Year: 2020

Audio File of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 8

We are children of God

O sacred Providence, who from end to end
strongly and sweetly movest! shall I write,
And not of thee, through whom my fingers bend
To hold my quill? shall they not do thee right?

Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes,
And put the penne alone into his hand,
And made him Secretarie of thy praise.

George Herbert’s poem, Providence, begins with a scriptural text upon which the whole poem hangs, a text from the Wisdom of Solomon: “Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily and sweetly doth she order all things”, fortiter et suaviter, strongly and sweetly (Wisdom 9.1). It is also the only scriptural reference in Boethius’ great classic, The Consolation of Philosophy, written in 529 AD while in prison, falsely accused and awaiting his death; the work itself is a treatise on Providence for that is our great consolation regardless of the times and circumstances.

Herbert writes of Providence with the awareness that this is itself a providence. Providence bids him write and that bidding extends to all humanity. It belongs to us to write of Providence. It is our vocation as “children of God”. It is about who we are in the sight of God.  Writing here is a metaphor for living out what we believe and know.

Yet the question is not at first how well do we write but what and how do we read. After all, Solomon, Boethius, Herbert, and a host of other thinkers and writers have all read and learned something of God’s Providence whether in Scripture, history, philosophy, or people’s lives. Only so can they then write of it as what moves so strongly and sweetly. Only then can we read so that we, too,  might be the “secretaries of thy praise”. But what and how do we read?

To contemplate the Providence of God is to discover the will that wields the world and beyond. It is what we acknowledge in the Collect: “O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth”. But what does it mean to contemplate the Providence of God?

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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.

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