Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

admin | 17 September 2023

“God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”

This Sunday comes just after the Feast of the Holy Cross this year, itself the marker for the Autumn Ember days this week. Holy Cross (Sept. 14th) reminds us of the centrality of the Passion of Christ and its meaning for us in our lives partly by recalling us to the purpose of the ordained ministry. The task of the Church through the priestly ministry is to recall all of us to our life and vocation in Christ. In a profound sense the concentration of our thoughts upon the Cross and Passion of Christ is the great counter to the anxieties that bedevil our current world and culture.

Louise Penny’s post-pandemic novel, “The Madness of Crowds” suggests that people “were tired of being afraid” with respect to Covid, the fear of sickness and death which quickly turns to the fear and hatred of others, to division and hostility. I would like to think that she was right that people are tired of being afraid, but I wonder. It sometimes seems that we have become acclimated to fear, finding in it the comfort of being a victim where responsibility and agency is directed away from ourselves and is placed on others. Our fears make us more manipulable to the agendas of others.

This is the opposite to what Paul is saying in Galatians and which Matthew illustrates in his “be not anxious” gospel, a phrase which Jesus repeats three times. “Be not anxious” complements Christ’s “be not afraid”. The Gospel puts its finger on what we are anxious about: “your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” How can we not be concerned with and even preoccupied with these material and physical realities? And especially when all of the assumptions of the middle-class about their future and that of their children seems less and less rosy? To be sure, and yet there is a great spiritual danger in attaching ourselves to expectations that cannot do justice to the radical truth and dignity of our humanity, something which, paradoxical as it may seem, is realized in Christ Crucified.

The Passion of Christ teaches us most profoundly about God and about ourselves in our essential humanity. What it means to be human cannot be measured by wealth and power, by the material and physical aspects of our lives. Not that such things don’t matter but they are not and cannot be everything. At best they provide the context in which our lives are lived but to what end? It is not simply about the comfortable life; it is about a life lived with purpose to what is greater than ourselves and in which we find a deeper truth about ourselves. We are, as Paul suggests, a new creation in Christ. We are not defined simply by the cultural contexts and experiences of our lives. Which is why, as he puts it, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matter at all.

More profoundly, as Paul indicates, we learn the truth of God in what God wills to undergo for us in the form of our humanity; in short, the Passion. This points us to the Passion as part and parcel of our sanctification as well as our justification. Once again the focus is on the internalization in our souls of the external work of Christ on the Cross. Knowing the frailty of our humanity points to an inward strength which is found not in any presumption about ourselves, either as victims or in our pride, but as found in the mercy that does not end, the mercy of God. That and that alone can keep us “from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation.”

These readings ask us to think more deeply about what it means to be human and teach us that the truth of our humanity is found in God. Nowhere is that more clearly seen than on the Cross which reveals to us both the nature of God and the nature of our humanity. In the Passion of Christ we see what God wills to undergo for us in the truth of our humanity. But as the Gospel shows that also connects to how we see everything else in the world around us of which we too are a part. It reminds us of the Providence of God which is intimately bound to the idea of Creation. What God creates he sustains. Creation is really a continuing activity.

It is really all about attention. Paul calls attention to the idea of our participation in Christ’s Passion, bearing, as he does, in our own bodies “the marks of the Lord Jesus.” The Passion defines us in one way or another, stigmata or no stigmata, literally speaking. The wounds of the crucified are the marks of divine love written in our flesh.

Yet Matthew calls our attention to the simple beauties of the created world, to the birds of the air and the flowers of the field who are all part of God’s creation as are we. To be reminded that this is God’s world and not ours to manipulate and abuse is really the counter to our anxieties which are really nothing more than an over-investment in ourselves at the expense of God and one another and the natural world. We are too often preoccupied with ourselves. It is not simply that “the world is too much with us, late and soon” as Wordsworth says; we are too much bound up in ourselves and this leads in turn to our misuse of creation.

This is our disconnect from God and God’s creation and from the Providence of God which moves sweetly and strongly – suaviter et fortiter – through all things. Who we are in Christ connects us to the principle of life itself – Christ the light and life of the world and of our souls. The Cross of Christ reminds us of the radical nature of the divine life revealed in the Passion. It is all a matter of attention.

Prayer is really all about attention. “Prayer consists of attention,” the philosopher and activist Simone Weil teaches, and, indeed, attention of the highest order, namely, “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God.” This complements Richard Hooker’s observation that prayer signifies “all the service that ever we do unto God.” For “as teaching bringeth us to know that God is our supreme truth; so prayer testifieth that we acknowledge him our sovereign good.“ Thus, “the faculty of attention, directed toward God,” Weil says, “is the very substance of prayer.”

But it equally belongs as well to the love of neighbour. “Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance, the love of neighbour, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance.” As she explains, “the capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” But what is the Passion of Christ except the contemplation of the one who bears the sufferings of our sinful world? We behold what God wills to undergo for us and in the body of our humanity.

This is wonderfully expressed by Miranda in the Tempest having beheld a shipwreck in which she thinks all are lost. “I have suffered with those that I saw suffer,” she says. It speaks to her character and ultimately to her openness to the Providence of God whose grace in us works ”a sea-change into something rich and strange,” a transformation in outlook, if we heed Paul’s words about who we are in Christ.

This sense of attention to God and one another equally calls us to attend to God’s Providential care for the whole of creation. This counters our anxieties because it reminds us of our connection to the whole order of creation in redemption. In other words, it is not all about us but about our humanity in the world and with God. In attending to the created order we are attending to God and to one another. He is found, as Evelyn Underhill reminds us, “in the little things,” thus even in the birds of the air and the flowers of the field which awaken us to his glory.

Attention requires humility, not our boasting in ourselves or complaining about others. We “should glory,” Paul tells us, “in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” for there all things have been gathered through the sufferings of the Son to the Father. The Cross becomes through Christ’s Passion the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Such, too, is the glory of autumn, we might say, rains and winds notwithstanding. The Cross is our glory for there is the vision of “the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” It is what we seek in prayer for Christ reigns and triumphs from the tree. Because of that we can say with Paul: