Sermon for Septuagesima
admin | 13 February 2022“Go ye also into the vineyard”
“My beloved had a vineyard”, Isaiah says, in a remarkable passage of triple reflexivity. “Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard”. The prophet sings a song about God’s love, the beloved who in turn loves us. The vineyard of creation is the place of our being loved. How have we responded? “He looked for it to yield grapes but it yielded wild grapes”.
Isaiah captures the human dilemma. We are created in the image of God, as Genesis 1 reminds us in the first lesson at Matins every year on Septuagesima Sunday. We are also made out of the dust of the ground into which God breathes his spirit. In other words, the early chapters of Genesis remind us of two essential things: our connection to every other created thing, from dirt to angels, as it were, and our relation to God in whose image we are made. Genesis 1 places our humanity in the context of the whole order of creation. Creation is about nothing more than a relation to a Creator, which is to say that we are part of an intelligible order of reality. But what is the dilemma which Isaiah highlights? It is our turning away from the order and purpose of creation to pursue our own interests. As with Genesis, that reveals a contradiction within ourselves and with reality. The intelligibility of creation is all about the wisdom of God over against the folly of our humanity.
Yet our folly does not negate the truth of the vineyard, itself an image of creation and of the proper form of engagement with the natural world. But what is the purpose of creation? Lynn White’s 1967 paper, ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis’, claims that it is “the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man”. This has played a major role in blaming Christianity for the environmental and ecological catastrophes of our times. But is that the Christian teaching? He was right to note, as Alistair McGrath observes, the importance of religion in relation to ecology.
There is a long and rich tradition of reflection within the religious and philosophical traditions about our relation to nature. But to suppose that creation exists simply for us really reveals more about the impulses of our utilitarian and technocratic world which attempts to reduce the world to our interests and pursuits, in short, to technological domination. It results in the endless and often thoughtless manipulation of nature and ourselves which destroys both. This is the opposite of what Genesis means by God giving man “dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” which can only mean in the context of Genesis acting in the image of the Dominus, the Lord, in terms of care and respect for the whole created order. To view dominion as license for humans to manipulate and destroy is a serious misreading of the story and one which is profoundly false to Christian theology in its history and in its various forms of reflection on creation and nature.
The current term for the contemporary ‘age’ in which we find ourselves is ‘the anthropocene’ which clearly puts humanity, anthropos, at the center of everything. It highlights how human activity in the forms of its modern dominance over nature has had a profound effect on the natural world and in largely negative terms as a result of the industrial revolution and now the digital revolution. The problem with the world is simply us. Get rid of humans, the extreme environmentalists argue, and all will be fine. Humans are the problem, the evil, that has to be removed. But for what end?
I love the story of the 1951 meeting between A.J. Ayers and George Bataille in some Parisian bar where the question, debated late into the early hours of the morning, was the following: “Was there a Sun before men existed?” At first glance, it seems absurd. But a moment of reflection – or several hours of reflection with and without French wine – brings out the critical point. What does it mean to say something exists if there is no knower? The debate hangs on the important point that we cannot remove ourselves from reality. We would want to say that, of course, the sun pre-exists human life on earth but that only begs the question about how we can come to know things unless they are in principle knowable, and that implies a knower. Quantum physics has long recognised the importance of the observer effect as an essential component that influences what is being observed; in short, we cannot remove ourselves from the intellectual equation about the picture of reality.
But this doesn’t mean that reality is reduced to whatever happens to be in your mind or my mind or someone else’s mind, that there is ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth’ for that is to deny all truth. In a strange way, the Ayer/Bataille encounter points to the theological idea of God as the knower, the cause and the principle of the world without which it is not thinkable at all. In other words, the doctrine of creation is really about God’s knowing and loving of all things in himself. It is emphatically God’s world and one in which we have our place. We are sent into the vineyard to labour, a labour which is no longer simply a curse but about reclaiming our relation to Creator and creation. The vineyard image is about restoring that relation, a kind of paradise plus, if you will.
To reclaim this sensibility is the pressing task because it situates us within a larger reality. Humans cannot not make a mark on the world but that does not mean either that the world exists for us to do with it whatever we will – largely the project of the modernity of the last 350 years or more – or that we are condemned to an armageddon- like destruction of the world and ourselves as its result. We cannot not leave a mark but the question is really about what kind of mark. There is all the difference, after all, between the vineyard and “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot”, in Joni Mitchell’s famous song Big Yellow Taxi (1970), though it seems to me that the ‘they’ in the song is also us. This returns us to the primacy of the ethical.
All this is prologue to this morning’s readings. In the background of the Gospel is the whole pageant of Creation in Genesis and the story of our follies and failures so poignantly captured in Isaiah imagining God’s lament. God “looked for it to yield grapes but it yielded wild grapes”. Today’s Gospel places us in the vineyard of God’s creation and reminds us that our true and real relation to creation and to one another is grounded in God’s Word and Will, in the justice of God. “Whatsoever is right that shall ye receive”.
The vineyard is an image of creation. It reveals the mind of the Creator, we might say. It reminds us that creation, imaged as a vineyard, is God’s creation and therefore subject to his will and purpose. And what is that will and purpose? It is the challenge of the Gospel to teach us that it is nothing less than our going into the vineyard and acting in accord with the will of God. We labour not to get ahead of one another nor simply for our own self-interest but ultimately to honour the God of all creation and one another as fellow-workers in the vineyard. In seeking our own self-advantage, we neglect the virtues, particularly, the virtue of temperance, of self-control, precisely because we let our appetites rule and dominate both ourselves and others. This is the lesson of the Epistle. Without temperance, our appetites and desires are destructive of nature and ourselves and lead to the grotesque forms of inequality in our present day. Peter Goodman’s book, Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World (2022), notes that during Covid the wealth of the world’s billionaires rose by $3.9 trillion. Such is the obscenity of the unbridled pursuit of wealth to the neglect of the ethical. This is the problem shown in the Gospel, too, in assuming that some are owed more than others on simply a quantitative basis.
The point of the parable is that our labours in the vineyard cannot be reduced to some sort of quantification – such as ‘how long?’ and ‘how much?’ – or to the idea of the dominance of the few over the many. The parable seeks to return us to the Lord of the Vineyard, to the God whose infinite mercy and truth cannot be constrained to some sort of calculus of the finite, to the flow-charts of the technocrats of our times. For that is a kind of fallacy: it assumes that nothing is and nothing is knowable unless it can be measured. As if quantity is all. In the world of big data, this seems to be the ruling concept. But more data does not mean more knowledge, yet alone wisdom. Learning how to live with less, we may discover, is more – something more spiritual, something more intellectual, something more ethical, something more true, and something more responsible. This means reclaiming a proper and ethical form of human agency where we are placed; the counter to the forms of exploitation. In other words, the Gesima Sundays return us to the qualities of human excellence as transformed by the love of God which are found in our places within the vineyard of God’s creation. To know the vineyard as God’s creation means to want to yield for God not the wild grapes of our folly and disobedience but the good fruits of character and faith.
It is the reason for our Parish, the reason for our being together and persevering in “the race which is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith”, as Hebrews puts it, “the alpha and omega” of our life, as John’s Revelation in the second lesson at Matins tells us. We are not defined by numbers whether in the pursuit of profit, or in the quantitative demands of the digital culture of likes, or in the impossible monetary demands of the Diocese. There is something more – the justice of God in the good order of his creation. Our labours in the vineyard seek to honour the justice of God in creation in our lives with one another where we are placed. The real challenge is what the ‘Gesima Sundays illustrate: the quality of our souls and life in faith.
“Go ye also into the vineyard”
Fr. David Curry
Septuagesima 2022
(In the Parish Hall)