by CCW | 3 February 2019 15:00
It is a question for us. Ours is the culture of Humbaba. Humbaba? Who or what is Humbaba? He is a figure from the great Sumerian epic poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Humbaba is said to be the guardian of the forest which might make him the prototype of Smokey the Bear, protecting the forest from fire, or an appropriate mascot for environmentalists opposed to the ravaging of the forest by clear-cutting. But he is also said to be “the evil in the land,”a terrifying force of nature, we might say, and, intriguingly “a battering ram.” He is in many ways indescribable. A seemingly odd collection of images, to be sure, but ones which are largely summed up in the idea of Humbaba as belonging to “the fearful uncertainty in things.”
For the Sumerian world, the world of Mesopotamia, some 5,000 or more years ago, is perhaps more like our world than what we would care to imagine. For despite our naive over-confidence in technology, a fearful uncertainty lies at the heart of our culture. Apart from the technophiles who persist in thinking that technology is the future and will solve all our problems, we are really no longer quite so “assured of certain certainties,” as T.S. Eliot puts it, no longer quite so “impatient to assume the world.” We are, as he suggests in the Journey of the Magi, “no longer at ease.” That is, I think, a good thing.
The image of Humbaba as “a battering ram” is most suggestive. Humbaba is one of the images of chaos for the Sumerian culture, a culture which like ours produced an amazing array of practical and technological accomplishments, unrivaled in scope until the modern world of industrial and digital progress, with all of its attendant problems. They were the first, historically speaking, though they had their counterparts in the cultures of ancient China, India, and Egypt – all river cultures – to invent things like irrigation, therefore not being defined by the givenness of the land but figuring out how to bring water from the river to arid ground making it fertile; the first to invent sailing, no longer limited to the directional flow of rivers; the first to develop agriculture and the tools associated with it which allowed for settling on the land; the first to build cities with walls and buildings out of bricks, requiring the use of fire to harden clay, and so on and so on. But, perhaps, most importantly and as belonging to these marvels of human ingenuity; they were the first to invent writing.
It was called cuneiform, meaning wedge shaped marks engraved upon baked clay tablets. It was invented in a warehouse. Why a warehouse? Why writing? Because the desire and need to keep track of things, of our stuff, as it were, means naming and numbering. An interesting consideration. You can’t number what you can’t name. Writing is the highest expression of the remarkable practicality of the ancient Sumerian world. Not altogether unlike ours in the ‘bad infinity’ (to use Hegel’s term) of the digital text/image culture which we inhabit or which rather inhabits us. The invention of writing leads from listing things to telling stories and to setting them down in writing, stories which reveal how a culture thinks and expresses itself. Writing ultimately belongs to thinking. But thinking in what kind of way? That is our question, our fearful uncertainty. Is thinking for us to be reduced to twittering or to algorithms?
For all of the remarkable accomplishments of the Sumerians, not unlike the remarkable accomplishments in medicine, in hygiene, in so many areas of human life in our time, the ancient Sumerian world was full of a profound and fearful uncertainty about things. What is the fear? It is ours. The fear that chaos might overwhelm and destroy all that we have done. On the one hand, the practical arts of the Sumerians are incredible and great, but, on the other hand, there is the deep fear that chaos might re-assert itself and suddenly overwhelm us whether by fire or flood, by some uncontrollable force of nature; in short, that chaos might just be greater than order.
For the Sumerians, the fear is literally outside the city. It is the fear of chaos breaking in and destroying the order of the city. Such is Humbaba, “the battering ram,” who might break into the city. It is a powerful image.
The contrast is equally striking. If the ancient Sumerians were afraid of what lies outside of the city, the fearful uncertainty that lies at the heart of our culture and life is not what lies outside but what lies inside us. Our fear is us. Our fear is about what we surrender ourselves to, namely, the products of our hearts and minds. Our fear is not about what lies outside but about what lies within. We are the fearful uncertainty. We are Humbaba.
Today’s readings speak to our fearfulness. The Gospel makes it clear that the problem is about a lack of trust, a lack of faith in God. Our contemporary fear is that our thinking and doing might just destroy the world and ourselves. Our fears are rooted in our failure to recognise the limits of our technocratic reason, our refusal to be wise.
What then is the counter to our fears? It is shown in this remarkable Gospel story in which Christ rebukes the wind and bids the sea be still. But more importantly there is the way in which Christ addresses our fears and uncertainties. He speaks to the sea-storms of our hearts. “Why are ye so fearful?” And then he asks a second question, a rhetorical question, which reveals the answer to the first. “How is it that ye have no faith?” It is a powerful question. It opens us out to a profound consideration. Our fears are rooted in our lack of faith, a loss of confidence in the truth and providence of God. What that means shows itself to us in this Gospel story.
Christ is God who is with us in the midst of the storms of life, in the midst of our chaos which is far greater than the chaos of nature. Jesus Christ is God in our midst, the one who rebukes the wind and calms the sea, the one who rebukes us and calms the many sea-storms of our hearts. It all comes down to the Epiphany message that God is in Christ reconciling himself to the world, the one to whom all powers of nature and man are subject. “What manner of man is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?” All power is of God, something which those in the vanity of their power forget, and something which we, too, forget at our peril. Divinity is made manifest in Christ, the one who cares for us and who awakens us to truth and life.
We are awakened to the presence of the God who is the God of all truth and life even in and through the miseries and uncertainties of human life. We are set, the Collect reminds us, “in the midst of so many great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright.” The Epiphany stories reveal our need for the grace and truth of God with us in Christ in the midst of the sea-storms and tempests of our lives. That makes all the difference. It is the saving grace.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 4, 2019
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2019/02/03/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-after-the-epiphany-4/
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