Sermon for Trinity 13: "How do You Read?"

The Rev’d Dr. Ranall Ingalls, Chaplain

September 10, 2020

From the Gospel According to St Luke,

How readest thou?

How readest thou? How do you read?

A friend who taught early English literature at Trinity College many years ago would often be asked at dinners and formal events, ‘What do you do? What do you teach?’ Mischievously, he would often reply, ‘I teach reading.’ Almost without fail, the person would soon move on, looking to talk to someone more interesting.

But what is the business of our University if it is not reading? What are we here to do if it is not to learn how to read? We want to become the sort of people who can hear voices from times and places and circumstances very remote from our own. And in the end, we want to be able to be face to face with people in a world where those who stand opposed to one another often just shout louder instead.

When Jesus asks the lawyer in today’s Gospel, ‘how readest thou?’ it is a question for us, then. How do we read?

The lawyer asks a good question, and he has the right answer. It was a standard question, and he gives the standard answer. If you desire eternal life – that is, a share in the life of the God who is eternal – love God, and love your neighbour. But the lawyer goes on to ask a point of clarification. Who is my neighbour? And there is so much in why he asks that question. We are told that he asked it to justify himself. That is, he wants confirmation that he is right and good. His house is in order. He is doing what God requires.

Jesus answers with a parable, and I want to suggest that it is a parable about reading. The priest who serves in the Temple at Jerusalem and the Levite who assists the priests both are well read. They know the Scriptures. They know the law. But they take from the texts that they must anxiously preserve their own ritual purity. To touch blood or a corpse would be to become impure. So they pass by the man fallen among thieves on the other side of the road. On their reading, their first duty is to preserve their own purity, to remain right and good.

Samaritans also read the law, though they were rejected as heretics by faithful Jews. Samaritans hated Jews. Jews hated Samaritans. Hatred was the done thing. The only thing more astonishing in this parable than the fact that it is a Samaritan who stops to help a Jew in trouble is that the Jew accepts help from someone he would have been taught to despise so much.

This Samaritan read the law, and understood that it was not to preserve his personal purity and bless his performance of piety. It was to call him out of himself to do the holy will of God, for love of God. Knowing that he must love his neighbour, his question was not ‘Who is my neighbour?’ but ‘To whom am I called to be a neighbour?’ His reading was not to justify himself. That would be to shut himself up inside himself. No, his reading was to open himself to what is real and actual, to open himself to be face to face with the image of God in the persons of his fellow human beings. This kind of reading opens us to beauty, truth and goodness, and to a life of longing for their fulness as something not already possessed.

If he is to learn to read, the lawyer must look on the goodness of a hated Samaritan and own it as good. This is hard. It requires humility. It goes against the grain. He must confess that the one who was neighbour to the man who fell among thieves was a hated Samaritan. And he must face the fact that he is not the Good Samaritan in the story, but the man fallen among thieves. Closed up on himself, preoccupied with his own performance of piety, he has been robbed of his humanity and is half dead. He will be raised to life again only by another.

The measure of our reading is not what we bring to the text, but what we are able to receive from it. The measure of love is not our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for others, but our willingness to be face to face with them.

How much damage we do because we want to do good for others, without the patient, humble attentiveness through which alone we will know them. So, for example, today we remember with thanksgiving the life and labours of Edmund James Peck amongst the peoples of Canada’s far north. But we cannot think of the relationship between Europeans and indigenous people in this land without remembering many evils, including the Resdiential schools. And those who established the Residential schools did what they believed to be good. These were not fascist monsters, though what they did was monstrous. They were well-educated, well-meaning people determined to do good. In so many ways, they were people who are just what we aspire to be. It is a warning to us who seek to change the world without having first learned to love it – to change people, without having been face to face with them first.

To read is not easy. It is to be open to suffering. By ‘suffering’ I do not simply mean pain. I mean that which happens to us, that which is given to us, that which is not the result of our actions and decisions and choices. To suffer is to receive. So, for example, we suffer when we fall in love, for we are in the grip of a power that is does not arise from our choices. But to be open to suffering is to give up justifying ourselves. It is to give up the anxious preservation of our performance of piety or virtue or respectability or right-thinking progressive opinions or whatever. It is to die and to rise again continually. It is to be broken open. It is continual hunger and thirst. It is movement and change, growth and life. It is never achieved once for all.

When we encounter that suffering which is pain, which is anguish, our first and overwhelming reaction is almost always to disassociate ourselves. We must be different. This must be the sort of thing that can happen to a person like this, but not to a person like me. They must have done something to bring this upon themselves. In any case, I cannot be held responsible. They are not my problem. Am I my brother’s keeper? And when we encounter that suffering which is delight, we may draw back too, afraid to give ourselves to another, anxious to remain in control.

If we are to overcome anxious self-preservation, and learn to read not only texts but the book of the world, we must know ourselves in the man fallen among thieves, and then in that same man as he is seen, looked upon with compassion, raised up, and taken to a place where he can heal and regain his humanity. When we have regained our humanity, we will take responsibility for the whole world, as St Silouan the Athonite says. We will pray for the whole world, taking responsibility for every injustice and wrong, because we will love it as Christ loves it.

St Paul describes this way of healing in words familiar from the Pentecost anthems, ‘We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.’ Christ pours out his life for the life of the world, and there is the fulness of love, the fulness of what it is to be human, the fulness of glory.

And in this wonderful and holy Sacrament which we celebrate this evening, Christ’s death – the height and depth and length and breadth of love – is shown forth, and this eternal life – this life of God that God himself lives, this life that God is – becomes our food.

If we are to read, then, our feet will move along a path in which our humanity is constantly being renewed and restored to us. We will know a love that does not originate with us as a resistless and transforming power within. When we rise up to receive Holy Communion, it is to tread in this way. And so may we depart to go read – by God’s grace and with his help patiently to attend to texts, to people, to the world, with open faces.

O Lord, make us human again. It has been so long.