Year: 2021

“God … shall himself restore, stablish, strengthen you”

Some ancient texts add ‘settle’ to this list of verbs, as in being “settled upon a foundation”. In a sense, our return to in-person worship here at Christ Church is about our restoration, about our being established, about our being strengthened, and about our being settled upon the foundation of our life together in Christ. It is good to be back and I hope that we can begin to settle into the regular forms of our corporate life in Christ with a spirit of gratitude and forbearance, knowing that there are and will be uncertainties ahead. We have, I hope, learned something about ourselves in and through these troubling times. The challenge has been to keep our focus on the spiritual teachings that alone restore, stablish, strengthen, and settle us upon the care of God; “casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you.”

The care of God is a radical concept and teaching. It belongs to the even more radical concept of God as love, whose love is the ground of all life and being, all knowing and loving. Yet again, the Gospel provides us with a telling illustration of what the care of God means for us in our lives. In the face of the critical murmurings of the Pharisees and Scribes about Jesus being in the company of publicans and sinners, “receiving sinners and eating with them,” as they suggest, Jesus tells three powerful parables, two of which comprise today’s Gospel. They are the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the parable of the prodigal or lost son. The fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel is a tour-de-force of teaching about repentance and rejoicing. Repentance and joy go together. That alone is worth pondering and thinking about. We are meant to see ourselves in these parables.

Such a view underlies an important aspect of the Prayer Book liturgy as penitential adoration and reminds us of the deep love of God for us that derives from the love of God himself. Our whole liturgy is about joyful repentance; our turning back to God because God has turned us back to himself. Such is restoration and the grounding of our lives in God, restored, established, strengthened, and settled upon his love.

I have on occasion thought about the ethical teaching of this chapter of Luke’s Gospel aesthetically, by way of the idea of a triptych. A triptych is three panels, usually painted, depicting certain biblical stories understood in relation to each other and often placed just above or standing on the altar. In this case, the whole chapter could be captured in a triptych illustrating the theme of repentance and rejoicing. Triptychs are a feature of Medieval Christian art and usually take the form of a large central panel framed by two hinged side panels each half the size of the central panel. The hinges allow the side panels to enclose the central panel if desired at certain times in the liturgical year. In terms of the fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, the parable of the prodigal son would have to form the central panel framed by the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin.

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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.

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