Category: Sermons

“And one … turned back”

Metanoia, as we have suggested on occasion, literally means a thinking after, though it is usually translated simply as repentance. Repentance is a turning back to the one from whom we have turned away. It signals the profound nature of our relation to God, a kind of constant circling around the principle of our being and knowing, a retire ad principia, as Lancelot Andrewes puts it, that marks our going to and from God in understanding and love.

Last Sunday and this Sunday present us with two Gospel stories both of which center on a Samaritan: the parable of the so-called Good Samaritan, and the one who “turned back,” “glorify[ing] God,” and “giving him thanks,” who was “a Samaritan.” In both accounts from Luke’s Gospel, it is Jesus who tells us that it was “a certain Samaritan” who “had compassion” and “showed mercy” on the one who was “wounded” and “half-dead,” and that the one who “fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks” was “a Samaritan.” In one way, Jesus is providing a critique of what we might call denominational chauvinism where one group denigrates another and asserts their own superiority. But in another way, Jesus is teaching us something more radical about ethical teaching and ethical living. It has very much to do with our encounter with the other, what Jesus calls here the “stranger.”

“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.” It is, to be sure, an indictment of Israel. Ten lepers were healed; only one returned to give glory, but “he was a Samaritan”, a kind of outsider or stranger. The Samaritans were a sect within Judaism but despised by the Jews. At issue is their view of the Law and the place of the giving of the Law. But Jesus is not simply pitting Jews against Samaritans and choosing sides. He is not saying that the Samaritans are right on these questions about the Torah and the giving of the Law. In fact, quite the opposite. What then is the significance of these two back-to-back Gospels about Samaritans?

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And who is my neighbour?

In 2014, Grace Gelder, a middle-aged English photographer, married herself. In 2015, performance artist Tracey Emin, best known for her art exhibit “messy bed”, married a rock, a stone in her garden in France; the perfect husband in terms of stability, quiet, comfort and calm. To be sure, it’s not going anywhere. There are those who have ‘married’ bridges, the Eiffel tower (and subsequently divorced), a Ferris wheel named Bruce, a warehouse, and other objects, inanimate and otherwise. Such is the nature of our commitments to various things, I suppose. Yet, rather than immediately and completely dismissing such things as narcissistic nonsense, the philosopher and cultural critic, Slavoj Zizek, suggests that we should consider the moment of truth in such things. To marry oneself suggests that one is not simply identical with oneself and raises the further question, ‘which self are you marrying?’

Your happy self? Your grumpy, catty self? Your anxious, nervous self? Who are you? What is your self? By extension, the same applies to these other ‘marriages’ which are about forms of attachment which reveal aspects of ourselves as well. But even more, they reveal a profound contradiction in our contemporary world. We are autonomous selves and yet utterly unclear and uncertain about ourselves. How can we love anything or anyone given such radical uncertainty about ourselves?

One might at this point opt for the classical Buddhist approach and simply deny that there is any you at all. There is no self. This is indeed a remarkable concept in relation to getting utterly free of all and every form of attraction, of desire, of possession. You are an illusion and so is the world. But the kind of boutique Western Buddhism popular in the west, is neither western nor buddhist. For, on the one hand, it affirms what Buddhism most emphatically denies, namely, the self, and, on the other hand, denies what western culture in general firmly embraces, namely, that there is a world which is in some sense knowable; in short, there is God. I am not sure that these are real options, since classical Buddhism negates the question, while faux western buddhism persists in the same confusions. What then shall we do? Well, we might consider thinking more deeply the familiar and yet unfamiliar parable of the so-called Good Samaritan in today’s Gospel. We know it but overlook its profounder meaning.

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“Ephphatha”… “Be opened”

Hearing and seeing are the biblical senses of the understanding. It might seem, at first, that they are simply about what is received, that they are, as it were, merely passive senses, the senses of reception. Something seen is received by the eye; something heard is received by the ear. But there is an activity as well, the activity of seeing and the activity of hearing.

What is seen and heard is there for the understanding. There is something communicated, the meaning of which we enter into through the activity of understanding. For it is not just the words which are heard or the vision which is seen that is received. What the words signify, what the vision reveals, is given to be understood.

Our understanding is our wrestling with the significance of things. It is a profoundly spiritual activity. It speaks to who we are in the sight of God – those to whom God reveals himself and into whose presence he would have us come. Hearing and seeing as the senses of understanding mean that there is an acting upon what is received. There is a similar double-sidedness to our “being opened.”

In the Gospel for today, “they bring unto [Jesus] one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech”. They beseech the healing touch of Jesus upon someone who is deaf and, if not altogether dumb, at least impeded in his speech to the point that others must speak for him. In response to their request, Jesus puts his fingers into his ears, spits upon the ground, and touches his tongue – all outward, tangible and physical acts – but, as well, and just as remarkably, Jesus’ “look[s] up to heaven”, “he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, be opened”. There is, in short, a healing: “and straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.”

As with all the healing miracles of the gospels, they signify the restoration of our humanity. What is wanted by God is not the deformity of our being but the perfection of our humanity. What is wanted is our being made totally and completely adequate to the truth of God; in short, our being opened to God signals our willingness to will what God wills for us.

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“By the grace of God, I am what I am”

“Standing on the promises” is an old evangelical hymn composed by Russell Kelso Carter, professor of chemistry, natural science, civil engineering and mathematics at the Pennsylvania Military Academy in 1886, just four years after the building of this Church. Some of you may know it. “Standing, standing/ standing on the promises of Christ my Saviour,/ Standing, standing,/ I’m standing on the promises of God.” It refers to the promises of God and signals the sure, rock-fast nature of those promises even in the face of “the howling storms of doubt and fear.” How? “By the living word of God.” It belongs, I think, to Paul’s message in today’s epistle.

But how do we stand? There are the things which God wants and promises for us and then there is our relation to such things. Paul talks about our standing on the gospel which has been preached to us and which has been received by us “by which also ye are saved,” he says. But he adds a conditional clause; “if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.” At issue is the living word of God in us.

The promises are not to be taken for granted. They are given, to be sure. Paul goes on to talk about the Faith in more-or-less creedal terms and about his own early relation to the proclamation of the gospel – “I persecuted the Church of God,” he says in an honest and confessional way. How then does he now stand in relation to the gospel? As “the least of the Apostles,” he suggests, but nonetheless an Apostle – one who is sent. Such a standing and such a sending are nothing less than acts of grace: for it is “such a measure of thy grace” that allows us to “run the way of thy commandments” so that we “may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure” as today’s Collect puts it. Something is required on our part, to be sure, and yet, what is wanted has its source solely, utterly, and completely in God. Grace is what comes from God to us, but we are not merely the passive recipients of God’s grace; we have to run with it that it may define and shape us. “By the grace of God, I am what I am,” Paul states, aware of the transition and transformation from persecutor to follower and even more, to being an Apostle, to being who he is solely by the grace of God.

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Love your enemies

One of the three great untruths of our times, according to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), is “the untruth of us versus them” where life is seen as an endless conflict “between good people and evil people.” This is really “a pathological dualism,” as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks points out (Not in God’s Name (2015)), which divides our humanity into “the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad” and in which “you are either one or the other.” This kind of conflict narrative is endlessly divisive and gnostic. You begin and end with division, with difference as hatred of the other. The awareness of difference leads to division which in turn leads to the demonization of the other. It is static and dogmatic. All there is is difference. Sadly such polarizations largely determine the tenor and character of our current social and political discourse.

While in evolutionary terms this may be explained away as an aspect of tribalism and of our tendencies to favour those in ‘our group,’ in a deeper sense it betrays all and every sense of our common humanity. It is ridiculously reductive and utterly destructive of our souls and of our life in community for the simple reason that we begin and end with our enmities, with our divisions as hardened into hatreds. In the face of such things, today’s Gospel is profoundly and wonderfully counter-culture and redemptive. It also connects to the rich traditions of wisdom in many of the great religions of the world.

Arjuna, a great warrior prince in the Hindu tradition, stands in the middle of the battlefield between two competing armies. They are all his relatives, sort of like the Maritimes. Why should I fight? he wonders. This is his ethical dilemma. How to transcend the enmities, the animosities, and the divisions that we encounter? It can’t be by denying that they exist because they are there. It has to be by some other way of thinking grounded upon a deeper understanding of our humanity. The Bhagavad Gita, reflecting the teachings of the Upanishads, offers a way of transcending such dilemmas. In that work, Arjuna is taught by Sri Krishna to follow his dharma, the law or duty of your being. A wonderful illustration of the meaning of dharma is found in the story of the Guru and the Scorpion. The scorpion falls into the river and the Guru rescues it from drowning only to be stung by the scorpion who falls again into the river only to be rescued again and again by the Guru who continues to be stung. Those looking on ask the Guru why he keeps rescuing the scorpion who keeps stinging him. He replies: it is the dharma of the scorpion to sting; it is the dharma of the human to save.

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“Nevertheless, at thy word, I will let down the net.”

In the face of the nihilisms of our contemporary culture, this is a welcoming word that signals an openness to God and to his will and way for our humanity. It should and is meant to complement the opening line of the Epistle reading, “be ye all of one mind,” but it doesn’t, at least not now in our situation as a church. We aren’t of one mind on many matters of great importance. We are a church divided, and a community and culture of souls divided. This is, sadly, nothing new. I have offered a brief statement of reflection about the current state of disarray, disaffection, and division with respect to the issue of same-sex marriage. The institutional church remains caught in the controversies of identity in our contemporary culture. We live in a divided church but prayerfully and, I hope, charitably with respect to these divisions and with an openness to the rediscovery of the principles that provide a more complete understanding of our humanity.

Today’s Gospel grounds our lives not on self-assertion but upon God’s word. Ambrose, in his commentary on this passage, indicates that in the figure of Peter especially, we have the figure of the Church. Peter is the rock upon which Christ builds the Church but only “at thy word.” It is a powerful idea and concept. There is the constant struggle to understand what it means to act in accord with God’s Word but, at the very least, it acts as a check upon human presumption. Simon Peter expresses very clearly the nature of the human predicament. “We have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing.” This complements wonderfully Mary’s statement to Jesus at the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee that “they” – we – “have no wine.” The awareness of our limitations, of our mortality, of our insufficiency, of our confusion, is a profound truth about our humanity. In our current distresses, it suggests at the very least uncertainties about ourselves and about the claims of the autonomous self. To put it in another way, what these Gospel stories indicate is that God knows us better than we know ourselves, on the one hand, and that God seeks for us to know what he seeks for us, on the other hand. “We see in a glass darkly,” not least of all about ourselves. “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known,” as Paul says, known in Christ. Hence the significance of the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity in Jesus Christ. Divine love transforms and perfects our human loves in all our confusions and illusions but only “at thy word.”

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“Forgive and ye shall be forgiven”

Forgiveness. It is the hardest and yet one of the freest things, perhaps even one of the simplest things in our lives. It undoubtedly belongs to that most free of all things: the power of God’s praise which overcomes human pride and presumption. Forgiveness  is the power of God’s love moving in human loves. There can be no love that is not constantly love-in-renewal and there can be no renewal-in-love without forgiveness. Divine forgiveness empowers human forgiveness. Yet how hard it is for us to let go of ourselves and of the illusions of our self-image and our assumptions about others.

What makes forgiveness so hard? Quite simply, it is our hypocrisy. This is the point of the Gospel. Hypocrisy is not just our saying one thing and our doing another, not just our doing one thing and thinking another; it is about a profound presumption, an illusion about who we think we are.

We are divided within ourselves against ourselves, against one another, and against God. We are in the ‘far country’ of our self-estrangement, in ‘the region of unlikeness,’ to use Augustine’s image, separated from the truth of ourselves in God. There is our blindness and there is our judgmentalism splendidly illustrated in the Gospel. “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?” That powerful image leads to the next: “Cast out first the beam that is in thine own eye, then shall thou see clearly the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.” This is the prescription for our presumption, our prejudice, meaning pre-judgment, our claim to know what we do not know. It is not just our ignorance, but our arrogance that is the problem. It is a willful blindness, a kind of refusal to see what, in fact, we have been given to see and know, for instance, in the witness of the Scriptures. But then, again, we frequently refuse to act upon what we do see and know. It is not just our knowing that is the problem. There is our capacity for willful destruction, the will to nothingness, as it were. We close our eyes to the truth before us, at once hypercritical of the minor faults of others (the mote or speck of dust) while utterly blind to the major faults and failings in ourselves (the beam or log). We do not know ourselves or others very well.

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“Cast all your care upon him, for he careth for you”

Compelling words. Compelling readings that speak directly to our souls and culture in disarray. These words and readings counter the despondency and despair that inhibits and negates life and in particular our individual lives. Why and how? Because they call us back to God in the deep meaning of God for us and for our lives. 1st Peter reminds us of the truth of God, the God who cares for us in the midst of the world’s sufferings and pains, a world in which there is much evil and darkness. That has to be faced and not just wished away. Peter here reminds us profoundly about the realities of suffering, about “[our] adversary the devil,” the very principle of evil, and that “the same afflictions are accomplished in [our] brethren that are in the world.” The Christian Faith does not mean that you are inoculated from suffering. No. It is about a way of thinking through suffering.

God cares. This is a strong statement about the goodness of God but it is a statement which we cheapen by reducing God to ourselves and our concerns, making God subject to us. This is not what Peter is saying and not what Luke is showing us in the Gospel. After all, we are bidden to “humble [our]selves” and to “be subject one to another.” Being “clothed with humility” is the condition of grace, the grace which alone exalts and lifts us up. Such things point to a kind of spiritual activity in us, a movement of the goodness which belongs to the essence of God. That God cares, theologically speaking, does not mean that God is measured by our sense of well-being, but that we are alive to his goodness, his power, and truth. God is always more and greater and beyond comprehension by definition. To know that God cares is to be open to the transcendent and transforming power of divine love, the love that is shown to us in Christ.

That is the point of the Gospel. It illustrates the strong meaning of God’s care for us in the face of the sufferings of our world and day, sufferings that arise from our evil. God’s care requires our repentance. Repentance is the strong term for our being turned back to God. We can only be turned back to God by virtue of God’s turning to us.

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