Category: Sermons

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

It should be the mantra for our divided and fragmented world in the attempt to reclaim the spiritual and intellectual principles that give meaning to human life. We are in the wilderness in a flight from the world, a flight from reality; the very opposite of the wilderness of Exodus and of Lent. For we are scattered in the confusions of our minds, scattered in the pride of the imaginations of our hearts, as Mary’s Magnificat suggests.

This Sunday looks back to the Exodus and to the other Sundays in Lent and looks ahead to Holy Week and Easter. It is simply about what is learned in the wilderness journey, our journey to God and with God as the principle of all reality. The Exodus was about a journey from slavery into freedom. What enslaves us is more than something external, more than the restraints and limits that belong to the natural world and to human life. The deeper forms of enslavement have to do with the realities of sin which are about a denial of God and of the goodness of creation. The modern gnostic flight from reality sees the world as something fearful and evil yet assumes a human freedom from the world through the fantasies and illusions of our control over nature; a flight into a technological future away from the limits of the world. It is no longer God’s world to be engaged respectfully and with care. It is an evil from which we assume we can escape. The movie ‘Interstellar’ is, perhaps, one illustration of this theme – a flight from an earth which we have made inhabitable to other planets but with the realization, perhaps, that the one thing we cannot escape is ourselves.

Lent is about facing the reality of ourselves. The good news, paradoxical as it may seem, is the knowledge that we are all sinners. Good news?! Indeed, because we can only know ourselves as sinners through the realization of what is prior to our sins and follies, namely, our own created being and our place within the created order.

Lent began on Ash Wednesday with the imposition of ashes signaling the acknowledgement of ourselves as sinners. Turning to God in repentance, however, is not an act of human pride and ascetic accomplishment; in other words, a work of man. It is our response to the grace of God moving in us in the deepening awareness of ourselves as sinners. It belongs, in other words, to that twofold sense of freedom from what enslaves us and our freedom to God; “to decline from sin, and incline to virtue,” as The Penitential Service rather beautifully puts it, “that we may walk with a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore” (BCP, p, 614). Such a movement is about our being gathered to God.

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“If I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God
hath come upon you”

We cannot free ourselves from what enslaves us to ourselves. Nor is it enough simply to be released from the obsessions that possess our minds and our thinking. Today’s remarkable and terrifying Gospel speaks  to our divided world and our divided selves. We are divided against ourselves in the confusion and conflict of opinions and emotions, in a whirlwind of fears and anxieties that pit us one against another about what is good and what is evil. At stake is any real passion for the absolute, for God, not just a freedom from what possesses us but a freedom to God in his openness to us.

To say that the world, whatever that means, is united in the demonizing of Putin with respect to the invasion of Ukraine only points to another division especially when it extends to the demonizing of all Russians and all things Russian including the music of Tschaikovsky! We need the wisdom of such Russian writers as Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn to help us think more deeply about evil and particularly about the Devil. Rowan Williams’ rich examination of the novels of Dostoevsky includes a chapter called “Devils,” subtitled, “Being toward Death,” which aptly captures the problematic of evil in today’s Gospel. “The triumph of the diabolical,” Williams suggests, “is when we cannot bear to see what we cannot deny is truth, in ourselves and in the world – the systematic cruelty and the humiliating world of inner fantasy and revolt against ‘good’.” “If there is no God, all things are permitted”, it is famously said in The Brothers Karamazov, but as Williams observes “the devastating truth is there is no escape from the diabolical”. “If there is no God to pass judgment, there is no acquittal or release either”. The self is immobilized in self-hatred and in denial of the principle of its own freedom and being. Such is possession.

Freedom perverted is the essence of the diabolical for Dostoevsky as Williams sees it. “The Devil is the enemy of any real freedom … since he is the spirit of destruction” (p. 93), thus “being toward death” which is the deeper contradiction which the Gospel dialogue brings out. The contrast in the Gospel and the Epistle is between “being toward death” and “being toward life.” Paul exhorts us in Ephesians to be “followers of God” and to “walk in love,” “walk[ing] as children of light,” while recognizing that we “were sometimes darkness, but now are [we] light in the Lord.” Light and life triumph over darkness and death.

The pericope ends with what may be an early Christian hymn in an adaptation of Isaiah’s “Surge, Illuminare” (Is. 60.1). “Arise, shine, for thy light is come, / and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee” is transformed into “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead,/ And Christ shall give thee light.” It sounds a positive note in contrast to the dark and negative picture of “the last state of that man.”

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“For this is the will of God, even your sanctification”

We are called to holiness, St. Paul reminds us. Sanctification means being made holy. The doctrinal concepts of justification and sanctification are necessarily intertwined. Justification is how we are known in the sight of God. God sees us in Christ who is our justification, the one who makes us right with God. In other words, it is about our being known in the knowing love of God. Yet as Paul reminded us on Quinquagesima Sunday “now we see in a glass darkly”; we do not yet see ourselves fully and truly in God. Thus, while the justifying righteousness of Christ is perfect and inherent in him it is not yet fully realised in us. Sanctification is about living more fully truly and fully in Christ and in the work of redemption which he has accomplished for us. Lent is about our journey with Christ in that work of redemption. As such it recalls us to both the principles of justification and sanctification.

Today’s Collect helps us to understand the dynamic between the Epistle and Gospel. God sees “that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” This puts starkly the human condition, our sinfulness and insufficiency. But to know this is to be looking to God, to his healing grace and truth for us and in us. What Paul is talking about in the Epistle reading from Thessalonians is about nothing less than seeking to be who we are in the sight of God. That turns on what we see in the Gospel, namely, the amazing story of the persistence and strength of an unnamed “woman of Canaan” who illustrates for us what it means to be looking to God for grace and mercy, for healing and salvation; in short, to being made whole, our sanctification.

The story is about the struggle that belongs to faith. Jacob wrestling with God becomes Israel, meaning one who struggles with God. That struggle is about breaking into the heart of God, into the meaning of God’s will and purpose for our life. Here in this story of a non-Israelite we have, in my view, one of the most powerful images of what it truly means to be an Israelite, as it were, to be who we are in the sight of God and to be living in that understanding. It is found in the amazing but disturbing dialogue and exchange between Jesus, his disciples, and this woman. She has a hold of the one thing necessary: an insight into the truth of God in Jesus Christ who alone is the principle of life, on the one hand, and the healing or restoration of our wounded and broken humanity, on the other hand. She knows the human need for divine mercy. This is her litany and ours. The Prayer Book Litany, the first part of the Liturgy to be translated and reworked from Latin into English by Thomas Cranmer, simply explicates in a comprehensive and exhaustive way all the things for which we seek God’s help and mercy.

She illustrates the meaning of the idea “that the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Ps. 51, 17). She is deeply troubled about her “daughter grievously vexed with a devil.” It is a phrase worth pondering. It speaks directly to our contemporary culture of addiction and psychotic disorders, of neuroses and mental distresses that are destructive and paralysing and which affect not only the individual but their families and friends. They are part and parcel of a broken and troubled world. Such things are really about a loss of self, what we might call, a negative negating of the self. Though some may think that there are cures to be found in the therapeutic culture whether through prescribed drugs, the pill cure, or through the talking cure, such as cognitive behaviour therapy, the older view of Freud, for instance, was that there is no cure to the discontents that beset modernity; at best, there are only ways to cope.

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“As dying, and behold, we live”

The Epistle reading from 2 Corinthians 6 lays out in a powerful and compelling way the forms of our response to the grace of God now which is “the day of salvation.” Our text is simply one part of a wonderful series of dialectical and paradoxical relations which have to do with who we are and how we see ourselves in the sight of God “as the ministers of God.” It provides a way of thinking the question which Plotinus (3rd c. AD) will later articulate but which actually belongs to all philosophy and life. “But we … who are we?”

The preoccupation with ourselves is an ancient and modern question albeit in different registers of meaning. The story of Narcissus for the ancient Greeks is a cautionary tale which has a certain modern resonance. It is really about the forms of self-obsession perhaps best illustrated in the ‘selfie culture’ of our contemporary world, not to mention the self-absorbed features of social media in general. Just as Narcissus drowns in the image of himself in the pond so in our contemporary world we are obsessed with ourselves and drown in the image of ourselves. In both cases we lose sight of who we are in the greater canvass of reality and, more importantly, in the sight of God.

“Know thyself,” the great Greek maxim of the Delphic Oracle, has its perfect counterpart in the Hebrew idea that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9.10; Ps. 110.10; Job 28.28). This is, I think, completely different from our modern self-obsessions which are entirely solipsistic and entirely self-involved, as if reality is only what is in our minds rather than in our engagement with what is greater than ourselves. To “know thyself” means to know your place within the world as an ordered whole, the cosmos, hence reality. “The fear of the Lord” is the wisdom which knows God as the principle of all things.

Lent seeks to clarify who we are by placing us more clearly and more fully in the sight and life of God. Paul’s wonderful rhetorical flow in the Epistle confronts us with the necessary interchange and back-and-forth of opposites; in short, the dialectic of human life as informed and transformed, or at least in the process of such a transformation, by virtue of our response to the grace of God. Paul is calling attention to our attitude of mind towards everything which we confront and experience. It offers a kind of coincidence of opposites as well as a sense of inner resilience and strength over and against the ups and downs of the world. In that sense it is really about facing suffering and learning from it. Such is the meaning of the Exodus in its fullest sense.

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“Behold, I have taken upon myself to speak to the Lord,
I who am but dust and ashes”

“I, who am but dust and ashes”, Abraham says in a remarkable passage that follows upon the promise of the promised son, a scene in which Abraham engages God in direct back and forth dialogue about righteousness and mercy. ‘How many righteous persons, God,’ Abraham is saying, ‘do there have to be within the city before you spare it?’ ‘Fifty? Forty? Thirty? Ten?’ The exchange is priceless and serves to highlight the idea of the infinite mercy of God which cannot be quantified, a point which reinforces that there is no wisdom in techne and technology since it defaults to a quantitative logic. Here is the first time that the phrase “dust and ashes” appears in the Hebrew Scriptures. It is in the context of a dialogue of question and answer between Abraham and God.

“Lord, I who am but dust and ashes”, dare to question you, God, Abraham is saying (Gen. 18.27). But that opens us out to the great insight of our engagement with God and one another, a question about our participation in God’s own life. “Now we see in a glass darkly but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as I am known,” as Paul puts it in Sunday’s Epistle reading from 1st Corinthians 13.  Such is the project of Lent, to know even as we are known. The phrase will reappear with Job in the context of his wrestling with God. “God,” he says, “has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes” (Job 30.19) but the phrase reaches its greatest poignancy of meaning in Job’s repentance in response to the wonder of God answering Job out of the whirlwind to recall him to the majesty and the power of creation: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38.4). “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now I see thee;” Job says, “therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

We are called to account about who we are. The epigraph to Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter of Things is from Plotinus. “But we … who are we?”, also quoted by the great physicist Schrödinger (1951). To know even as we are known.

Dust and ashes signify humility and repentance; the humility that contrasts with our pride and presumption; the repentance that seeks our being turned back to God. The dust of death and the ashes of repentance point us to the death and resurrection of Christ, to our life through his death for us in the flesh of our humanity. The haunting phrase of our liturgy, “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return” recalls the story of Creation and the Fall in Genesis and reiterated in the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: “all are from the dust, and all turn to the dust again” (Eccl. 3.20). Such is humility as the counter to pride and pretension.

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“Then shall I know even as also I am known”

Quinquagesima Sunday makes explicit the logic which underlies the ‘gesima’ Sundays and which runs through the whole pageant of Lent which begins with Ash Wednesday this week. “We go up to Jerusalem”, Jesus says to the disciples, and explains exactly what that means. Yet, the disciples, as Luke points out, “understood none of these things”.  This captures what Paul means by saying that “now we see in a glass darkly”. The hope of Lent as the journey of the soul to God is that “then” we may see “face to face”, that beyond “know[ing] in part”, we shall “know even as also [we] are known”. It gives a deeper meaning to the strong petition of the blind man on the wayside who simply wants to “receive [his] sight”.

The deeper significance of this is that we might see ourselves as God sees us, to see ourselves in Christ; in short, to know even as we are known in God. This highlights Lent as the season of the mystical journey of our souls to God. It emphasizes two themes which stand in complete opposition in our dystopian world: knowledge and will or power.

The great lesson of 1st Corinthians is about wisdom in love, the counter to the delusions of our  technocratic culture which is utterly and entirely bereft of wisdom, of virtue, and is anti-life and anti-intellect. Know-how skills do not provide us with the knowledge of what belongs to character, to the virtues of the soul, which concern ends and purposes; in short, meaning which goes beyond techne or technique. Knowing what something is or knowing that it exists for a purpose extends far beyond the know-how skills of our digital devices which reduce us to machine-like things who think like our devices. We make the machines that make and unmake us. To know even as we are known is to reclaim our humanity from the disastrous projects of its being re-engineered, as Brett Frischmann & Evan Selinger pointed out in Re-engineering Humanity (2018).

Such is the paradox and the perversion of the famous Turing-test devised to see if a computer is capable of thinking like a human; now it is about whether humans can be made to think like computers. “I am not a robot,” we are sometimes asked to check but that only confirms how conditioned we are to being essentially technobots, mere cogs in the machinery of algorithms which work for purposes that are entirely remote and hidden from us but serve the interests of the technocratic elites. Such examples serve only to highlight the divide between power and knowledge.

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“The seed is the word of God”

The ‘Gesima Sundays’ mark the transition from learning to living, a turn to the practice of the virtues as transformed by divine love to become the means of our participation in Christ’s work of human redemption. That will be the project of Lent, the pilgrimage of love that brings us to the book of love opened out for us to read on the cross of Good Friday. Already we are being turned towards Easter.

Today the virtues of courage and prudence are set before us in the Epistle and Gospel respectively. This focus on the classical virtues as transformed by divine love to become forms of love themselves locates the ‘Gesima Sundays’ within a larger tradition of ethical thinking. They connect to the great ethical turn in philosophy by Socrates and Plato, for instance, along with others in what has been styled the “axial age” (Karl Jaspers) and thus to the idea of philosophy as something lived, the idea of the good life.

Such ancient interests speak to our modern concerns. What is the good life? It is a pressing question in our current circumstances economically, politically, socially, environmentally, and religiously. The Christian Faith speaks to our current distresses even if nothing more than to raise the necessary ethical questions, the questions that are rooted in an understanding of the dynamic between God and Man in Jesus Christ. “I am come”, Jesus says, “that they may have life and have it more abundantly.” He doesn’t mean more and more of everything materially but spiritually and intellectually.

It means a kind of thoughtfulness in the face of the fearful thoughtlessness of our world and day. The question about the good life is the question we all face. The contemporary preoccupation with ‘wellness’ suggests  one way in which this is pursued largely through the various techniques of physical exercise and diet. At best, this might relate to the virtue of temperance, of the self-control of our appetites, in a culture of excess and addiction. Endorphin high or cannabis high? There is a difference, I suppose, which lies in the question of intention at the very least.

But in another way this points to the unlivable character of contemporary life in a global world that confronts us with enormous iniquities and inequalities on a scale of magnitude that is scarcely imaginable. It signals the loss of a way of understanding that belongs to the mediating institutions, such as schools and churches, between the leviathan of modern governments and the behemoth of multinational corporations. As governed by technocratic reason, they are profoundly anti-life and effectively reduce us to passive little technobots, mere cogs in a machine ruled by technocrats. The levelling nature of this form of thinking has no respect for the organisations and institutions that once contributed to the social and spiritual well-being of our communal lives, let alone the ethical and spiritual principles which animate such institutions.

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