by CCW | 16 August 2020 08:00
Audio File for the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 10, 2020[1]
“By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Sion,” the Psalmist says in a great and moving passage. A psalm of the exile, it captures vividly the sense of longing for what was and the difficulty of how to carry on in the face of loss. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” We cannot help but feel the pathos in the lines, the sense of remembering what was once deeply treasured and now seems utterly lost and gone. In another work of epic poetry, written by Virgil many centuries after the Psalms, Aeneas, ship-wrecked upon the Libyan shores of North Africa, comes to the great city of Carthage. He sees engraven upon the walls of Queen Dido’s palace the story of the destruction of Troy, from which he has fled to found the new Troy which will be Rome. “Is there,” he says to his comrade, Achates, “anywhere on earth that does not know the story of our troubles?” These are, he famously says, “the tears in the nature of things,” the human sorrows that touch our minds (Virgil, Aeneid, I. ll. 460-463). Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.
These moving passages from the Hebrew Scriptures and pagan antiquity contrast and illuminate the lacrimae Christi, the tears of Christ. “He beheld the city and wept over it.” What follows is viewed as a prophecy about the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD by the Romans under Titus and recorded by the historian Josephus. No doubt, that event was the occasion for the tears of many in Israel.
What are his tears? In John’s Gospel, “Jesus wept” at the grave of Lazarus, his friend. He enters into our sorrows and sense of loss. His tears are tears of compassion. In the story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain, “when he saw her he had compassion on her,” we are told. His tears which precede the raising of Lazarus are tears of compassion, too, it seems. But is it so here in Luke’s account of his weeping over the city of Jerusalem? Why does he weep? Because “thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” It is a poignant statement, an indictment of Sion, of Jerusalem. Why? Because of our ignorance of what belongs to our truth. The Gospel here needs to be seen not only in terms of the Gradual Psalm but in the light of the Epistle.
Paul “would not have [us] ignorant,” he says, “concerning spiritual gifts.” Jesus weeps because of our spiritual ignorance. What is that ignorance? It is an ignorance of the spiritual gifts which belong to our life with God. Here Paul expands upon the gifts of the Spirit enumerated in Isaiah as six and enlarged by the Septuagint and Vulgate translation to become the classical seven-fold gifts of the Spirit, immortalized in the Veni Creator. You can find it in the Prayer Book on page 653: “Thou the anointing spirit art, Who dost thy seven-fold gifts impart.” They are the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and piety, and of the fear of the Lord. Comprehensive and yet not exhaustive, for as Paul suggests “there are diversities of gifts but the same Spirit.” He goes on to enumerate nine gifts of the Spirit: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits, divers kinds of tongues, and the interpretation of tongues. They all belong to the Holy Spirit and to the unity of the human community.
There is some overlap between Isaiah and Paul in terms of gifts that pertain to matters intellectual and spiritual but the deeper point is that these gifts, as Paul sees them, all belong to the unity and the good of the human community as grounded in the Spirit. This passage in 1st Corinthians lays out the qualities of spirit that belong to the unity of the community yet at the end of this chapter, he will say, “I will show you a still more excellent way” (1 Cor. 12. 31). That is the way of charity or love in his famous hymn to love in 1st Corinthians 13. The gifts of the Spirit are God’s gifts to us in community, gifts that belong to the building up of the community, and to our life together with God and with one another. But if we neglect the gifts of God?
Jesus weeps over Jerusalem because of our betrayal of the things of God in our midst which we have forgotten or denied. His tears are tears of regret, tears of sorrow and loss at what we have lost. In this way, the tears in the nature of things have to do with what is lost which belongs to our good not simply through war and conquest but by sin and ignorance. The Gospel passage ends with the powerful and, no doubt, disturbing scene of the wrath of Christ in cleansing the temple. We know this story from Advent just as we know Paul’s hymn of love from the beginning of Lent on Quinquagesima Sunday. In both cases they are about our learning what God wants and seeks for us in the pageant of his love coming to us in redemption and mercy.
That we should be reminded of this now in the heat of the summer and in the midst of the Trinity season is a wake-up call about being mindful and attentive to the word and spirit of God at work in our lives and in our institutions. The tears of Christ are about his sorrow for our sin and negligence of what is in our midst. Our ignorance is a narrowing loss of vision, a failure of the spiritual imagination. In Advent and Lent we participate in what Christ does for us; in the Trinity season, we attend to his life in us. Our neglect of the love Christ has shown and bestowed upon us occasions the tears of Christ. That should convict us and move us to pay attention to the purpose of the holy places, our churches. They are meant to be where we grow in the love of God and of one another. That means attending to the visitation of Christ, the one who has come near to us and is with us. He would have the gifts of the Spirit alive in us. They are the gifs which ground us in the life of God and which seek the good of one another.
There are diversities of gifts, to be sure, but these gifts are all to be understood, first, as deriving from one and the same spirit, and, secondly, as contributing to the good of the entire community. In such a view, we learn to be the citizens of the holy city, Jerusalem, while on pilgrimage here in this vale of tears. Jesus weeps and so should we at our own shortcomings and failures to attend to his presence in our midst in Word proclaimed and Sacraments celebrated. Then our tears of sorrow may turn to tears of joy.
Thus the lacrimae rerum, the tears in the nature of things, are not simply tragic. The lacrimae Christi, the tears of Christ, recall us to our participation in the life of Christ, to our learning about what belongs to our good through the diverse spiritual gifts given by the one Spirit. Jesus and Paul would not have us ignorant concerning the spiritual gifts that belong to our life with God.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 10, 2020
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/08/16/sermon-for-the-tenth-sunday-after-trinity-3/
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