Category: Sermons

“We have taken nothing”

Today’s Gospel illustrates at once the emptiness and the futility of our lives, on the one hand, and the fullness and the purpose of our lives, on the other hand. It suggests something about what it actually might mean to be “all of one mind,”as the Epistle begins, and, then, concludes after showing us exactly that it would mean to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” It has altogether to do with our attitude and relation to Jesus and to his Word. “At thy word I will let down the net,” Simon Peter says, even in the face of the empty toil and fruitless labour of the night and in the awareness of our nothingness. It is about blessings even in the face of suffering, “if ye be followers of that which is good.”

Our lives are empty and futile in themselves. This is a hard, but necessary and humbling lesson, but it is the counter to our folly and our pretension. Only “at thy word” can we “let down the net” and begin to discover what ‘fulfillment and purpose’ might mean for us in our lives. It is altogether about our being with Christ. And what is our attitude to finding ourselves in the presence of God revealed in Jesus Christ? It is what Simon Peter says, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”

This must trouble us. Why does he say this? Why doesn’t he rejoice in the sudden abundance of a rich catch of fish, the nets breaking with the fullness of the unexpected harvest? Because of a deep and profound spiritual insight, an insight which belongs to biblical wisdom. Simon Peter is aware of a power that is more than natural and more than human. He recognizes the reality of God in Jesus Christ. He gives expression to the deep biblical insight of the distance between God and man, the distance between God’s righteousness and truth and the unrighteousness and folly of human lives. The language is that of knowing oneself to be a sinner and therefore not presuming to stand on equal ground with God. It is the attitude of a humble yet philosophic piety. It is to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” You are in the presence of the Holy. It is not an entitlement. It is grace.

The Gospel story suggests that the real purpose of our lives and our lives as being fulfilled, to use the psychological language of our day, is about our being with Christ and acting in obedience to his word. “At thy word” is a phrase which echoes Mary’s response to the Angel Gabriel, “be it unto me according to thy word,” which is the condition for the richness and the wonder of the Word made flesh, the Incarnation of Christ, for us. We can have no fullness apart from Jesus. “Without me, ye can do nothing,” he says (Jn. 15.5). We can only enter into the will and purpose of God in the order of creation, redemption, and sanctification. Our lives, in other words, find their purpose and meaning in his Word. This is, of course, the reason for the Church. It is not by accident that the call of Simon Peter follows from this encounter. “Fear not,” says Jesus to him, “from henceforth thou shalt catch men,” anticipating his statement in Matthew  “that thou art Peter [Petros means rock], and upon this rock I will build my church” (Mt. 16.18).

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“Thou hypocrite”

It is sometimes called ‘the Mercy Gospel’. It is part of the “Sermon on the Plain” in Luke’s Gospel which complements the more famous “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew’s Gospel. Both ‘sermons’ present to us some of the most powerful ethical and spiritual teachings of the Christian Faith, teachings which we have either forgotten or of which we are completely unaware. Mercy, as this rather challenging reading makes clear, is inescapably connected to justice. Hypocrisy, starkly and sternly presented in the parable, is injustice masquerading as justice in the form of self-righteousness and judgmentalism so prevalent in the current confusions of our culture and in ourselves.

The mercy is that we “groan within ourselves,” as the Epistle puts it, waiting for the fuller realization of what we know is yet incomplete in us. Mercy lies in suffering the forms of our finitude and our sinfulness, our unrighteousness, but only if we can be brought to know our unknowing; in short, the blindness about ourselves that belongs to our self-righteous judgments about others. It is an ancient and classical theme and by no means unique to Christianity. Buddhism, for instance, arises in part out of a critical rejection of the Brahmin class of Hinduism who are seen as “the blind leading the blind” especially with respect to the question of human suffering. In today’s Gospel, the point is made in very graphic and personal terms as suggested in the use of the second person. Why do you behold the mote, the small faults of others, while remaining unaware of the much greater faults in yourself? Such is hypocrisy, the only answer to which is self-criticism and self-correction. We are quick to judge others but only so as to absolve ourselves in the emotive forms of passionate outrage.

We are hypocrites, to be sure. The mercy is that God calls us to self-understanding in which we are made aware of our absolute need for mercy. We all stand under the same condemnation; in other words, none of us is fully righteous. “There is none that doeth good, no, not one“ (Rom. 3.12) as Paul puts it, “the good that I would I do not, the very evil that I would not do is what I do” (Rom. 7.19). This is to confront the limitations and failings of our very hearts. Yet, this is good news precisely because it turns us to the desire for the mercy of God and puts a check on empty emotivism.

We meet within the Octave of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of French Canada and associated with the European encounter with North America through the landing in Newfoundland of John Cabot supposedly on his feast day in 1497. Thus the Collects for the Nativity include prayers for the nation of Canada, prayers which are surely much needed. Yet John’s birth signals primarily his vocation within the Providence of God in the working out of human redemption. His life and death point inescapably and necessarily to the one for whom he exists. He preaches, as Luke puts it, “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Lk. 3. 3). He is not that forgiveness but the one who belongs to its necessary preparation and ultimate fulfillment in Christ who is the forgiveness of sins. The desire for righteousness leads to its highest expression in mercy.

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“God … shall himself restore, stablish, strengthen you”

Some ancient texts add ‘settle’ to this list of verbs, as in being “settled upon a foundation”. In a sense, our return to in-person worship here at Christ Church is about our restoration, about our being established, about our being strengthened, and about our being settled upon the foundation of our life together in Christ. It is good to be back and I hope that we can begin to settle into the regular forms of our corporate life in Christ with a spirit of gratitude and forbearance, knowing that there are and will be uncertainties ahead. We have, I hope, learned something about ourselves in and through these troubling times. The challenge has been to keep our focus on the spiritual teachings that alone restore, stablish, strengthen, and settle us upon the care of God; “casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you.”

The care of God is a radical concept and teaching. It belongs to the even more radical concept of God as love, whose love is the ground of all life and being, all knowing and loving. Yet again, the Gospel provides us with a telling illustration of what the care of God means for us in our lives. In the face of the critical murmurings of the Pharisees and Scribes about Jesus being in the company of publicans and sinners, “receiving sinners and eating with them,” as they suggest, Jesus tells three powerful parables, two of which comprise today’s Gospel. They are the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the parable of the prodigal or lost son. The fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel is a tour-de-force of teaching about repentance and rejoicing. Repentance and joy go together. That alone is worth pondering and thinking about. We are meant to see ourselves in these parables.

Such a view underlies an important aspect of the Prayer Book liturgy as penitential adoration and reminds us of the deep love of God for us that derives from the love of God himself. Our whole liturgy is about joyful repentance; our turning back to God because God has turned us back to himself. Such is restoration and the grounding of our lives in God, restored, established, strengthened, and settled upon his love.

I have on occasion thought about the ethical teaching of this chapter of Luke’s Gospel aesthetically, by way of the idea of a triptych. A triptych is three panels, usually painted, depicting certain biblical stories understood in relation to each other and often placed just above or standing on the altar. In this case, the whole chapter could be captured in a triptych illustrating the theme of repentance and rejoicing. Triptychs are a feature of Medieval Christian art and usually take the form of a large central panel framed by two hinged side panels each half the size of the central panel. The hinges allow the side panels to enclose the central panel if desired at certain times in the liturgical year. In terms of the fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, the parable of the prodigal son would have to form the central panel framed by the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin.

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Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Second Sunday after Trinity

“If the world hate you”

Well, it does. Deal with it. But while the world may hate Christians and Christianity (and every other religion for that matter), self-hatred is equally, if not more destructive, a deeper denial of our God-created being and life. Self-hatred now extends to a certain kind of cultural self-loathing and self-flagellation current in the western democracies of our contemporary world, something which Michael Houllebecq has recently written about in relation to France (The Narcissistic Fall of France, Unherd, June 8th, 2021). It is not just a North American phenomenon. It arises out of the profound disorders and discontents that belong to the destructive tendencies of the twentieth century which remain with us and which we either choose to ignore or begin to ponder. It is part of a general sense of malaise that our way of thinking and being has to change. But in what way? At the very least through a kind of thoughtfulness which the remarkable readings before us encourage and demand.

The cultural problems of our age have very much to do with assumptions about human rights and the principle of self-determination and how those ideas are to be understood in relation to the more universal principles of justice and compassion, such as in Plato, Deuteronomy or even Cyrus the Persian, as Samuel Moyn notes (The Last Utopia, Human Rights in History, 2010). Contemporary human rights talk is “the last utopia”. The language of rights that dominates our thinking presupposes a principle that transcends the political communities in which we live. But then how are they to be embodied, enjoined and enforced? How are they to be respected and upheld without reducing things to the endless power struggles of this group or that tyrant over and against every other? How do we live and think apart from the local communities in which we live? The Global is the great abstraction. The “right to have rights,” as Hannah Arendt brilliantly observed, leads nowhere; for “without communal inclusion, the assertion of rights by itself made no sense” (Moyn, The Last Utopia, p. 12). The principle of self-determination historically has been rather problematic and so, too, the extension of that idea to individuals whose self-determination is asserted now as a sovereign right. It is what underlies the conflicts and problems that belong to the native peoples in Canada, on the one hand, and to the vagaries of the politics of sexual identity, on the other hand. As Moyn says in a later book, “rights are not enough” (Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, 2018). They lead more to division than unity and equity; the very things that paradoxically are sought.

It is in this contemporary context that we might begin to ponder the wisdom of the scriptural readings for this day. John profoundly counters the problem of self-hatred by recalling us to God. “If our heart condemn us,” he says, “God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” We are not who we think we are in our own heads, in the proud fancy and imagination of our own hearts, in our claims to self-determination, as it were. We are instead God’s beloved who are known in God’s infinite knowing and loving of “all things”. “Beloved,” as John immediately goes on to say, “if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence towards God.” In other words, knowing ourselves as ‘the beloved of God’ changes our whole outlook and attitude. What we hate should not be ourselves (or one another) but our sins which make us less than ourselves. John is reminding us of an important spiritual insight which speaks to the moral and ethical confusions of our world and day about the constraints to the extent and meaning of cultural and personal identities.

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Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for the First Sunday after Trinity

“This commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.”

And if we don’t? Then we have the powerful story of our denial of God’s love by our complete neglect of one another. Lazarus is lying at our feet. How we deal with one another is entirely grounded in our relation to God. Make no mistake, the parable of Lazarus and Dives, the rich man, speaks directly and profoundly to the forms of “the malaise of modernity.” The term is not mine; it was used a long time ago by Charles Taylor, Canada’s ‘pre-eminent’ philosopher. We live now in the collapse and disarray of the institutions that in their truth contribute to the dignity and ennobling of human existence. This  compels an awakening of an ethical attitude towards the world of which we are a part; a corrective and critique of ourselves.

The lessons for the First Sunday after Trinity are particularly instructive and challenging. The Epistle reading from 1 John 4 encapsulates the meaning of Trinity Sunday quite profoundly. It is remarkably simple: “God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God in him,” to use the older translation that remains in the Scriptural sentences as the refrain of the Trinity season. It is at once so familiar as to be completely overlooked and ignored. Perhaps that is why we need the accompanying Gospel reading from Luke 16 to point us to the radical meaning of the commandment to love, paradoxical as that may seem. For the parable is a telling indictment of our neglect of God through our neglect of one another. The point is not that the world is a problem; we are the problem. We create the gulf, the abyss between ourselves and God, between ourselves and the world, and between one another through our indifference and neglect.

The dangers are very real. This week has confronted us with the heart-breaking spectacle of the unmarked and concealed graves of native children who died in the Residential Schools system, neglected and ignored by those to whose care they were entrusted. It is a sad story and another blow to the quest for respect and dignity of Canada’s native peoples, many of whom remain deeply committed Christians, hence the touching spectacle of love and compassion in the placing of children’s shoes on the steps of churches. It makes visible the desire to be seen and remembered, and not to be neglected and ignored.

The parable is about the realities of neglect and indifference. It turns us to the literal ground of our lives; Lazarus on the ground at our feet. In that sense, the First Lesson at Matins from the Book of Joshua complements the Gospel. The Book of Joshua is about the conquest of the promised land but as the lesson makes clear that is entirely based on God’s Word and Will as the defining feature of Israel.” Be strong and of good courage; be not frightened, neither be dismayed; for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Words which have a certain power and resonance for us in the present. Just so the Second Lesson from Mark makes clear that the land is also a place of teaching and healing, indeed, spiritual healing. Jesus teaches “as one who had authority”, the ultimate authority of God, the one who raises to life and casts out demons.

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Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity Sunday

“No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father,
he has made him known.”

“Now the Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity, and the Trinity in unity.” A surprising and startling statement, it may seem, and yet it belongs not only to the Athanasian Creed but to the central logic and meaning of the Christian Faith. God is Trinity though the word Trinity appears nowhere in the Scriptures. It appears first in the writings of Theophilus of Antioch writing in Greek in the second half of the second century, albeit in a peculiar form, and then in the Latin writings of Tertullian in the late decades of the same century. Yet it belongs to the revelation of the essential life of God and to the equally essential task of our thinking God. The first section of the Athanasian Creed ends with the words: “He therefore that would be saved, /let him thus think of the Trinity,” think of the Trinity in this way, the way of affirmation and negation in the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology that is the Athanasian Creed. Pretty strong stuff. Can we really think this?

It is the essential proclamation of the Christian Faith but far from being something exclusive and forbidding, exotic and remote, speculative and abstract, it is the doctrine, the teaching, that requires and provides the basis for the Christian engagement with other religions and faiths and with ourselves. In short, the divine self-relation which the Trinity is and reveals offers the connection to the universal idea of thinking God without which we cannot think ourselves. It is not about some form of Christian triumphalism or supersessionism – the idea that one religion or philosophy supersedes another or that the latest fancy or fantasy is by definition the best.  It connects us instead to the quest for wisdom that belongs to the radical truth of our humanity.

“No one has ever seen God,” John tells us. He states a simple truth. God is nothing, no thing among other things, not an object, not a thing, but rather the very ground of the being and knowing of all things. What John highlights here belongs to his thinking deeply and profoundly upon the words of Christ. “Apart from me you can do nothing,” for instance; “Before Abraham was, I am,” and so forth. These are radical words which speak about God in himself without which we are nothing, not even selves. As John rightly intuits, the truth of God is revealed in the only-begotten Son, who ever is and never was not. His words compel us and challenge us. That is the meaning of the Gospel lesson about Nicodemus coming to Jesus in the hiddenness of the night. The meaning is about how we have to think about things in a radically new and different way; literally, to be born again, into a new way of understanding.

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Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Day of Pentecost

“And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind”

Sometimes the things that come upon us suddenly unsettle us most of all. We live in rather unsettling times because of the Covid-19 pandemic and all of the disruptions that it has occasioned. This prompts the question as to whether we are simply and completely determined by things outside our control. To be blunt, you cannot blame Covid-19 on Christ Church or Windsor or Nova Scotia or Canada or China or Wuhan. It is not so simple. It is a modern pandemic which has to do with global mobility and the inequalities socially and economically among so many in our so-called global world. We are all, in that sense, completely implicated in our current unsettledness. Everything comes down to the spirit in us by which we confront our struggles and concerns; in short, about how we think about ourselves in relation to one another.

Perhaps, just perhaps, Pentecost might provide us with a way to think about things more universally and yet profoundly local. There are things which unsettle us, perhaps, never more so than in these unsettling times. But is it so with the Descent of the Holy Ghost? He came down suddenly upon the disciples, we are told, but was his coming suddenly a coming unexpectedly? That he came suddenly we read, his coming unexpectedly we do not read. In fact, Jesus tells us to expect the coming of the Holy Ghost “commanding them not to depart from Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of the Father,” even the descent of the Holy Ghost. We are meant, it seems, to be settled upon what comes to us even in unsettling times.

Yet we may wait expectantly and still be caught unawares, for the realisation of what we await may far exceed our expectations and so catch us by surprise. We await for what we do not fully understand. The grace of God is always something more; the mystery of God something more yet again. The promise of the Ascension was the coming down of the Holy Ghost for which Jesus prepares us and bids us wait, yet “suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind.”

Certainly, the effects of this coming down would appear to be most unsettling, the manner of their appearing no less so – “a rushing mighty wind” and “cloven tongues like as of fire,” lighting upon the disciples gathered in Jerusalem filling them with the Holy Spirit and moving them “to speak with other tongues.” To all appearances an event most unsettling, at once exotic and ecstatic.

We all know about the winds that unsettle us – the rushing mighty winds of rumour and slander, of whisperings and murmurings, of allegations and accusations which seek to belittle and destroy. The winds of hatred and revenge, of judgement and accusation, are the winds of death. These are the winds that unsettle us as sure as the sea-storms which come up suddenly and trouble our ships upon the waters. But in our current situation, we live in the midst of other uncertainties, the uncertainties of those claiming to speak in the chimera of ‘science,’ those who rightly demand our acquiescence to this restriction and this but at the same time suggesting their own uncertainty, their own sense of the provisional and the uncertain which belongs, to be sure, to the truth of modern science.  To be up-front about this is really about transparency and honesty, a check on our presumption and pride. To be patient about all of the forms of uncertainty that swirl around us is our current struggle and demand, a check upon our frustrations and judgements.

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Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Sunday after Ascension Day

“The end of all things is at hand”

Ascension is apocalyptic. That is a loaded term and, perhaps, a frightening term since it is fraught with the images of impending doom and destruction. Yet apocalypse really means an uncovering, a making known, or a revealing of what is hidden. In this sense, it is actually something powerful and positive rather than fearful and paralyzing.

Everything turns on the sense or meaning of an end. End in what sense? Ascensiontide celebrates the end of Christ’s saving work in his homecoming to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to redemption. His homecoming is about our end with God, an end in which we participate now through the life of the Church. “It is finished,” Christ says on the Cross in what is regarded as the penultimate word from the Cross. It is an ending which is really about completion and accomplishment in the restoration of all things to God – something which is envisioned in the lovely passage from Isaiah at Matins in the harmony and peace between everything in creation and God. That is also what is shown in the imagery of the Ascension captured in Peter’s rich statement that “the end of all things is at hand.” That leads not to fear and anxiety but to charity and hospitality, to service and ministry “as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” It is now and always now.

To put in in another way, Christian life is always about living in the end times since everything is gathered to God. We are given a way to face suffering and death, hard times and sorrow with a good heart and with courage and even with joy so “that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” There it is, grace and glory! As the Matins lesson from Luke indicates, Christ’s Ascension leads to the disciples returning to Jerusalem not in sorrow but in joy, waiting upon the promise of the Father in the sending of the Comforter. This is the truest form of empowerment.

The term, apocalypse, serves to awaken us to that reality even in the face of the ups and downs, the catastrophes and challenges of our world and day. What is apocalyptic is not just about the rise and fall of kingdoms and of social and economic structures but about the making known of the love of God in human lives.

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“I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”

Jesus’ famous words to Mary in the stories of the Resurrection already point us to the culmination of the Resurrection in the Ascension of Christ. Such is the mystery of God’s essential life opened out to us precisely through the words of the Rogation Gospel on Sunday past. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father”  (Jn. 16. 28). God is made known to us and for us in the comings and goings of Christ, the Word and Son of the Father. There is the going forth of the Word in Creation and now there is the return of the Word in Redemption signaled most completely in the Ascension.

The Ascension is the homecoming of the Son to the Father. The idea of homecoming is a rich and arresting idea. Home has such a powerful resonance and meaning. It speaks at once to the places in which we live but even more to the sense of spiritual identity and purpose. Who we are is grounded in Christ, in his going forth and return to the Father in the bond of the Spirit, the ever-present third, which belongs to the dialogic structure of all thought and reality. The Ascension marks the end, in the sense of purpose, of all creation. Its end and thus our end is found in the return of the Son to the Father. We abide in those eternal motions of heavenly love. Exitus et reditus. A going forth and a return. Everything is gathered back to God and has its meaning and purpose in God.

The Ascension teaches us the deeper meaning of prayer: “God’s breath in man returning to his birth,” as Herbert puts it. Creation redeemed has its crowning expression in the Ascension of Christ. Yet this feast, almost invariably lost to view falling, as it does, on the fortieth day after Easter and, thus, on a Thursday, highlights the radical and deep meaning of prayer. Prayer belongs to our homecoming in Christ’s homecoming. “We ascend in the ascension of our hearts,” as Augustine wonderfully puts it. Prayer is the motion of the Ascension in us. “Lift up your hearts.”

Far from being a flight from the world, it celebrates the redemption of all creation as returned to God in whom it has its being and meaning, its beginning and end. The very structure of some of our church buildings, such as Christ Church, architecturally speaking, illustrates the very motion of the Ascension. We go from the font to the altar in a kind of ascension that leads us up through the nave to the chancel steps and under the Rood Screen (under the Cross) to the sanctuary and altar. Such a movement in space and structure is the form of our participation in Christ’s going to the Father. The very beams of the building proclaim Christ as the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of all things. We are embraced in those wooden beams symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice and life and its culmination in the return of the Son to the Father. Such is the Ascension.

Our liturgy, too, in its ritual acts symbolizes the going forth of God’s Word proclaimed in the Gospel and the gathering of our souls to God’s Word made visible in the Sacraments. In every sense, there is the lifting up our souls and our world to God in prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament, in service and sacrifice.

In the conditions of the latest lockdown, we may not be able to gather together in person but my hope is that we are together in prayer, the prayer that gathers all things to the care of God and that places ourselves in that care for one another. We live in the endtimes of all things by abiding in God’s eternal life opened out to us through the comings and goings of Christ. That is our joy and our strength even in difficult and uncertain times.

“I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”

Fr. David Curry
Ascension 2021

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Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Rogation Sunday

“And the Lord showed him all the land”

Rogation Sunday celebrates the redemption of creation and our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The Resurrection is cosmic in scope. It concerns the whole world as ordered to God. This acts as a kind of corrective with respect to our modern attitudes and approaches to the natural world as something which is just there to be manipulated and used. Rogation is prayer. Prayer does not separate us from creation but belongs to the gathering of all creation to God.

Thus prayer is an activity of redeemed humanity and happens in the land where we have been placed. Our places in the land are to be the places of grace. How? By prayer. Rogationtide embraces the world in prayer. The world is comprehended in the relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit, as seen most wonderfully in today’s Gospel and which culminates in the Ascension. What is overcome is sin, the world as turned away from God and as turned against God, the world as infected and stained by our sinfulness, by our forgetfulness of our place and of ourselves in the landscape of creation redeemed, and of our forgetfulness of one another. The consequences are our disrespect for the land and the sea, for the world in which we have been placed, and for one another. We make a mess of it. We forget the place of creation in the will of God; we forget the redemption of creation and our place in it.

Rogation Sunday recalls us to a kind of theology of the land. In the story of Creation, the earth, the dry land, is said to be good (Gen.1.9,10) and the whole of creation not only good but “very good”. Such is the creation which God the Creator sees. And we, who are made in the image of God, are also formed out of the dust, “from the ground” (Gen.2.7). We are placed in the garden of creation. The garden is the land of paradise.

In the story of the Fall, our disobedience not only alienates us from God but also from the land. The land of paradise becomes the land of sweat and toil. “Cursed is the ground because of you … In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to the dust you shall return” (Gen.3.17,18). “And the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken” (Gen.3.23). That means to work with the land in accord with the will of God in creation. In the story of Cain and Abel, the land becomes the land of blood. Cain slays Abel in the field: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God says (Gen.4.10) in a particularly powerful and poignant image. These stories are altogether fundamental to what unfolds in the story of salvation in the Old and New Testaments.

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