by CCW | 18 July 2021 08:00
It must seem strange in the sultry heat of the quiet summer and in the lush richness of nature’s bounty in the beauty of the valley, to hear about sin and death and about being in the wilderness with nothing to eat, even given the endless shadows of COVID-19 and the sense of outrage in the culture against the churches.
But this is to lose sight of the guiding wisdom of the Spirit in the Scripture readings in terms of the balance and interplay between the theological themes of justification and sanctification which ultimately speak profoundly to our current distresses.
Sanctification is about our taking ahold of the redemptive work of Christ’s justifying grace; it is the active reception of what has been given. This Sunday’s readings highlight this idea in terms of our lives sacramentally which is nothing less than our living in the love of God.
They open out to us things that we need to hear, things which have to do with a larger, more complete, and more honest view of human life and in its relation to the natural world of which we are an integral part. Ultimately, it is about life with God in Jesus Christ, something of lasting worth and meaning in which we participate here and now. To put it more simply, there is a spiritual and scriptural wisdom here which challenges the complacencies and certainties of our ordinary lives. Ours is the culture, to some extent, of full bellies and empty souls, notwithstanding the grotesque inequalities of wealth in the global world where famine and poverty still rule. The greater question is about what it means to be human. The spiritual and biblical view of orthodox Christianity suggests that it has altogether to do with the dynamic of our life with God. And that is wonderfully illustrated for us in the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for today.
“The free gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ,” St. Paul tells us. “I have compassion on the multitude,” Jesus says. These are the strong positives of our spiritual life that speak to the human condition, “in times of adversity and prosperity,” we might say (echoing the marriage service). They are profoundly suggestive of the dynamic of that spiritual life expressed sacramentally in terms of baptism, on the one hand, and holy communion, on the other hand. Baptism is about nothing less than our personal and individual incorporation into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, “being made free from sin and become servants to God” and to what further end? That we may have our “fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.” This we cannot earn and do not deserve. It is not something to which we are entitled. It is, precisely, “the free gift of God.” Yet, it is meant to be lived. If we have the beginning of our spiritual life personally and individually in baptism, then we have the continuation and growth of that spiritual life in us through holy communion and by its extension into our lives.
In a way, it is as simple as that. And as hard. Why? Because we have to think it and will it. We cannot take it for granted or assume that we deserve anything that is good.
I know. We have it so good. Full bellies, toys and gadgets and things to amuse ourselves to death, in a world where so many are dying from famine and war. And yet there is a deep fearfulness that lurks behind our complacencies and expectations, “fear in a handful of dust,” as T.S. Eliot noted, a fear that haunts our culture.
It has altogether to do with our arrogance and our ignorance: the arrogance that refuses to contemplate the spiritual principles that belong to human dignity on the premise of our own self-sufficiency and completeness, on the one hand, and the utter and sad ignorance of the spiritual wisdom that properly belongs to the institutions that shape human lives and gives them purpose and direction, on the other hand. Left to ourselves, the biblical and ethical view suggests, we are “slaves to sin,” slaves to “the weakness of human nature,” offering our “bodily members to serve uncleanness and to iniquity after iniquity.” This is what we don’t want to hear – it seems so judgmental and negative.
The spiritual wisdom here is that we do not properly enjoy anything that is good unless we acknowledge “the author and giver of all good things.” Why? Because that is part and parcel of our human dignity, namely the capacity to acknowledge – not just to know passively but to know actively, naming our knowing, if you will, or to put it another way, knowing that we know that God is “the author and giver of all good things.” This is what our lives of prayer and praise are about and, most especially, sacramentally.
Our lives are lived in the wilderness, in the awareness of our lack of sufficiency and completeness in and of ourselves. The wisdom here is that human dignity is ultimately to be found in our life with God in Christ. It involves our whole being. “I have compassion on the multitude,” Jesus says. That compassion is about more than a picnic in the park. It has to do with the fuller meaning of the Incarnation. God does not simply look down upon our wayward and meandering ways of arrogance and folly; in Christ he has entered into the human condition, become man for us, even made sin, in the sense of taking upon himself all that belongs to the disorders of our lives, but in order to redeem and restore us to fellowship with him and with one another. It is about far more, though not less, than the provision of food in the wilderness. The fuller meaning of this as something spiritual is seen in the actions of Christ in taking the bread, giving thanks, breaking the bread, and giving the bread to the disciples to set before the multitude. The actions illustrate the meaning of Christ’s compassion as the deep love of God who provides for us in the empty wilderness of human life.
The sacramental significance of this passage is obvious. Seen in the long, long light of the tradition of the Church, it is about nothing less than the continuing means of our participation in the life of God, given to us as a free gift through the sacrifice of Christ on the cross by which we are made free from all that separates us from God. By baptism we are born anew or grafted into that divine life so freely given. But it is not to be taken for granted. “We do not presume to come to this thy table, trusting in our own righteousness” but only “in thy manifold and great mercies.” We are meant to live from it sacramentally.
George Herbert’s wonderful poem, Prayer I, sets before us a remarkable and rich set of images which canvass the whole of nature and human life but grounds both nature and human life in our intellectual appropriation of what God provides. The sonnet assumes but never states the simple copulative verb, ‘is’, in every phrase and line. In an ellipsis, prayer is each of the twenty-seven images in the poem.
“Prayer the Churches banquet,”“the Churches banquet.” Prayer is “Angels age.” Prayer is “God’s breath in man returning to his birth.” Prayer is “the soul in paraphrase.” Prayer is the “heart in pilgrimage,” and so on. Prayer is “Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best”… Church-bels beyond the starres hear, the souls bloud,/ The land of spices.”
The sonnet ends with what I think belongs to the struggle of our age. It ends not with an image but with the underlying concept that belongs to the whole pageant of images culled from the domestic, the natural, the divine, the homely, the practical, the esoteric, the romantic; in short, images that embrace every aspect of life. It ends with the idea of prayer as “something understood.” In short, prayer is sacramental; it joins heaven and earth, God and man. Prayer is “something understood,” however uncertainly, however obliquely, however much in “a glass darkly,” however much in and through the various images which the poem presents. Prayer as “something understood” concludes the poem even as it provides its underlying logic in deliberate understatement. Yet such is the radical meaning of doctrine in devotion as the counter to the opposition between thought and experience.
The images capture something of the same richness and wonder that the Scriptures proclaim. We have only to live it with joy and thankfulness. It requires being in the place where the Word is proclaimed and the Sacraments celebrated, “nourish[ed] with all goodness, and of thy great mercy [kept] in the same.” For such is the compassion of Christ, the compassion that bids us take hold of what he provides. His compassion is given so as to be lived in us. Prayer is nothing less than Christ in us. Two and half centuries after Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins offers what might be viewed as a kind of commentary on Prayer (1). We seek to act “in God’s eye what in God’s eye [we are]-/Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces” (As Kingfishers Catch Fire, 1877). Such is compassion. Such is prayer. “Something understood.”
Fr. David Curry,
Trinity VII, 2021
(unpreached in 2016; reworked in 2021)
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