Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
Link to the Audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 15
I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus
Such marks in the body are like large letters. They tell a story. What is written in our lives? In the Gospel, Jesus tells us three times not to be anxious. Yet we live in a most anxious time. Tyndale’s translation, which shaped the King James version which came to be used in the Prayer Book in 1662, has Jesus bid us “be not careful.” This may seem strange until we realize that we are only too often full of cares, overburdened with fears and worries, “distracted with much busyness,” like Martha, literally unable to attend to the “one thing necessary.” In modern times, the older concept of carefulness has been replaced with a more loaded and psychological word, anxiety, the Englishing of the German angst.
That has, I think, a different kind of intensity. It belongs to a more modern preoccupation with ourselves and with a kind of dread, at least as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche see it, a fear about ourselves in having to commit, to think and to act in an alien and meaningless world. The anxiety is in us, in the negativity of our modern subjectivity and self-consciousness; incurvatus in se, as turned in upon ourselves we are in dread of ourselves, uncertain about how to act or how to be. The title of W.H. Auden’s 1947 prose poem, ‘The Age of Anxiety,’ has come to define our culture as the culture of anxiety, at once wanting to connect and be with one another in a kind of sympathy and yet altogether uncertain about how that can be accomplished. We are, perhaps, no longer “assured of certain certainties,” in Eliot’s phrase but sense the need to be taught as he puts it, “to care and not to care,” to learn to care in the right way. The current culture of outrage only adds to our anxieties and divides us from one another in endless antagonisms. Anxious about being anxious only adds to our anxieties.
In our obsessions and busyness, our fears and worries, we lose something of ourselves. The paradox of being too caught up in ourselves is a loss of ourselves, a forgetting of who we are in the sight of God and his providence.
