Sermon for Rogation Sunday

admin | 26 May 2019

“In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world.”

Rogation Sunday reminds us that the Resurrection is cosmic in scope. It recalls us to the land in which we are placed and to our vocation where we are. That is altogether about prayer and praise. “Prayer,” as Richard Hooker so clearly states, “signals all the service that we ever do unto God” and so it is praise too. That Godward orientation of our lives belongs to a sacramental understanding whereby the things of the world become the instruments of grace and salvation. It is about seeing the world in God and God in the world. This challenges completely many of our contemporary assumptions.

Rogation is about prayer in this wider sense that connects us immediately and concretely to the land and to our cultivation of the land. This is not simply like, say, Sir Francis Bacon’s endeavour to interrogate nature and to force nature to disclose her secrets in order to make the natural world serve human interests. Though Bacon’s interest in nature was with respect to the betterment of the human condition, that impulse to interrogate nature forcefully and experimentally only too easily slides into the tendency to dominate. We know only too well how that leads to destruction, to a disregard and a disrespect of the created order. Canada shipping garbage to the Philippines? The mind boggles, the heart weeps.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 1879 poem, Binsey Poplars, reflects on this larger problem by way of an instance of a kind of clear-cutting along the banks of a country stream. “All felled, felled,” … “not one spared” … “O if we but knew what we do/ When we delve or hew – hack or rack the growing green” … “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.” There is more to that ending than just a kind of nostalgia for a romanticised rural idyll. His point is that we unselve ourselves in such acts of destruction.

Rogation recalls us to a kind of thoughtfulness about our engagement with the land where we are placed. We cannot not leave a mark; the question is what kind of mark? The cliches of our contemporary world in this respect are often misleading and dangerous. The mantra ‘think globally and act locally’ seems more and more only to serve the corporate interests of the global elites. To think and act locally might actually lead to a deeper appreciation and understanding of the world and of ourselves in it. Even better, just think!

Rogation recalls us to creation redeemed and to the necessity of working with the Lord God of creation, acting in accord with God who is Lord, the Dominus, who seeks the good and the care of all that he has made. Creation has its meaning only and entirely in his will. “Let them have dominion” can really only mean ‘let them act with proper care for the good of the land’, acting in the spirit of the Dominus, the Lord, in whose image we are made. One of the great follies and sadnesses of our times is the way in which that statement has been twisted and abused by all manner of fundamentalists, Christian and atheist alike, the way in which stewardship and domination are opposed rather than seen as connected and complementary.

Rogation Sunday is about the redemption of the world and the redemption of our humanity. The world is God’s world and we are God’s people. There is a purpose to the world and for our humanity that is greater than the hubris of our technocratic domination and destruction of the world. Creation exists for God. And that is the great teaching that belongs to our Christian witness. “Man is the world’s high priest,” the poet George Herbert puts it, reminding us that “Of all the creatures both in sea and land/ Onely to man hast thou made known thy ways/ And put the penne alone into his hand/ And made him Secretary of thy praise.”

The world exists for the praise of God and we are to be the secretaries of that praise. Our vocation is to articulate creation’s praise of the creator; in short, to offer “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” and to chronicle in our own lives his grace and glory. Why do you seek as some of you do to plant flower gardens? For yourself simply? What if you were to see it as being done to the glory of God in whom all beauty and truth and goodness belong and from whom they derive? I am sure you do.

In our text, the word ‘overcome’ means ‘having conquered’or ‘prevailed’, ‘having gained victory’ over the world. But this is not about our conquest of nature but Christ’s victory over our destructive and perverse attachments to the world, to our forgetting that it is God’s world and that our vocation is to “come before his presence with a song.” The song of all creation is the praise of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier of the whole world, the God who is Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, shown to us in Christ’s comings and goings from and to the Father, to and from the world. Overcoming here has nothing whatsoever to do with our mistaken and destructive domination of the world. It is altogether to do with the necessity of “radically rethinking the world” and “thus understanding and living differently within it” (James Bridle, New Dark Age, Technology and the End of the Future).

Rogation simply means asking. Prayer in its most basic sense is asking God for what we need and for what we desire. That can only be “according to thy Word,” and as “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven;” in other words, only as such requests be good and right. Such qualifiers are not a cop-out. They signal, actually, the humility of wisdom that counters the hubris of presumption. They humble us and as such connect us to the humus, to the ground, to the very dust of creation even as the Resurrection shows us that dust redeemed, raised up and blessed.

I cannot contemplate Rogationtide without thinking of a poet whom I regard as the great poet of the Rogation, Thomas Traherne (1636-1674). He offers, I think, the antidote to the problems of our incomplete relation to the natural world and to our self-forgetting which James notes in the Epistle. Traherne bids us enjoy the world which is a far cry from exploiting the world and a far cry from destroying the world. “You never enjoy the world aright,” he says, “till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars … till you can sing and rejoice in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in scepters … till you delight in God for being good to all.” In short, “you never enjoy the world aright,” he is saying, until you enjoy it in God. He articulates beautifully and mystically a kind of sacramental understanding we need so badly to reclaim. It requires a prayerfulness and a thoughtfulness in us. “For till God in everything be seen, nothing is pleasant.”

In so many ways, this is the radical meaning of our liturgy. In the midst of our practical fears and worries, anxieties and uncertainties, trials and tribulations, here is the salutary teaching which impels our practical doings. It is found in our “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.” The overcoming is about prayer as praise in which we place ourselves, one another, and the land where we are simply and profoundly in the hands and heart of God. The overcoming is Christ’s embrace of us and our world in his love for the Father, all because as he says, “I go to the Father.”

We pray in today’s Collect, “that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same”; that is to say, thinking and doing. What is wanted in our practical lives are the qualities of thoughtfulness, humble service, and ethical responsibility. In locating the things of our practical lives in something more reflective and emphatically prayerful, we discover both our freedom, our peace, and our responsibility. We recall our vocation and find ourselves in the presence of the Trinity. It happens through the Son who challenges us to pray aright.