Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity
Audio file of the Services of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 7
“How can anyone satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness?”
“I can’t get no satisfaction,” Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones sang way back in 1965 in one of the great classics of rock’n roll. Yet what he sang long ago, the disciples hinted at even longer ago. Even if the song is, well, ungrammatical, and, no doubt, sexually charged, we get the point. Whether it is “useless information” on the radio, or dubious advertisements on the television, or “ridin’ round the world,” “doin’ this” and “signin’ that” in the parade of worldly fame and in the pursuit of sensual pleasure, such things just don’t satisfy. The phrase captures the human situation rather well. It serves to point to what we need and want and which is shown in the Gospel. We seek something more, something which only God can provide.
Today’s readings are particularly suggestive and wonderfully instructive about the realities of human life. Slaves to sin become servants of righteousness. How? By being freed from sin, the wages or outcome of which is death. How are we freed from sin? By becoming the servants of God. How is that accomplished? By “the free gift of God [which] is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Thus the wilderness of the world becomes a kind of paradise where we are satisfied with what the Lord provides for us; “bread in the wilderness.”
From slaves to servants. The shift in words is entirely about translation. It is really the same word that Paul uses throughout this passage from Romans; doulos in its various noun and verbal forms. In short, we are slaves either to sin or to righteousness, even slaves to God. Yet the transition from sin to righteousness signals something profound. Being slaves to God is our freedom. The classic Collect at Morning Prayer for Peace echoes the Epistle: “O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom” (BCP, p.11). Perfect freedom is found in our slavery or service to God “in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life.”
We live in the now of God through his Word and Sacrament. This is the counter to the false satisfactions of the ideology of progress which assumes that we are always making everything better and better; always progressing upward and onward, always going forward, as we constantly hear. But neither is it simply its opposite, namely that we are always making everything worse and worse, regressing, as it were. These are two complementary yet contradictory ideologies that are duking it out in our current discontents. They are overly simplistic civilisational narratives united in one thing: no satisfaction. Either we haven’t got there yet in our attempts at progress or we are utterly condemned, forever and always, to misery and death, the death of ourselves and the natural world. These are the two competing narratives. No satisfaction either way.
