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 Papa — Abba — 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
