Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity

admin | 21 July 2024

“We are children of God”

Our readings set before us, it seems, a series of binary opposites: in the Epistle, flesh versus Spirit, servitude versus sonship, suffering versus glorification, and in the Gospel, prophets outwardly “in sheep’s clothing” but “inwardly ravening wolves,” good fruit versus evil fruit, a good tree versus a corrupt tree, saying versus doing. But are we simply left with a series of binaries, caught in the back and forth, the to and fro of division and opposition? What would be the good in all of that?

We are being tasked with thinking through these binaries to grasp an underlying sense of spiritual integrity and wholeness, to who we are in God, and, as the Collect suggests, under the Providence of God. This transcends the binaries and oppositions though without negating them. The Epistle is emphatic that we have “received a spirit of sonship” that frees us from slavery and fear. “We cry aloud, Abba, Father; the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit, that we are children of God,” and “fellow-heirs with Christ, if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” Such is the greater vision and vocation of our humanity in the midst of the turmoils of our souls and our world.

Some of you will recognise this reading from Romans as one of the lessons provided for the Burial of the Dead in our corporate parish life. It speaks directly to us as mourners in the face of death highlighting the awareness of our own mortality yet reminding us of our life in God through the sufferings of Christ. In other words, it recalls us to our sonship as the children of God not in a flight from the world and the flesh but through our redemption and freedom in Christ.

This belongs to the radical meaning of the doctrine of the Incarnation, to the reality of the Word made flesh who is Christ Crucified, and to its meaning for us in the pilgrimage of our lives as eloquently expressed in the Eucharistic Prayer. Almighty God, our heavenly Father, gave his “only Son Jesus Christ to take our nature upon him, and to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption.”

This is one form of “th’ abridgement of Christ’s story,” as Donne puts it in a poem celebrating the coincidence of the Annunciation and the Passion on the same day in 1608. “Th’ abridgement” is the concentration of Christ’s story in the necessary interplay of Passion and Incarnation, “th’ abridgement … which makes one (As in plain maps, the furthest west is east) Of the angels’ Ave and Consummatum est.” Donne notes further that in this conjunction, “death and conception in mankinde is one.” Why? All because of what belongs to the logic of human redemption. This is concisely expressed by Richard Hooker. “We may hereby perceive the cause,“ he says, “why divine nature should assume human, that so God might be in Christ reconciling to himself the world.” This presupposes a gap, a separation, that is to be overcome not by us but in what belongs to us. As he explains, “the world’s salvation was without the incarnation of the Son of God a thing impossible, not simply impossible, but impossible it being presupposed that the will of God was no otherwise to have it saved than by the death of his own Son. Whereby taking to himself our flesh, and by his incarnation making it his own flesh, he had now of his own although from us what to offer unto God for us.”

This way of thinking about human redemption ultimately belongs to our life within the “never-failing providence” of God, and so to our lives within that understanding. Sticking close to the images of Scripture here means reasoning through the oppositions to grasp a deeper sense of the unity of our thinking and our doing, the unity of the inward and the outward, rather than simply remaining caught in their opposition. But this means appreciating the radical nature of God’s Providence which in some sense is simply the endless activity of God’s creative will which not only creates but sustains all that is. The word ‘providence’ can easily mislead us since it suggests the idea of foreseeing or foreknowing when in fact God only sees, seeing and knowing all things “in one swift mental stab,” as Boethius puts it. There is no before or after with God. That belongs rather to us in the limits of our thinking and results in the negation of the very thing we seek and desire, our wholeness and completeness as found in God’s eternal life. It is the problem of reading temporal distinctions into the eternity of God.

Our readings point us to a new and renewing sense of our humanity as the children of God called to be who we are in word and deed, uniting in ourselves what belongs to our unity in Christ. The poet George Herbert, in his poem entitled Providence, highlights our identity and vocation under the Providence of God’s loving care. Recalling the insight that wisdom moves all things “strongly and sweetly,” he says that “Of all creatures both in sea and land/ Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes./ And put the penne alone into his hand, /And made him Secretarie of thy praise.”

“Man,” he says, “is the worlds high Priest,” called to the praise of God in our lives, called to give voice to the voiceless forms of the created order in which we are placed. Our lives are meant to be a kind of writing, a writing out of the story of Christ in us, a constant dying and living to him and with him. Such is the providential blessing of knowing that we are the children of God. Only in him we may say with Julian of Norwich that indeed “all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well,” words of comfort and strength for all, not just for some. Her words were spoken in the face of the horrific suffering of the plague in the 14th century. They are words which recall us to the radical nature of our life in God and with God, come what may in the uncertainties of our times.