundamental contradiction in our very being, is so powerful. Paul captures is perfectly it seems to me when he says that “the good that I would I do not and the evil that I would not is what I do.” Exactly. And yet to know this is the good news, indeed the good news of today’s gospel.
It provides a kind of picture of salvation history and one which places us in a critical light. We are those who have not just ignored and made light of God’s gracious invitation to life, such is the obvious symbolic meaning of the marriage feast, but we have acted with violence towards God’s messengers and servants. We have even crucified God’s Son and Word, as another equally potent Gospel parable notes. But here the story turns to God’s will to bring in as many as possible to the marriage. We are not however merely passive beings. And so the focus turns on one who is there without regard to the purpose of the feast, someone we might say who is not keeping his foot when he goes to the house of God. In other words, present in body but not in soul and spirit. Present without honouring the purpose of the place and the event.
We never hear them. I have never read them publicly though I probably should. Perhaps you have stumbled upon them while fumbling about in your Prayer Books. They are the two exhortations, both rather long, found on pages 88-92, the first which “the Priest may say” either “immediately before the Sermon” or before the invitation to confession and which “shall always be said on a Sunday in Advent and a Sunday in Lent,” and the second “upon some Sunday before Christmas Day, Easter Day, and Whitsunday.” I am serving notice to you and myself about that now. But in the meantime, I encourage you to read them thoughtfully and prayerfully as a means of preparing yourself for Communion “so that,” as the second exhortation marvellously puts it, “ye may come holy and clean to such a heavenly Feast, in the marriage-garment required by God in holy Scripture,” referring to today’s Gospel. The point, as in the Gospel, is that something is required and asked of us. We are not to be complacent about the grace of God and about the purpose of this holy place. Indeed, the liturgy itself prepares us but only if we are keeping our feet, walking circumspectly, thinking seriously about serious things.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 20, 2018
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