Month: September 2021

“Be not anxious”

“Take no thought,” the King James Version following Tyndale puts it. Other translations have the disconcerting phrase “be not careful.” “Be not anxious” is a more modern rendering and reflects the contemporary therapeutic culture in its various nostrums. But are we really to be without thought and without care? Is anxiety simply about our emotional and psychological state of being? No. I think the readings for today speak very directly to the question about how we think about nature and thus ourselves. They counter some of our modern obsessions and preoccupations; in short, our worries are the things in which we over-invest ourselves, thinking about things in the wrong way. Hence Jesus bids us three times to be not anxious as part of another way of thinking about ourselves and the world. It is about seeing the world in God and God in the world.

There are no end of worries and concerns, fears and anxieties that beset our troubled world: concerns about the environment and climate, about the economy and jobs, about adequate housing and food security, let alone the myriad of disturbing preoccupations with respect to identity politics that more and more are about a sense of alienation from the body and nature. For all of these worries and anxieties belong to a common problem: the sense of our disconnect from creation and nature and thus from one another and ourselves, even our bodies. The last two hundred and fifty years or so bear witness to what some have called “the great acceleration” referring to the forms of our technocratic mastery over nature and over ourselves that has altered the very world in which we find ourselves in destructive ways, a world which we sense is increasingly unlivable and threatening. This is to state the obvious.

Yet what is required has very much to do with our thinking, about how we think about nature or creationChanges. If we assume, as many have, that nature is just dead stuff there for us to manipulate and use however we wish, we can only discover that this is ruinous and destructive of the natural world and ourselves.  There are, it seems to me, three conflicting modern approaches to the natural world which in their separation from one another contribute to our contemporary dis-ease. One approach is this idea of our complete mastery or dominance of nature that ultimately fails to respect the natural order. It arises out of a sense of our separation from nature that leads to an instrumental manipulation of nature, the consequences of which are now more fully before us. It is, however, an overstatement about ourselves as distinct and separate from the natural world in its externality.

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“Thy faith hath made thee whole”

Today’s Gospel is the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel. It is appointed for Thanksgiving Day as embracing both the idea of harvest thanksgiving and national thanksgiving, the idea of giving thanks for our rational and political freedoms, however much in disarray. The Gospel story is especially powerful and complements the paradoxes of the Epistle reading from Galatians which continues the theme of our living and walking in the Spirit, bidding us, on the one hand, to “bear ye one another’s burdens,” and, on the other hand, to bear our own burdens.

In bearing one another’s burdens we are bearing our own as well. How? Because we are social, spiritual and intellectual creatures in and through our life with one another. We don’t live in isolation from one another. To be human means our connection and life with each other. But how and in what way?  These readings, like so many of the Scripture readings of the Trinity season, point us to the truth of our humanity as lived in a sacramental and social community. They speak to us about becoming and being whole.

Our text in the Prayer Book is from the King James Version which preserves Tyndale’s translation about being made whole. Wycliffe in his 14th century translation renders it as “thy faith hath made thee safe.” More modern English translations adopt the idea that “your faith hath made you well” and a few use the somewhat more literal phrase, “your faith has saved you” and one gives us “healed and saved.” In truth the Greek word which carries over into the Latin salvum conveys a range of meetings over the centuries about being rescued, being kept safe, being preserved, and getting home with the idea of being where you belong and thus who you truly are. But it is this sense of wholeness that warrants our careful attention.

The story seems at first to highlight the one who turned back. There were ten who were lepers. All ten were healed by Jesus who bids them “go and show yourselves unto the priests.” As Luke puts it, “as they went, they were cleansed.” All ten. One of them, though, in seeing “that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice, glorified God, and fell down on his face at [Jesus’] feet, giving him thanks.” Luke adds to this the observation that the one who turned back “was a Samaritan.”

It is a most moving spectacle. Jesus comments on his action in contrast with the other nine, that only one “returned to give glory to God,” and calls him “this stranger.” Is the story then about the radical individual who stands out and away from others in splendid isolation? Is being saved merely personal? Or is this stranger, this Samaritan, like the “certain Samaritan” in last Sunday’s Gospel, precisely the one who shows us the truth of our humanity in our corporate, social and spiritual lives?

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