by CCW | 20 September 2020 08:00
Link to the Audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 15[1]
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.
Our liturgy offers a profound counter and corrective to our personal and cultural anxieties. The Gospel reminds us of God’s world and his providential care for creation and our place in it. Jesus recalls us to who we are in the sight of God; connected to everything else in the created order yet precious and unique as made in God’s image. This is wonderfully shown in Anna’s baptism today, itself a reminder to each of us of our own baptisms. Young Silas cannot remember his baptism here at Christ Church but he can now know or at least begin to know about it, just as most of you can, through Anna’s baptism. In other words, each baptism recalls us to our identity in Christ.
Little Anna is for us like the large letters of Paul that highlight the marks of the Lord Jesus in the body. She is signed with the sign of the Cross and marked as Christ’s own through her incorporation into the death and life of Christ. Dying to ourselves and living for God is the basic and fundamental pattern of Christian life that extends from Baptism into the Communion liturgy. The world in itself does not define us. As Paul says, in the cross of Christ “the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” It is a most powerful statement about our humanity.
Large letters and marks in the body are things outward and visible that speak to our spiritual identity in Christ. In the Gospel, Jesus counters our inner anxieties by calling attention to the visible things of creation. “Behold, the fowls of the air … consider the lilies of the field.” Behold and consider, he is saying, the beauty and goodness of creation. Yet he is calling our attention to those outward things to remind us of the deeper inward truth of ourselves; in short, to who we are in the sight of God and his care for our humanity. The visible things of creation make known the invisible things of God. The opposition between mammon or earthly riches and God is a false opposition for the whole world is God’s. That realization changes entirely how we think and act. And more than beholding and considering, activities of thinking, of the human intellect, we might say, Jesus bids us “seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all those things shall be added unto you,” for none of those things of the world exist apart from God and his kingdom.
Something about the true nature of our humanity is shown to us. Through the things of the body we are brought to know ourselves inwardly as beings who think and love. It is all a question about the orientation of our thinking and our loving either as buried in our confusions, animosities and anxieties or as thinking towards and with God.
Thus this interplay of the outward and the inward, of the visible and the invisible is, I think profoundly sacramental. Creation and redemption are revelation, a making known of the radical truth of God without whom we cannot make any sense of our lives. Something is mediated to us through our reading, our looking, our thinking, and our willing. As mediated, it is something sacramental. The things of the world are used to make known the things of God, the things of the Spirit. Our liturgy, which is at once our work and activity, is also theurgy, God’s work and activity in us. It is the corrective to the “isolation” and “inarticulate loneliness,” to use Alistair MacLeod’s resonant phrase, that belongs to modern self-consciousness.
The Gospel reminds us wonderfully that we are at once connected to everything else in the created order and established in our human dignity in relation to our life with God and in God. Creation itself teaches us about God. His providence is but the extension of his creative act. The counter to our culture of anxiety is to behold, to consider, and to seek what God sees, knows, and desires for us. It is there for us in letters writ large so as to be marked in our own bodies in and through the sacramental life of the Church. It is what Epistle and Gospel teach us and what Anna’s baptism shows us. Here in our theurgic liturgy we have a way of thinking and being with God in Christ, bearing in our own bodies the marks of God’s loving care for our humanity. “Another lives in me,” as one of the martyrs puts it. This sacramental sensibility about our life in Christ is the counter to our anxieties. It is more than sufficient for us in the face of the evils of our day whether within or without each of us.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 15, 2020
Baptism of Anna Brigid King
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/09/20/sermon-for-the-fifteenth-sunday-after-trinity-9/
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