Category: Sermons

“Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost”

It is a powerful statement about the radical nature of human redemption. Coming as it does on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, it completes a pattern of reflection about our journey in the wilderness even as it marks a transition to the deeper wilderness of Passiontide.

We are lost in our temptations which set us in opposition to God. We are lost in our griefs and sorrows, our fears and worries about our children. We are lost in the utter emptiness of ourselves. These aspects of loss have been before us on the preceding Sundays in Lent. They have marked an aspect of the teaching about original sin which serves to catapult us more firmly into the redemptive grace of Christ.

Here, again, we are in the wilderness, but here we are fed in the wilderness. Loaves and a few small fishes. Even more, the fragments from the picnic are more than enough to sustain the redeemed community of our humanity. And in a way, that image of bread has been an underlying theme of the preceding Sundays reaching a kind of crescendo of meaning on this day which is sometimes known as Refreshment Sunday. The Fourth Sunday in Lent is Mid-Lent Sunday and it provides almost a kind of oasis of refreshment for our souls in the mid-point of the Lenten journey overall.

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This is the third of four Lenten meditations on original sin. The previous meditations are posted here and here.

“A house divided against itself falleth”

In the course of these little considerations of the big theme of “original sin”, I have tried to locate our reflections in the propers for the Sundays in Lent. The Third Sunday in Lent would seem to offer a particularly dismal view of our humanity that complements perfectly the negativity, as some would see it, of the doctrine of original sin. To the contrary, I would hope to argue, since the doctrine of original sin is really part and parcel of the good news of human redemption. Without the honest appreciation of the sin-wracked nature of our humanity, it is pretty hard to make sense of human experience and the grace of Christ crucified.

In other words, the honest recognition of how compromised we are by the habits of sin is really the entry point to the transformative power of God’s grace that leads us as Dante puts it, “from misery to felicity.” It does so by working on our hearts and minds. We are drawn into the drama of our redemption. The doctrine of original sin belongs to that drama.

We are, in the words of the gospel, radically divided within ourselves. The many divisions and tensions and contradictions within the institutions that drive our social and political lives are really a further extension of the idea and the doctrine of original sin.

The doctrine of original sin is the necessary counter to a variety of social and political viewpoints in our world and day. It is the counter to the ideology of progress, the idea that things are always going forward, that our humanity is constantly on the march towards the more and the better, the better, of course, always measured in terms of the more. It is the counter to the idea that the future is ever brighter and the past always a yawning abyss, the proverbial dark ages. The doctrine of original sin reminds us instead of the perennial darkness of the human heart, the much more persuasive concept of “the heart of darkness,” to borrow Joseph Conrad’s title.

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“And the last state of that man is worse than the first”

It is a terrifying picture really, the picture of the darkness of utter desolation. It is something which our contemporary culture knows about or, at least, experiences in one way or another. We have all been there. “I am desolate and in misery,” the Psalmist says. You know about desolations and miseries. It may because of sorrow and loss; it may be because of hardship and troubles. It may be because of the enmity of others or it may be because of our own sinfulness. “Look upon my adversity and misery, / and forgive me all my sins.”

It can lead to a sense of hopelessness, the sense of utter futility, the sense of the empty nothingness of life.

We live, of course, in a world that is seemingly full of everything; there is a fullness of images. We are constantly besieged and bombarded by a vast array of images which flicker and dance before our imaginations. The consequence is that our sensual imagination is overloaded. What are these images? They are the images of violence and self-indulgence; in short, the images of destruction and consumption.

And yet, there is a terrible emptiness to this fullness of images. They are, as it were, nothing worth and quite unsatisfactory. But, they consume us. We are possessed by what beguiles us. We find that we are strangers to ourselves. We are alienated from ourselves.

What shall we do? Shall we empty our selves of these empty images through some heroic effort of will? Just disconnect the internet? Pull the plug on the TV? Perhaps, but is it really “nirvana,” a state of empty nothingness that we seek? For in the culture of images even the emptying ourselves of the images of sensual immediacy is to find ourselves empty and lost. Whether we are full of these empty images or aware of their emptiness we are nonetheless empty and lost to ourselves. “And the last state of that man is worse than the first.”

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This is the second of four Lenten meditations on original sin. The previous meditation is posted here.

“Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David”

Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy upon us. It is the recurring refrain, not just of the season of Lent, but of our Anglican liturgy. In a way, it is an implicit acknowledgment of the condition of our sinfulness, the on-going legacy of original sin, if you will, the mystery which we are pondering in this series of Lenten addresses.

The Canaanite woman in the Gospel story for the Second Sunday in Lent cries out for mercy. It is, evidently, not a cri de coeur that is restricted to the people of Israel. It is universal. She cries out for mercy to Jesus for her daughter who is grievously vexed with a devil, deeply troubled spiritually or mentally, we might say. But that whole idea of being vexed by a devil suggests the power and hold of evil on our souls. Somehow it seems that we cannot just go and do all that we would like to do or even believe that we ought to do for ourselves or for one another.

Paul expresses that deep sense of how we are divided within ourselves. He states the condition of our divided wills, “the good that I would I do not, the evil that I would not do, that do I do.” We are a divided house and we cannot stand on the power of our strength of will, crowing to the universe, like Frank Sinatra, that “I did it my way.” Time and time again, the Church in the liturgy through the Collects and the Scripture readings especially, reminds us of this deeply disturbing feature of our human lives, the condition of our divided selves, the reality of our corrupted wills.

And yet, to pray for mercy is to acknowledge this reality without succumbing to the utter hopelessness of despair. To pray for mercy is to be open to God’s power and grace which is greater than the contradictions of our being. This is an important point, I think, because logically there is something incomplete in defining ourselves negatively. It presupposes something positive. Sin, original sin, is about privation, a lack or absence of being and truth. But it is totally dependent upon what it denies. Sin is nothing in itself.

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“Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which
fall from their masters’ table”

It is a powerful and amazing Gospel story. And very disturbing. I wonder if we can hear it. Sometimes, I think, ours is the culture of fragile, wounded and broken souls, strong, perhaps, mostly in its sense of entitlement and in its sense of injury. This story surely disturbs and disquiets us. Why?

Consider what we see here. A mother whose daughter is sick. Ordinarily, we may uphold the strength of a parents’ love for their children as being quite powerful and most strong. Isaiah, in a remarkable passage asks the question whether “a woman can forget her sucking child” and suggests that even that form of love is not as strong as God’s love. “Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you,” he has God say. His point is that our human loves are always incomplete in comparison to the divine love. “Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands,” God says in a wonderful image.

And yet, we may wonder about such loves, the love of a mother for her child as a limited love and the unlimited, unforgetting love of God, in the wake of this story. We may see here the power of a mother’s love for her daughter, to be sure, but we may question the love of God. If the love of God is what we are meant to see in Jesus Christ, then that love seems very odd, harsh and strange; indeed, disturbing. So what then are we to make of this story?

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“The people which sat in darkness have seen a great light”

Matthew recalls Isaiah’s prophecy about the light that has arisen upon “them which sat in the region and shadow of death.” He does so in the context of Christ’s coming to Capernaum which is on the sea-coast of Galilee in the land of Zebulon and Naphtali. Christ’s coming there occasions the connection in his mind with Isaiah’s prophecy about those same sea-coast lands. Matthew is suggesting the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy in Christ Jesus, the Jesus whose mission of repentance, discipleship, healing and salvation are the very things that belong to the evangelium – the good news that is the meaning of the word, gospel.

The lesson from the Acts of the Apostles echoes that same theme. “The word of God grew and multiplied,” we are told, and we hear of the spreading of that word into Seleucia and Cyprus through Barnabas and Saul; all under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. With the commemoration of St. Patrick, we are taken in an opposite direction, “away in the lovable west,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, to the shores of Ireland but with that same spirit of mission. St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland; the one who brought the good news of the Gospel to those sea-coast islands on the far, far reaches of Europe, the very outposts of civilization and order in the fifth century.

The remarkable spread of Christianity is one of the great mysteries of the world; an undeniable fact that bespeaks a remarkable revolution from pagan darkness to the light of Christ. With the coming of Christ, light and hope triumph over the dismal darkness and despairing fatalisms of the pagan cultures, whether sophisticated and urban or rustic and rural, whether ancient or modern. Patrick lit the paschal fire, the fire of Easter triumph of Christ’s resurrection, on the hill of Tara. It signaled the conversion of the Irish.

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“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”

The story of the Temptations of Christ is read on the First Sunday in Lent. In response to the second temptation, Christ responds with these words: “thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” But, of course, in relation to the idea and the reality of the doctrine of original sin, that is exactly and constantly what we do. We tempt God. We constantly put God to the test, trying to make him accountable and measurable to us. Our task this Lent is to ponder the mystery of our sinfulness, the mystery of original sin.

Original Sin: What is it and why does it matter?

Have you ever wondered, what’s wrong with the world? Have you ever wondered, what’s wrong with me? In other words, have you ever had that sense that nothing is the way it should be either with ourselves or others or our world and day? Has that sense of things not being right ever resulted in asking about evil? Unde hoc malum? Where does evil come from? Or do we persist in saying and thinking that everything is good; just a few bad apples in the pile that spoil everything?

Original sin is the doctrine that there is something radically and inescapably not right about any of us right from the get-go of our being. Very tough stuff. And yet, it seems, this is actually part and parcel of the good news. Original Sin catapults us into the totality of God’s grace and grants utter primacy to God’s will. Our task is to try to understand something about this strange and curious teaching that seems to cause so much consternation. Yet, as G.K. Chesterton observes, it is the most empirical of all Christian teachings, the most provable from experience.

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“Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven”

The land is the place of worship. Abram comes into the land which God has given him and builds there “an altar to the Lord.” Jesus comes to his own city. And there is healing and forgiveness. The land is the place of forgiveness and new life.

This morning’s first lesson is part of a whole theology of the land that unfolds in the witness of the Scriptures. That theology of the land begins first with the story of Creation and the Fall. Creation is the paradise in which God has planted us but has become the wilderness of our disobedience in which we have to learn the truth of God and his will through suffering and work, through the forms of our wilfulness made visible to us, and through the forms of divine love revealed to us.

In way, the Book of Genesis is the story of brothers and of brothers that are often at odds with one another and often about land. There is the story of Cain and Abel, the story of the first murder and one in which “your brother’s blood,” God says to Cain, “is crying to me from the ground,” from the land. It marks the beginning of the blood-soaked ground of our world and day, a world of wars and destruction. There are the stories of Abram and Lot, such as we have this morning in the separating out of who is going to have what land and where. Just as importantly, that story unveils part of the divine covenant for our humanity transacted by God to Abram – the idea of a promised land. What exactly is that promised land remains a much vexed problem politically. But, perhaps, that is to miss the point theologically. Abram builds an altar to the Lord under the oaks of Mamre. It will be the scene for God’s promise to Abram and Sarah of a Son through whom all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, though not without a most grievous and difficult trial of Abram’s faith. Ultimately, the land is the good land where God is acknowledged, where God is honoured and worshipped. “There he built an altar to the Lord.”

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“Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil”

Everything in this gospel must disquiet us. There is, first, the idea of Jesus being led “by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil”; secondly, there is the idea of the wilderness itself, an image which disturbs as much as it attracts.

Wilderness here is the place of temptation but under the guiding force of the Holy Spirit. This implies a kind of necessity about the wilderness in the understanding of the Christian pilgrimage. Somehow there is something good about temptation.

Wilderness. It is an intriguing term. What do we understand by the wilderness? It is an ambiguous concept for ancients and for moderns.

The wilderness can be a place of fearfulness and uncertainty, the wilderness of chaos as in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. Alternatively, we might think of the wilderness as a place of pure nature, unsullied by human activity, a notion, perhaps, best captured in the twentieth century phenomenon of national parks, and now, the idea of wilderness sanctuaries where human intervention is held to a minimum. There is as well the idea of the wilderness as a place of sanctuary and escape; wilderness as a kind of paradise away from the greater wildness of the urban jungle.

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“Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”

Dust and ashes. Hardly an auspicious beginning, we might think. Usually we think of dust and ashes in terms of endings; the fire that ends in a heap of ashes, the dust that is swirls around in the wind, the detritus of the mundane world.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. Dust and ashes are the dominant images of the day. Ashes are a symbol of repentance in the ancient biblical culture. Dust recalls us to the biblical story of creation and is the strong image of our creatureliness. Everything in the physical and material universe is made of dust, we might say. That is an important feature of our creation: we are the God-made dust into which God has breathed his spirit, even sanctified dust.

The two images coalesce in the ritual imposition of ashes on our foreheads, itself another image that signals the special nature of our creatureliness. We are made in the image of God by virtue of our reason and will symbolized in our foreheads. Ashes are imposed with the sign of the cross on our foreheads, and they are placed on our foreheads with the words, “Remember O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” Those words, too, suggest an ending. They seem to sound an ominous and serious note.

And yet, the business of this day is all about a beginning and as such there is something lovely and wonderful, even beautiful about Ash Wednesday. It is, we might say, a somber day of the soul’s rejoicing. Why? Because the operative word and idea of Ash Wednesday is repentance and repentance is great good news for our souls. We get to begin again.

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