Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 17
Walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called
And what is that vocation? “Friend, go up higher,” as the Gospel suggests, pointing to the idea of life as an ascent to something more, to something better, to what is the Good. Yet Epistle and Gospel concur that the way up higher is by way of humility “with all lowliness and meekness,” and even “with long-suffering,” as Paul puts it. “He that humbleth himself shall be exalted,” Jesus says. The way up seems to be the way down.
The way up is only accomplished through humility not presumption. And so this loaded phrase is the antithesis of presumption and pride at the same time as it sets us on a pilgrimage to God and places us with one another and with God. It counters all of the obstacles of human perversity and self-righteousness. Jesus here challenges a narrow and restrictive understanding of the Sabbath. It is made for man, not man for the Sabbath, as Jesus memorably says elsewhere. Something of what that means is captured in the phrase, “Friend, go up higher,” which in turn signifies the vocation of our humanity. It is about our life to God, in God and with God and so with one another in “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
To go up higher is to enter into what God seeks for our humanity. It means a certain kind of conversion of the soul – our being turned around and turned to God. The turning here is through dialogue, even if it is one sided. “They could not answer him again to these things,” Luke tells us about the Lawyers and Pharisees who appear to disapprove of Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath. Like Socrates, the questions of Jesus confront us with ourselves. Only in that confrontation can we begin to make sense of the positive injunctions of the parable which follows this encounter between Jesus and the Lawyers and Pharisees.
“Friend, go up higher” has nothing to do with the overrated and disastrous pre-occupations of the idea of endlessly upward mobility in our world and day. The most over-used phrase in our current discourse is “going forward.” We might be better off in going back to what we have lost if ever we might hope to be going higher. Higher, though in what sense? Does this mean a repudiation of our quotidian lives, our lives as lived in the messiness of the everyday? Quite the opposite. But it does suggest a far different orientation than what is implied in the false idol of endlessly expanding economic growth and the even more disastrous illusions of the ideology of progress which has so bedeviled our culture.
