Saturday, August 29, 2015
Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 17B ~ August
30, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Graft in
our hearts the love of your Name
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
There
are number of ways to interpret this prayer. I have, before, emphasized the
mystical practice of the Jesus Prayer, by which we invite God’s Love to be
united to our own personal centers. The prayer
may also refer to our story or narrative about God. As I have also said before, name means reputation, a person's public
story. So, here is an obvious meaning:
May God help us to love the story about His activity.
However,
since God's activity is love for us, the "love of your Name" could
also mean God's love as revealed in the story.
Not our love for the story, but God's love for us as revealed in the story. In that interpretation, we are not asking God
to excite in us feelings of piety or reverence for the Bible and tradition
(although there's nothing wrong with that!); rather, we are asking that the
whole import of the story — the awful Love of God — may take over our innermost
selves.
Graft in our hearts the love of Your Name.
The Love of God's Name also reminds us that
God has a Name known to us. Now, a name is a word. A reputation, a story, a narrative, is
nothing but a collection of words, a description. The presupposition of revealed religion is
that God has given us a self-description. God has identified Himself in language we can
understand. The problem is that our
words are limited, while God is not.
Therefore, the story we have been given is incomplete and, in a certain
sense, faulty. It has to be, because it is given in terms we can understand (up
to a point), but the Object of our understanding is, by definition,
incomprehensible!
Even though God has told us His Name, we must
not pronounce it, because it is holy. That means it is entirely removed from us —
"utterly other." To speak it is
blasphemy. That is the primary meaning
of the Third Commandment: the Name of God is holy, and so we may not even utter
it aloud. As Wittgenstein famously observed, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof
we must remain silent.”
All this is a colorful way of expressing our
basic problem, as adherents of divine revelation: God has revealed Himself, but God is still
Utterly Other. We may know the Name, but
we must never say it, because to do so is to describe God as less than God, to
"take the Name… in vain." So
what are we to do?
At the very least, I think, we must recognize
that anything we say about God is conditional, provisional, and incomplete. It cannot be otherwise, since we are finite
while God is not. That means that it is
the extreme of arrogance — rising perhaps even to blasphemy — to say that my
pronunciation of the Name is right and yours is wrong. In giving us His Name, God has not given us
certainty, at least not the kind of certainty that warrants persecution of
those who disagree.
At the same time, God has revealed something of Who He is. If we must be very careful not to take the
Name in vain, it is because God Who so commands has already identified Himself as
our Liberator: "I am the LORD your God, Who brought you out of the land of
Egypt, out of the land of slavery." (The original Hebrew has the unutterable Tetragrammaton,
which we render as LORD, all in capitals, to avoid pronouncing it.) Who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
you see! We can say something about this Utterly Other One, something about His
identity. We can say that God has freed
us from slavery, because God has told us so.
The very One Who commands us not to take the Name in vain, also commanded
us to recognize God’s acts of Love in history – and to tell of them. We may not
be able to speak of God out of our own limited consciousness – “Whereof we
cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent” – but it is God Who is speaking
here, not us, Who says
I
am the LORD your God, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land
of slavery."
Of
course there will be those who deny this.
We have to say that they are mistaken, because we have experienced God's
liberation and heard God’s self-identification – we know God’s Name. That does not mean that we are permitted to
hate anyone or persecute them, just because they don’t acknowledge the Name. In fact, they may know things about God that
we don't. They may know God by another
Name, which is just as holy and faithful.
That is none of our business.
The paradox is that this salutary humility, arising
out of our recognition of our own limitations, is commanded by the One Who has
revealed Himself to us and identified Himself — Who has, in other words, told
us His Name.
Lately we hear many who describe themselves
as "spiritual but not religious."
I suppose this means that such people recognize within themselves the
desire for the Unnamable One, a desire we would say God has given them. In Augustine's great prayer:
You
have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests
in you.
I suppose our spiritual-but-not-religious
friends hesitate to be duped by all the counterfeits available in the religious
supermarket. I suppose they have come to Wittgenstein’s conclusion about the limits
of our ability to name God. Finally, I suppose they may hesitate to acknowledge
the Name, out of a kind of awe — an instinctive horror of taking the Name in
vain. If so, this is good. "The fear of God is the beginning of
wisdom."
The good news is that God has spoken. God has told us
His Name. The Utterly Other, silent by
definition, is also the Word spoken from the Beginning, Who has become flesh
and dwelt among us. Our own hearts are restless until that Word enters them and
comes to dwell in them — until the Love of the Name grafts itself in our
hearts, as a new vine grafted onto an old root, causing the steady increase in true religion, which is to say increase in
our bond with Love Himself, by the Holy Spirit's nourishment with all goodness,
unto the fruition of good works.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME,
LORD JESUS!
