Christ Church

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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