Saturday, June 27, 2015
Sermon for the Pentecost 5
Proper 8 B ~ June 28, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
God did not make death…righteousness
is immortal.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
I have posted a somewhat longer commentary on today’s
readings on my blog (billteska.blogspot.com). For now, let me observe that the
first readings in Track 2 often function as antiphons, setting out a theme in
which to interpret the Gospel. In this case, the theme is that
God did not make death,
And he does not delight in
the death of the living.
For he created all things
so that they might exist;
the generative forces of
the world are wholesome,
and there is no destructive
poison in them,
and the dominion of Hades
is not on earth.
For righteousness is
immortal.
So then, why doesn’t God do something about all the
suffering in the world? If God is good and omniscient, then why allow all that
random and undeserved suffering? Last week, I suggested that one way God deals
with it is to calm our anxieties about it. This week, we see Him at work
actually doing something about human suffering.
Does this help? It shows that God
CAN help if He wants to, so why not help everybody? What are we to do with
this? For us prisoners of time, I think, there is still no answer to Job’s
question other than the miraculous calming of the seas of our own inner anxiety
about the problem – with the addition of the Mystery of the Cross. We are
finite and we don’t see the whole picture. That’s one (not very satisfying)
observation. A somewhat more interesting one has to do with time and eternity, and
their intersection on Calvary. We say
that God is outside time. We are in it, and that is the problem. Our suffering
occurs within time. In the eternity of God, suffering is already overcome and
healed – and has been from the beginning, “from the foundation of the world.” The
days of creation are not measures of time. Time began when Adam and Eve left
the Garden. Time is an aspect of the Fall, and all our suffering occurs in
time.
So the Incarnation means that God
enters time – the fallen world – to save and recreate the world. In entering
time, God accepts its limitations. He can’t fix everything instantly. He can do
only so much. He can encounter only so many people. He can’t help everyone, at
least not in the way He helped the hemorrhaging woman or the dead girl, because
He has accepted the limitations of time and space. This doesn’t mean that God
is indifferent, and that is what these miracles show. They also show that His
first priorities are the weakest and lowliest, which is what females were – as
they still are in so many places. He calls them daughter and chooses them to be healed out of all the sufferers in
the area. He is still working in time, though, and the limitations He has
accepted prevent this kind of intervention beyond the local setting. As long as
He is operating in time and space, He can’t fix everything.
God’s rescue of Creation happens
in time. What we see seems to us to be partial. I suggest that it cannot be
otherwise, because time and space are intrinsically limited. But that temporal re-creation is pointed
toward the cosmic and eternal re-creation: the Victory over Death on Calvary, where
time and eternity intersect.
One thing that strikes me about today’s
Gospel is that Jesus’s touch seems to heal independently of His awareness. “Who
touched me?” He asks. Eternal God acting in Time can’t seem to help healing
everyone He touches – if they are willing. That is why there is such a mob
around Him all the time. But those
local, spectacular healings are only a small part of what God is doing here.
Perhaps the secrecy that Jesus
tried (unsuccessfully) to impose on the witnesses of these miracles was
intended to permit Him to get to Jerusalem for the cosmic Event, rather than
spend His limited time on local, piecemeal repairs. Our suffering is temporal.
Salvation is eternal, but it is going on in time. God has come to sanctify
time, but apparently that does not happen instantly, in our time-bound
perspective.
Let me conclude with an analogy
that seems related: modern physics asks us to contemplate the speed of light as
absolute. Everything else is relative to it. Also, the faster you go, the slower
time moves, so that time stands still altogether at the speed of light. As an
Episcopal astrophysicist once told me, a photon reaches our vision in the same
instant in which it left the Big Bang!
The photon, travelling - by definition - at the speed of light,
experiences no lapse of time. Rudolph Steiner thought that light is the same as
Spirit. Given what we are discovering about the relationship between light and
life, let us not be too quick to dismiss that as merely analogy. To say that God is Light and the creedal dogma that
Christ is Light from Light may be an
analogy, a figure of speech. But then again it may be more than we know.
In any case, we can say that, in
encountering Jesus Christ we encounter the Absolute and the Eternal, the Source
of Life and Light, Who is and was and is to come, Who, by entering time, has saved us from suffering and death even
though, in time, we still experience it.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
