Homily for Trinity 16

The Rev’d Dr. Ranall Ingalls, Chaplain

Thursday, October 1, 2020

From the Epistle of St Paul to the Ephesians,

For this cause I bow my knees to the Father…that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.

In the Name…

Compassion, argues Friedrich Nietzsche, poisons our humanity, by drawing our attention away from what is noble and strong. Compassion privileges the weak, the botched, the least clever. Those who take their humanity in hand and aspire to make full use of their potential and opportunities will have their eyes instead on what it is they want to make of themselves and the world.

Take this woman and her son in today’s Gospel, for example. She is a widow. That is to say, she lacks standing even in the small world of Nain. Now that her son is gone she is alone and without help. Why should we care? Why does Jesus care? The suffering of slaves, women and children was seldom taken seriously in the ancient world. In Greek drama, it was often the subject of ridicule. What has changed? Why do we care? Nietzsche answers that if we believe compassion to be important, it is because we have come under the spell of a religion of slaves, and this is often true of us even when we do not share that religion.

What shall we say in defence of compassion? Of Jesus in this evening’s Gospel? Very little here. These are very large questions, and I certainly do not pretend to have a knock-down drag out solution to Nietzsche. We will have to learn to live with him in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the world around us – and, if we are honest, in our inmost selves, and make of him what we can. But we may sketch an alternative – the alternative open to those who find they cannot continually make and remake themselves and the world they live in, but must receive it in whole or in part as something given. It is the alternative of prayer. I don’t mean prayer simply as the recitation of words. I mean that attentiveness to things as they are that discovers in them what there is to be loved, and gives rise to yearning, erotic desire, that this good should flourish and abound. I mean that attentiveness of which Simone Weil speaks when she says that attentiveness is prayer. Prayer is the alternative to Nietzsche which begins with love for what is, with attention to people as they are, and only then asks what is to be done.

We think of prayer as something active. And it is. If we are to pray, it will take time, effort. To learn to pray is a struggle. Anyone who has taken up this struggle will tell us that it is a journey on which we often find ourselves lost. Prayer requires activity. But as in love, so in prayer. All our activity is to be ready to receive – to receive the one whom we love, to make room for them, to take away the clutter of images of what we would like them to be in order that they may be present to us more nearly as they are. As Fr Snook put it over a year ago, ‘The art of salvation is the art of being loved.’ Prayer is the art – and it is an art, and like any art demands of us an investment of ourselves – of receiving the good God, and with Him the whole creation and every creature. This love was the subject of last week’s Gospel – the selection from the sermon on the Mount where Jesus speaks of God’s care even for ‘the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is thrown into the fire’.

Nothing is more characteristic of Jesus than prayer, and activity that begins and ends in love for what has been properly seen. He has seen the civil and religious powers, and he overcomes them not by imposing his will on them, but by bringing to light what they are, as sustained in being his goodness, wisdom and power.

In the Gospel, Jesus sees the widow and her son. Really sees them. That is the crucial point. He looks, and is moved. Nietzsche would have us believe that there are some at whom we ought not to bother to look. But Jesus looks and is moved by what He sees. He is not moved as we so often are by the anxious need to fix or to prop up our fragile self-image. He is moved by the widow herself, the son himself. He sees their terrible isolation – the isolation of death, the isolation of destitution – and calls them into a world of communion and fellowship. There is no argument here that communion and fellowship and a continual movement out of isolation belong to us as human beings, but there is that attentiveness that recognizes an actuality.

This past week I noticed for the first time something truly remarkable about the ‘paper icon’ at the back of the Chapel. In that image, both the Blessed Virgin and Christ look directly at us. This is unusual. Benjamin can tell us precisely how unusual it is. But in icons of a similar type, the Theotokos often looks past us, and Christ looks at his mother. In every case, there are reasons for this – wonderful reasons. But in the icon given us by our own friend at the monastery in Nova Scotia, Schema Luc, Christ and his mother look at us. Standing before it, we are seen before we look. What is most fundamental – most basic - is not our looking, but our being seen. And our looking presupposes that we have come ready to be seen, willing to step out from behind screens and masks, and to be loved for what we are, and not for the selves we construct with such care and present to the world.

To pray is to look, and, more fundamentally, it is to allow ourselves to be seen. And to see and be seen belongs to us as human beings – or so says the experience of many through the centuries. When St Paul speaks in this evening’s Epistle about being strengthened with the Father’s power by his Spirit, about being rooted and grounded in love, and about being filled with all the fulness of God, he is not talking about a movement to build or construct something to replace what we are now, not a movement away from our humanity. This is not about the imposition of our will or even God’s will from outside on stuff. The Spirit offers the power to be human, by strengthening what is most human about us. The love of Christ recalls us not to an ideal, but to the humanity we have lost. He call us not a perfection apart from vulnerability and suffering, but one that is found in it. The fullness of God is nowhere more present than in the love which takes Christ to the depths of rejection, isolation and suffering: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ In all these ways God restores our faces to us who have become faceless and nameless. And so we can be face to face, in communion, in fellowship. St Paul is talking about a communion and fellowship with God, with creation, with one another, which belongs to us properly as human beings. We do not create it, we recover it. Or, rather, it has been recovered for us, and is offered to us as a gift. It is for this reason that we celebrate a liturgy – a public work, something we do together, a work that demands of us our best – and we discover that what is essential about this public work is not what we are doing but what the divine is doing in it and by means of it. It is not merely our work, this liturgy. It is theurgy – God’s work. And the communion and fellowship which God offers and we receive here takes up the whole person and every part of the world to which each person belongs.

Let us then bring our whole selves to the liturgy, our souls and bodies, with all the devices and desires of our heart. Let us bring every aspect of our life together – our histories, our institutions, things glorious and good that we have received and share in common and the legacy of deeds of which we are ashamed. Let us bring all, content that all may be seen precisely and entirely for what it is. Let us bring all, confident that we will be seen as the widow and her son are seen in the Gospel. Let everything be brought, that everything may be lifted up to be the object of the divine compassion, and then that everything may be returned to us as God’s good gift that we may have true and abundant life. This is our resurrection – our share in the power manifest when Jesus called the widow’s son back to life. It is extended to us here, now, today in a crumb of dry bread. Here, now, today we are called out of isolation and into communion and fellowship – into our share in that life which is eternal, that is, which is God’s own life.