Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity
“Love is the fulfilling of the law”
John Drury’s masterful literary biography of the poet and priest, George Herbert (1593-1631) is entitled Music at Midnight (2013). The title is taken from an anecdote in Izaak Walton’s The Life of Mr. George Herbert, written in 1670. It has the ring of truth to it about Herbert’s character, drawn from his own account of what happened to him one evening on his way from Bemerton to an evening of music making with friends in the cathedral city of Salisbury. As he journeyed, “he saw a poor man with a poorer horse that was fallen under his load.” Both were in distress and in need of help “which Mr. Herbert perceiving, put off his canonical coat, and helped the poor man to unload, and after to load his horse. The poor man blessed him for it, and he blessed the poor man;” and then, in very telling phrase, “and so was like the good Samaritan, that he gave him money to refresh both himself and his horse, and told him, that if he loved himself, he would be merciful to his beast.”
The whole event acts out the story of the Good Samaritan. But the anecdote goes on to report what happened when Herbert reached the house of his friends, dirty and in disarray, unlike his usual trim and clean self. He told them what had happened and was told by one that “he had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment.” Herbert’s answer was that the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight, and that the omission of it” would have troubled “his conscience, whensoever he would pass by that place.” Walton quotes Herbert as saying, “For if I be bound to pray for all that be in distress, I am sure that I am bound, so far as it is in my power, to practise what I pray for … and I would not willingly pass one day of my life without comforting a sad soul, or showing mercy: and I praise God for the occasion. And now let’s tune our instruments.”
“To practise what I pray for.” Prayer is “a kind of tune which all things hear and fear,, Prayer (I). It illustrates the reciprocity and interplay of all things human and divine, natural and holy, domestic and exotic, concluding through a parade of images and metaphors that prayer is “something understood.” All in all, the anecdote and his poems encapsulate poignantly the radical understanding of the Parable of the Good Samaritan before us this Sunday in the midpoint of the Trinity season. It is all captured most wonderfully in the opening words of the last poem of The Temple, Love (III). “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guiltie of dust and sinne,” for that is our human condition. Yet “quick-ey’d Love” always draws nearer to us, “sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any thing.”
