Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Second Sunday after Trinity
“If the world hate you”
Well, it does. Deal with it. But while the world may hate Christians and Christianity (and every other religion for that matter), self-hatred is equally, if not more destructive, a deeper denial of our God-created being and life. Self-hatred now extends to a certain kind of cultural self-loathing and self-flagellation current in the western democracies of our contemporary world, something which Michael Houllebecq has recently written about in relation to France (The Narcissistic Fall of France, Unherd, June 8th, 2021). It is not just a North American phenomenon. It arises out of the profound disorders and discontents that belong to the destructive tendencies of the twentieth century which remain with us and which we either choose to ignore or begin to ponder. It is part of a general sense of malaise that our way of thinking and being has to change. But in what way? At the very least through a kind of thoughtfulness which the remarkable readings before us encourage and demand.
The cultural problems of our age have very much to do with assumptions about human rights and the principle of self-determination and how those ideas are to be understood in relation to the more universal principles of justice and compassion, such as in Plato, Deuteronomy or even Cyrus the Persian, as Samuel Moyn notes (The Last Utopia, Human Rights in History, 2010). Contemporary human rights talk is “the last utopia”. The language of rights that dominates our thinking presupposes a principle that transcends the political communities in which we live. But then how are they to be embodied, enjoined and enforced? How are they to be respected and upheld without reducing things to the endless power struggles of this group or that tyrant over and against every other? How do we live and think apart from the local communities in which we live? The Global is the great abstraction. The “right to have rights,” as Hannah Arendt brilliantly observed, leads nowhere; for “without communal inclusion, the assertion of rights by itself made no sense” (Moyn, The Last Utopia, p. 12). The principle of self-determination historically has been rather problematic and so, too, the extension of that idea to individuals whose self-determination is asserted now as a sovereign right. It is what underlies the conflicts and problems that belong to the native peoples in Canada, on the one hand, and to the vagaries of the politics of sexual identity, on the other hand. As Moyn says in a later book, “rights are not enough” (Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, 2018). They lead more to division than unity and equity; the very things that paradoxically are sought.
It is in this contemporary context that we might begin to ponder the wisdom of the scriptural readings for this day. John profoundly counters the problem of self-hatred by recalling us to God. “If our heart condemn us,” he says, “God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” We are not who we think we are in our own heads, in the proud fancy and imagination of our own hearts, in our claims to self-determination, as it were. We are instead God’s beloved who are known in God’s infinite knowing and loving of “all things”. “Beloved,” as John immediately goes on to say, “if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence towards God.” In other words, knowing ourselves as ‘the beloved of God’ changes our whole outlook and attitude. What we hate should not be ourselves (or one another) but our sins which make us less than ourselves. John is reminding us of an important spiritual insight which speaks to the moral and ethical confusions of our world and day about the constraints to the extent and meaning of cultural and personal identities.
That we are appalled and regret the actions of the past is testimony to our sense of justice and compassion and rightly so. But do we really think that somehow any of us would have acted differently? This is the problem of judging the past in the light of present passions and commitments. The problem is actually the way we remove ourselves from these stories and stand in judgement over others in a stance of self-righteousness. ‘There go I but for the grace of God’, I think. The Residential Schools were part of the deeply misguided and badly executed Indian Act of 1876, the legacy of which remains with us in terms of bad policy and human failure. They were, as the indigenous writer, Bob Joseph, puts it, “the most aggressive and destructive of all Indian Act policies” (21 Things That You May Not Know About the Indian Act, 2018). Jody Wilson-Raybould says it is “the one of the most insidious tools ever used to subjugate peoples,” and yet, as she acknowledges, Canadians, both indigenous and non-indigenous, remain trapped in the contradictions and problems of the Indian Act itself about either letting go of it altogether or continuing to cling to it (From Where I Stand, 2019). It makes the native peoples wards of the Federal Government; a burden from which the government would like to be freed but not something which all native peoples want to relinquish. The divides are within the communities themselves on all sides of the question. The Canadian dilemma seems to be an inability to think through the contradictions and confusions. More than a lack of imagination, it is about the intellectual poverty in which the current debates are framed. How to think reconciliation continues to be the struggle.
Contrary to the current media, apologies about the Residential Schools have been made countless times by Church officials and politicians, as well noted by both Bob Joseph and Jody Wilson-Raybould, not to mention the extensive questioning and hand wringing about the Indian Act itself over many decades. Modelled on an American experiment, the Residential Schools aspect of the Indian Act was a Canadian government programme intended “to kill the Indian in the child” as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada so bluntly puts it in its Historical Overview. The buzz word of the 19th and 20th centuries was “assimilation”; “cultural genocide” the term for the 21st. The shift in terminology is telling yet hides the real issue.
The Residential Schools were left to the management of the Churches but they were “chronically underfunded” by a Government seeking to wash its hands of the “Indian Problem”; the buildings inadequate, “drafty and unsanitary”; the “food for children was insufficient and often rotten”. The Schools were the “breeding grounds for diseases such as tuberculosis and influenza”; “6,000 of the 150,000 children that attended the schools between the 1870s and 1996 either died or disappeared. The numbers are not precise because no one kept accurate records: not the schools, the churches that managed the schools, or the Indian agents”, the government officials (Bob Joseph, 21 Things). The Schools were a matter of controversy and criticism from early on and throughout the whole of the 20th century until the whole programme finally ended in 1996. None of this is new.
And none of this takes away from the sense of heart-break, sadness and outrage about the unmarked and unknown graves of 215 native children in Kamloops. None of this takes away from the current struggle to bring dignity and respect to the native cultures of Canada. But to equate self-governance with self-determination as is currently the case belongs to a confusion about two different senses of nation; nation as peoples of a certain ethnic, cultural and linguistic identity, on the one hand, and nation as political and constitutional, on the other hand. How to negotiate between those two senses of ‘nation’ remains the dilemma even though the idea of ‘a nation within a nation,’ the first within the second, appeared to be the way beyond the constitutional impasse with respect to Quebec not so long ago. But it seems not longer able to be grasped and thought in Quebec and that only complicates the attempts to negotiate between the native peoples in all of their differences (and historical animosities), self-styled as ‘nations’ and as such viewed as a one group, on the one hand, and the nation of Canada, on the other hand. The Charter of Rights only adds to the confusion and uncertainty because of the abstract concept of rights and the ideology of self-determination.
The Gospel builds on the insight of the Epistle in an important way. An unnamed person sitting at meat with Jesus says, “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” It is, I think, a wonderful insight into the radical nature of our humanity as companions with God and with one another. The word, companion, means with bread, com panis. We are one with one another in the breaking and the sharing of the bread. This is the powerful truth that underlies sacramental theology and our sacramental life. In a way, it illustrates what John means by calling us “beloved,” reminding us of who we are in the knowing love of God.
It is in that context that we can perhaps begin to understand Jesus’s challenging response, itself a parable with its stylized beginning: “A certain man made a great supper, and bade many” just as last Sunday, we read about “a certain rich man” and “a certain beggar named Lazarus.” Like last Sunday, the Gospel highlights our neglect of God and one another; in short, the forms of our betrayals of the love of God which properly defines us and our relations to one another; quite independent of all forms of identity claims, cultural or otherwise, we might add. Here the issue is about various forms of self-interest that ignore or override the divine invitation to love in its truth and universality. Such are, precisely, our excuses.
The parable is all about our excuses by which we remove ourselves from the priority of God’s love upon which our interests and activities in the world are properly grounded. “I have bought a piece of ground”; “I have bought five yoke of oxen”; “I have married a wife”. In each case the circumstance is thought to take priority over the invitation to the banquet. “Come, for all things are ready.” All things are ready but not all of us are ready. Yet the parable goes on to indicate very powerfully the divine intent “that my house may be filled,” reaching out to “bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt and the blind,” and beyond the streets and lanes of the city, “go[ing] out into the highways and hedges and compelling them to come in.” Meanwhile those who were invited and spurned the invitation, “shall taste none of my supper” which is to say they shall not be blessed. It is a telling indictment of another form of our indifference to the radical dignity of our humanity. Why? Because they have removed themselves from the company of those who eat bread in the kingdom.
It is a wonderful story about how we absent ourselves from “the blessed company of all faithful people” (BCP, p. 85). Our excuses are really a denial of God’s love and truth and as such a denial of ourselves and interests. Our particular interests are to be grounded in our relation to God and not the other way around.
This is the problem for the contemporary church as an institution. The Church, if it is the Church, does not exist to please the world. That in a way is precisely the problem of our institutional churches, trying too hard to please the world and adopting its interests and agendas in one way or another with respect to all aspects of the political spectrum. It has nothing to say to the world because it has nothing to say for itself. We excuse ourselves from the reality which constitutes ourselves.
The restrictions concerning COVID-19 constrain us from being together as a company joined together in the sacramental breaking and sharing of the bread at Christ Church. That is one thing and it is not exactly an excuse but it is a far remove from the all too easy, familiar, and self-serving agendas and interests that keep us from the divine invitation to the banquet of God’s love on the parochial level at the best of times. Our present situation is in this sense a test of faith. I can only hope that this makes us stronger and more resilient, not cowed and fragile, not fearful and dead. I also hope that it makes us more willing to engage with the confusions and the complexities of our world by being more and more grounded in the visions of reconciliation and renewal which our spiritual traditions provide. They are the real wake-up call to repentance and compassion. The audio file and sermons are temporary reminders to us all about our being in the company of God’s love. We are in the world but not of it. We await the return to our in-person forms of our companionship in the Gospel but in the meantime we are companions with one another in what is heard and read and, in that sense, sacramentally understood and received. That company of the blessed is what God seeks for us all regardless of our various identities; we ignore it and so one another at our peril.
“If the world hate you”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 2, 2021
(under lockdown restrictions owing to COVID-19)