Saturday, July 22, 2017

Pentecost 7

Sermon for Pentecost 7

Proper 11  ~  Lectionary Year  A  ~  July 23, 2017
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

…creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay
and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

Weeds and wheat, Spirit and flesh and bodies, creation in labor. There is much to unpack here. But let’s start with the Prophecy: There is only one God. There is no other. The weeds in with the good grain are not due to some power or “enemy” that can oppose God. God has no equal. The point is that the garden is a process and the separation of the weeds from the grain is coming in the future.
Just as last week’s sower, the evangelist considers it necessary to add an interpretation to the parable. Unfortunately, like all interpretations these tend to narrow the meaning. Parables can have more than one meaning. The notion that the weeds are evildoers destined for punishment is not the only possibility. Reading the parable next to Paul’s letter to the Romans may stimulate our imagination in another direction.
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God… in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
So maybe the weeds symbolize what Paul calls the “bondage to decay” to which the whole material creation seems to be subject. At the end of time, the holy angels will destroy not individual human evildoers but a certain incompleteness in creation. It is not just individual righteous human creatures who are to be set free, but creation itself. Creation is groaning as if in labor to bring forth something completely new. Inseparable from creation, humanity too is groaning in expectation, as we wait for what Paul calls “the redemption of our bodies.”
Paul mentions the body twice: we have to put away the deeds of the body, but then we are to await the redemption of the body. He never speaks of the redemption of the flesh, but of the redemption of the body. This bodily redemption is part of the liberation of the whole creation from bondage to decay. To redeem is, literally, to “buy back” as in a pawn shop we redeem something borrowed against. Slaves could be redeemed bought back – and set free.  The bondage Paul speaks of is the whole creation’s slavery to decay and death, in which we also participate. But God has come in the Person of the Son to set us free from this slavery – and not only us, but all creation.  The Son is one of us. And we are like him – children of God by adoption and grace, if not by nature, because He has taught us to call God PapaAbba —  as He does. The consciousness that we are, together, the children of God is the Spirit. The Spirit is never opposed to the body, but it is opposed to the flesh and there is a difference. Our bodies are to be redeemed — together. In fact, we already experience the firstfruits of this Redemption. The Spirit is the consciousness of intercommunion among apparently separate bodies.  The flesh, destined for destruction, like weeds in the garden, is the insistence on individual separation.  In fact, maybe as the weeds represent the flesh, so the good grain represents material existence in the body: living and material intercommunion in the Spirit.
What we hope for is not a disembodied or immaterial redemption. The opposition of flesh and spirit is not an opposition between matter and spirit. It is the opposition of communion and separation. The flesh is our will to go our own way and to imagine that we can be by ourselves. That tendency is to be destroyed — the orientation toward death is to be destroyed, the destruction of destruction. But our bodies are to be redeemed. Matter is to be redeemed. I take this to mean that matter is to become what God always intended creation to be: the expression of divine love and beauty.
Our current view about material reality is friendly toward this Pauline view. The Word of creation is "Let there be light." As far as I understand it, our modern creation narrative is that light is all there is: light organized in various ways. And all connected. The shape and behavior of space and galaxies on the unimaginably large scale of the observable universe is found to be uncannily similar to the shape and behavior of energy and matter in the infinitesimal first moments of the Big Bang. The pattern is repeated from the infinitesimal to the virtually infinite.
The Chinese just experimentally demonstrated the theory of quantum physics: some particles of light — photons — are “entangled” with one another, and they behave in a way that shows their connection, even at great distances. The Chinese have just managed to do this in outer space. What happens to one photon here on earth happens to its entangled sister in the satellite. There is some kind of sympathy, even though there is no apparent connection and the photons are separated by great distances. Changes imposed on the terrestrial photon happen also to the celestial one — simultaneously. Yet there is no possibility for the transmission of information from one to the other, by any means known to us. This strikes me as another way of saying that everything is connected to everything else, in ways we do not yet understand: like the mysterious connection Paul calls Spirit. In fact Einstein even called it “spooky action at a distance.”   And it made him pretty uncomfortable.
St. Augustine would not have been uncomfortable, because he speculated that the Holy Spirit is precisely the connection between Father and Son. Spirit Is Connection, Life. Flesh Is separation, sin and death — all of which are excluded from the Being of God, whose children we are invited to become by adoption. Whatever matter is, whatever the cosmos is, everything is connected to everything else, eagerly longing for the revealing of the children of God — that is for creation’s own consciousness, ourselves — to realize the fulness of “the freedom of the glory of the children of God… [and]our adoption,  the redemption of our bodies.”
The weeds are the illusion of separation. from which we suffer, just as the good grain has to grow — for a time — with the weeds. But at the end of time that is when time has fulfilled its purpose — in what scripture calls the fulness of time – separation will disappear into its essential nothingness. As the Communion of the Holy Spirit is revealed to encompasses all creation — ta panta — in  glory, then the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father. 
AMEN
MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS

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