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
Pentecost 6
Sermon for Pentecost 6
Proper 10 ~ Lectionary Year A
~ July 16, 2017
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
To set the mind
on the flesh is death,
but to set the
mind on the Spirit is life and peace.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
At the end of the
nineteenth century, a fascinating controversy went on between two well-known
intellectuals, Sir Thomas Huxley and Prince Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin, over
the meaning of Darwin and evolution. It illustrates a difference in
what we have come to call paradigms.
From
the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about the same level
as the gladiator's show. … Life was a continuous free fight, and beyond the limited
and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all
was the normal state of existence
So wrote Thomas Huxley in 1888. He developed his view of
“nature” into a theory that has come to be known as Social Darwinism,
according to which, since nature’s law is a law of competition, weeding out the
unfit, it will not do to help the weak and unfit survive to reproduce. That is
a recipe for the “degeneration” of the human race.
Kropotkin disagreed, to put it mildly. Here
is the opening paragraph of his great work in response to Huxley,
entitled Mutual Aid:
Two
aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my
youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the
extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals
have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life
which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of
life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And the other
was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I
failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle
for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which
was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the
dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.
“Don't compete!”
Kropotkin concluded. “That is the watchword which comes to us from the
bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. Therefore combine—practice mutual aid!”
Faced with the same data, the two scientists
arrived at different conclusions. This illustrates how paradigms work.
Stephen Jay Gould, in a recent article rehabilitating Kropotkin from his
caricature as an anarchist crank, would say that the difference in paradigm
included a difference of data, because Kropotkin studied
sparsely-populated Siberia, while Huxley and the British concentrated on
the crowded tropics. But Gould points out that Kropotkin was anything but
idiosyncratic: he represents the mainstream of Russian evolutionary thought,
which remains untranslated and almost unknown in the West. Prince
Kropotkin seems singular to us only because he is the only such thinker who
wrote in English.
Now this difference in paradigms
~ the lens through which we agree to look at the world ~ is what Paul
is talking about, I believe, in his Spirit / Flesh dichotomy.
The Huxley-Kropotkin controversy may serve as an analogy of the difference. It
is very important not to misunderstand Paul. Spirit vs. flesh is
not material vs. immaterial. Although many have
interpreted it that way, such a dichotomy is, in fact heresy. Material
creation is what the bible says God pronounced it to be: Very Good.
The heresy that holds that what is wrong
with human beings is our material bodies and our lives in the world is NOT what
Paul is talking about. He is talking about two different ways of
viewing human life ~ two different paradigms, and the very
different ways of life that proceed from each view of
life. The flesh , rather like Sir Thomas Huxley, sees the
human person as in competition with everybody else: the “war of each against
all.” Therefore, my job is to advance my own interests, and get as much wealth
as I can. The Spirit, rather like Prince Kropotkin, sees the human
person as part of a great whole characterized by mutual aid.
This is a difference, which I have called a
difference in paradigm, might also be called a difference in spiritual
temperament. And what one perceives as reality depends greatly on one’s
spiritual temperament; whether one sees reality as the dance of Cosmic Love or
as gladiatorial combat ~ “a tale told by an idiot, signifying
nothing”. Remember who uttered those words: the murderous Macbeth, his soul
deformed by his own ambition, one of the most frightening depictions of
Pauline flesh in all of literature.
Prof. Gould rightly warns us against the
trap of reading our own political preferences into nature, as both Huxley and
Kropotkin most certainly do. But from the perspective of religious
history, I think one may also conclude that Huxley’s fleshly conclusions
naturally proceed from a prior inclination to view the world as competition.
Kropotkin, on the other hand, grew up as a nobleman in feudal times, for the
rural Russia of his youth was entirely feudal. It was also entirely
Christian, and whatever Kropotkin’s conscious atheism, there is no doubt about
the influence that Orthodoxy had on his consciousness ~ it was part
of the paradigm by which he experienced the world. That is, it
was spiritual in the Pauline sense.
For all its pain
and death, the material world is beautiful, and human beings are
the image of God, however distorted. And as his great compatriot,
Dostoevsky, wrote: “the tragedy of humanity is that a paradise of beauty
blooms around us and we fail to see it.” That failure to see is flesh.
That is what brings death. The Spirit is the divine gift of
seeing the Beauty and Love that in fact rule the world ~ what our Lord called
the Kingdom of God. Anyone who has that gift is led by
the Spirit, in Paul’s terminology. Like Prince Kropotkin, they may not be
aware of it, but nevertheless, they are children of God, and if
children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS
