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All Saints Anglican Church, Charlottesville VA

The Anglican Province of America

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Sermon for Trinity I

Baptism of St. Paul - Cappella Palatina 1140
Baptism of St. Paul – Cappella Palatina 1140
“Nay, for in all these things we are more than conquers through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:37-39

We live within, we inhabit a context, a total view of the world and things that is called a horizon. I have used this notion before and as I have said I did not make that word up and without getting into its long history in theology and philosophy this is what I am talking about: A literal horizon is the limit of my vision from a specific point of reference. What you can see from the top of a hill is more than you can see from the foot of the hill. What is inside your horizon has meaning for you, while you do not care about what is outside your horizon. You are who you are within a specific horizon. Your personal horizon is the limit of your experience, your knowledge, your understanding, your judgments, your loving, your caring and your valuing from a specific point of reference, that point of reference being you. It is your horizon. What I know, how I know, what I value, what I really care about, all my potentialities, possibilities, and actions make up my personal horizon. St. Paul was originally an enemy of Jesus Christ, but he experienced a conversion in which the resurrected Christ appeared and spoke directly to him leaving him blind and horrified and unable to eat or drink for three days. His narrative, which once was the story of a man named Saul whose life was driven by his love for the Torah and his enmity toward Christ, became the story of Paul, a man who loved Jesus Christ more than anything else in the world. It was Saul’s judgment that Christ and his followers were not in touch with reality in the most dangerous way because they were out of touch with the reality of the Torah. Remember that a personal horizon is the limit of my vision, my knowledge, my loving, my caring and my valuing from my point-of-view. Within Saul’s horizon the destruction of Christ and his Church was a noble and righteous devotion because they were leading other people to destruction, but his conversion shattered his horizon. In a manner of speaking the Church through a man named Ananias took Saul by the hand like a little child and gave him a new life:

 “So Ananias departed and entered the house (where Paul was lodging). And laying his hands on him he said, ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’ And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized.” Acts 9:17-18

Back in Jerusalem there was a Jew from Cyprus named Barnabas who knew what it meant to have one’s horizon shattered but he and other Christians who were in the original Church in Jerusalem were well on there way to rebuilding a new horizon piece by piece around the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Barnabas was the only Apostle willing to take Saul under his wing and there began the remedy, the remediation of Saul who later came to be known as Paul. But here is a point I want to make: For Paul high goods, noble and righteous purposes still existed, but rather than being the destruction of the Church, the most magnificent and righteous end became the very opposite – the multiplication of the Church through missions to the Gentiles. Here is another point I want you to see: every part Saul’s Jewish horizon was incorporated into Paul’s Christian horizon except that everything was radically redefined, realigned, transfigured, because Paul’s standpoint as a Christian was lifted higher and higher as he began to transcend his theological nationalism as a Jew. So for example in both horizons Paul experienced that which for him was noble and righteous, but the good changed from destroying the Church to building up the Church; in both horizons Paul experienced a deep, personal love for Israel, but in the horizon of Saul that love was manifested by action meant to eliminate Christians, while in the horizon of Paul his love for Israel was transformed such that he prayed and yearned for Israel’s conversion to Christ.

 “I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continue sorrow in my heart for I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen (Israel) according to the flesh…” Romans 9:1-3

Paul was saying that he loved Israel so much that he would be willing to be separated from Christ for her sake. The word that we have translated accursed is anathema a familiar English transliteration of the Greek word, which means various things like accursed, set aside, separated and even a votive offering to God. And that statement is all the more distressing, heartbreaking because it follows what must be one of the most breath taking assertions of God’s love and fidelity in the whole Bible:

“Nay, for in all these things we are more than conquers through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:37-39

There was a time in Paul’s life when he would have said something similar to that concerning Israel; it was his judgment that God’s love and promises to Israel meant that she was God’s chosen, God’s elect nation, the bride of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The process of reconstructing a horizon, collective or personal, is a long and painful process and some Christians chose to drift through life rather than face the task responsibly. Drifting is cowardly and not really living at all. One’s horizon may slowly unperceptively change without one taking responsibility for it, which is living irresponsibly. Some Christians are drifters and drifters are not living out the image of God, which requires attentiveness to experience, understanding, responsible judgments, and responsible living congruent with one’s judgments.  Paul was not a drifter; so in the epistle to the Romans and especially in chapter 9 – 11 we will discover the fruit of his hard intellectual, emotional, and theological work and it will be our task to responsibly study, understand, and appropriate his new, mature Christian horizon over the next few weeks. In these chapters Paul lays out the modifications that the Church and he as an apostle had made to their understanding of four fundamental realities in their life because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and their devotion to him: first the Church revised Israel’s monotheism, secondly the Church revised the identity of the true Israelite, thirdly and close to that the Church developed a new understanding of the Israel’s final cause, and lastly, the Church asserted plainly and decisively that faith, Jesus’ faith and the believer’s faith in Jesus, not the Torah, saves human beings.

First of all Paul asserts over and over again doxologically, in prayer and worship, that what we in our day call Israel’s monotheism is not an adequate expression of the Church’s experience of the God of Israel. Israel’s monotheism may be expressed in the famous verse from Deuteronomy 6:4:

 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD.”

The one God of Israel is Spirit and invisible and holy; no true Israelite would even speak his name out loud. But with the life and mission of Jesus Christ that has changed: It is true that God is one and it is true that God is Spirit and it is true that God is holy, but what is new with the Church is that there is a plurality in the Being of God, there are three Persons, and 2nd Person has become a human being of flesh and the Church both prays to and worships that God of flesh. He is the center of their life; he is the one great devotion to rules life. This is the very kind of thing that would have driven Saul with a vengeance to destroy the Church of God; for Saul it would be unspeakable blasphemy. But at the beginning of the next chapter in Romans 9:5 Paul declares that Jesus Christ is not only a real Jew and not only the Messiah of the Jews, but he is also the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the flesh:

“To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.”

Paul is unmistakable in his revision of Jewish monotheism and he had no illusions concerning how his fellow countrymen will take this. Paul does not attempt to make this easy for Israel nor for anyone else and in fact he systematized the Church’s new revised understanding of monotheism by attributing all the glory and titles once attributed only to the God of Israel in the Old Testament, now applicable only Jesus, God made human flesh, the Messiah, the Shepherd of Israel, the true Husband of the Church. But Paul makes it impossible to separate the God of the Old Testament from Jesus Christ.

The reality of the Old Testament is not cast aside but rather it is assumed into the Church’s horizon, transfigured and re-presented as a mystery now unveiled in this new age by Christ. Where salvation, life, and real righteousness once meant being a circumcised Jew practicing the Torah now it means being a baptized believer in Jesus Christ and walking in the Holy Spirit. In our study over the next few weeks you will see just how painstaking, how meticulous Paul goes about presenting the new understanding of the Old Testament, sin and salvation, forgiveness, the Law, Israel, other nations, and the future of the world that makes up the Church’s collective horizon. But first and foremost he must put the right understanding of Israel before the Christians in Rome and he does that, as I have said, with careful, compressed prose in chapters 9-11 that reads more like poetry than anything else I can think of. N. T. Wright compares those chapters as a unit to the artistry of George Herbert. And right in the middle of chapter 9:1 and chapter 11: 36 is chapter 10, verse 9, the eye of the storm, the center of the circle, the exquisitely stated theme that holds the three chapters, indeed all of Romans, together:

“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”

Everything that Paul writes in these chapters either leads to or follows from this simple beautiful of what it means to be a member of the covenant that God made with Abraham. As early as chapter 2 in Romans Paul began to assert the Church’s revised understanding of Jewish identity based upon the faith of Jesus Christ:

“For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.” Romans 2:18-29

In order to have Abraham as your father, you must be baptized into Jesus and you must believe and confess verbally that Jesus is Lord and that God the Father has raised him from the dead. That means you are a member of covenant God cut with Abraham, a true Israelite.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” Galatians 3: 28-29

There are two nations that loom large in Paul’s epistle to the Romans: Israel and Rome. Rome was the one singe power that held dominion over the whole world. Israel’s national life would come to an end in less little more than a decade from the writing of this epistle. Nations like Rome, powerfully nations, came and went but Israel is different.

“They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed  Romans 9:4-5

Other nations may come and go, but how are can it possibly be that Israel as a nation after having all these benefits from God would fall to pieces and be dispersed over the whole world. The Church of God is also a nation in a manner of speaking and Paul even refers to our citizenship high in heaven that transcends all other nations. It will be our task to understand how these three relate to one another. 

“Nay, for in all these things we are more than conquers through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:37-39

 

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Sermon for Ascension I

The Ascension - Rembrandt 1636
The Ascension – Rembrandt
1636

 “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.” Romans 8:28-29

By the time Paul had written these words the Ascension of Christ was a historical fact at the ripe age of about 25 years old. When I turned 25 years old I joked that I was one-quarter of a century old. When I turned 50 years old fractions based on a century were no longer funny to me. Still if you think of your life as divided up into quarters it is interesting to me that 25 years is such a short span, but for most people most of the time life is finished without using up all the fingers on one hand. Where were you 25 years ago? 25 years prior to writing this epistle Paul was doing everything within his power to wipe Christianity off the face of the earth. He hated Christians with what he regarded as a holy and righteous hatred that was equaled in force only to his love for the Torah. He not only consented but he was also complicit in the martyrdom of Stephen and other Christians. His infamy had spread throughout the fledging Church so that even after his conversion to Christ fear and suspicion was the default position of Christians regarding Paul. And yet within three years of writing this epistle Paul was under house arrest in Rome and only a few years later, in the early 60s, he was beheaded in the reign Nero Caesar for the very love of the person he had once so hated, Jesus Christ. And think about the fact that at the time of his death the total worldwide population of the Church was only 4-5,000 souls. If you were have told Paul that based on the statistics at that point things were not looking too good for the Kingdom of God, after he had ascertained how you got through the guards into his study, he would have told you not to worry. And maybe he would have had you take a seat while he took the time to give you a little perspective. Now hold that thought for a few minute while we get into Romans chapter 8 beginning with verse 28.

 “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”

Earlier in chapter 8 St. Paul cited the fact that the creation is groaning and longing for the final redemption of the world, which shall be signaled, by the redemption of our bodies, that is we Christians, at the resurrection. But, Paul points out, the creature does not groan by itself because the Church groans as well:

 “And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for … the redemption of our body.” Romans 8:23

This groaning that Paul refers to is a result of man’s actual sin in the world and that sin is a result of the fall. Remember last week we explored the effects of the fall of Adam: man’s nature is essentially good and he is the Image of God, and yet because of the wounds of the fall to his interior life and the deprivation of the Holy Spirit he is not capable of realizing the good that would save him from sin and return this drifting creation to God. The Holy Spirit awakened, reawakened and unified Adam’s powers and faculties in a free and godly harmony prior to the fall. And it is the gift of the Holy Spirit restored to man through Jesus Christ that now makes it possible for you to love God “with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,” and thy neighbor as thy self. Now by virtue of regeneration in Holy Baptism and feeding upon the life of God in the Blessed Sacrament you may walk in the Holy Spirit. And that is why Paul makes one last parallel in Romans 8 about our groaning: the creature groans awaiting our resurrection, and parallel to and in solidarity with the creature we groan awaiting our resurrection, and parallel to that double groaning, the Holy Spirit enters the narrative with an unutterable litany of groaning:

 “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” Romans 8: 26

What I want you to see that the big difference for us is not that a Christian is the Image of God, because every man or woman ever born is the Image of God – it is the sine quo non of being human. Like I said last week take away the Image of God and human beings are just hairless primates that stand upright and possess big brains. The big difference for us is that we are members of Christ’s Church and have been born again as God’s children, forgiven, pardoned for our sins, and that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who now enables you to, as Paul put it to “walk in the Spirit” and thereby to fulfill of all things the most basic requirements of the Torah.

 “That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” Romans 8:4

For several weeks I have spoken about the Image of God in all men, but now I wish to narrow our focus to the Church:

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28

With verse 28 Paul ties together in a living tether the three groanings of the creature, the Church, and the Spirit. From the start in Romans Paul declared the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be the power of God for salvation of the whole world, God’s Gospel which is about the Son’s faith in and his faithfulness to his Father, as well as God’s covenant faithfulness and how human beings may enter that covenant and then in chapter 8 the Spirit suddenly and without much introduction enters the narrative as the pivotal player. Four times the word for spirit is used in Romans before we get to chapter 8 and maybe one of those occurrences is a reference to the Holy Spirit and I have serious doubts about that. But then in chapter 8 there are 20 references to the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. Why? The reason there are 20 references to the Holy Spirit in Romans 8 is because it is with that chapter that Paul reached the denouement and he drew the strands of his narrative together so that we can see that it is the restoration of the Holy Spirit to man that has brought forth a new epoch – what some of the early Church Father’s call the 8th day of creation. Though the sin of man has made a wasteland of creation, God has heard the bitter groaning of the creature and the man and he has responded with his own groaning; “the Spirit itself (making) intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” And with the entrance of the Holy Spirit, Christ begins to wipe away the tears from our eyes as we continue to wait for the final resurrection, and learn how to walk in the Spirit and to fulfill the most basic requirement of the Torah which is to love God with our whole heart:

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28

Paul identifies as “God-lovers” those who are led by the Holy Spirit and have learned from Christ to address his Father as our Father because, by the grace of baptism, we are the children of God. The groanings of the Church through the Holy Spirit are transformed into the worship of God in prayers and hymns and spiritual songs, which are possible because of the heavenly virtues infused in us when we were baptized. All of this is the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Paul is saying that because the Spirit intercedes for us with heavenly prayers, God then works things for our good, which means that God’s intent is to use Church for working out the good for all creation because that is our final cause and thus our final cause is our greatest good. That is what it means to be “the called according to his purpose.” It is our highest good as Christians, as the Church to be whom God has called us to be which is to know and to actualize God’s finality for humanity in the life of the Church. That is what Paul means when he says that regardless of the nature of all the potential emerging probabilities in life or in the whole universe for that matter, emerging probabilities that God’s already knows unconditionally – God intends to use those emerging probabilities and actual events to form us not in the Image of God, which we already are, but rather God has determined to use “all things” to perfect us in the Image of God, and much more to Paul’s point to conform Christians to the image of his Son, Jesus Christ:

“For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.” Romans 8:29

This is as far as we will get today, but for those who are excited about the notion of being predestinated to salvation please note that a Christian’s predestination is not, as I have said, to the Image of God, but to the Christian’s predestination is to conformity “to the image of his Son.” Now please understand that St. Paul is neither a determinist, nor a physicalist, nor a fatalist, for whom human freedom, or obedience, or intelligence, or responsibility, or love are empty fictions. What we have here is not fate or determinism, but another expression of God’s final cause for humanity. I have already elaborated on fact that we come to know Image of God as we consciously and intentionally get active with the transcendental imperatives: Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, and be responsible. But because human being are the Image of God and because the Second Person of the Trinity himself has become a human being, then human beings may become Christians, sons of God the Father, siblings of God the Son by the grace of regeneration; and we are predestined to the image and likeness of his Son because that is God’s final cause for us and that image and likeness is living out of what others have called the fifth transcendental imperative: “be loving.” Furthermore the Image of the Son will be understood as a Christian consciously and intentionally increases his activity of loving like Christ, which is the activity of self-sacrificing love. It is a matter of taking on the form of servant, a slave, a person who makes no claims for himself, but only to love God and to do his will without self-interest. That is what predestination is about – being betrayed by your friends, being lied about, being cited as an enemy of the state and a God-hater when you are a God-lover, and finally to be impaled upon a cross. We will stop there.

If one looks back over the last 25 years of one’s life one will see how things may have gone in radically different directions from time to time had it not been for what at the moment one experienced as a galling influence, or at other times wounding disappointments, and then again there may have been those events we knew to be personal human tragedies that nearly drove one to give up, and in addition to all that there are the exigencies in our life. It takes time and some experience with the self-giving love of Christ, as well as our feeble attempts to imitate his love, to gain a needful Christian perspective on the moment.

 “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.”    Romans 8:28-29

 

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Sermon for Easter IV

Creation of the Animals -Franciabigio 1520
Creation of the Animals -Franciabigio 1520

“But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.” Roman 8:9

“For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God… Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now…”Romans 8: 19, 21,22

Last week I began with the fact that you may experience and come to understand the Image of God in which you are created not through introspection or contemplation, not as some piece of yourself that you may take a look at in the mirror, but rather that when you actually, consciously and intentionally buckle down to being a Christian and get serious about living attentively, intelligently, and responsibly in every piece of life – when you do that (and as I said last week frankly no one can do it for you) you experience yourself appropriating the Image of God living attentively, intelligently, and responsibly in the world. I am saying that when you do that you live true to yourself, an authentic Christian, the genuine article, and you live true to God without whom there is no truth and there would be no you.

Remember the Image of God in which we are created, identifies us ontologically, it is who we are as human beings; the Image of God is not an add-on to human nature, it is not even a gift of grace to humanity, but rather it is the sine qua non of human nature. There is a sense in which everything is a gift of grace including our very being and that would include our distinctiveness in creation, but that is not the point I am making. The point is that there is no such thing as human nature apart from the Image of God; it is the chief mark of our identity a human beings. It is precisely what separates us from the rest of creation. It is why we write books, create music, invented the organ upon which we play the music other human beings have created – it is why we make television shows and write scripts about Animal Planet instead of being the subject one of its episodes. We furless primates have been sculpted from dirt and made in God’s image, which is the potency actualized to love and rule reasonably and responsibility over his creation. To repeat once again, as you appropriate the Image of God by consciously and intentionally increasing your activity of responsible living, forming responsible judgments that lead to responsible action, you will also achieve self-transcendence; you will discover afresh what it means to lose your life in order to find it. And to the degree that you consciously and intentionally appropriate the Image of God as the activities of attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness and responsibility, and even more so with the refreshing of Holy Spirit, you will grow an authentic Christian life.

 “For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God… Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now…” Romans 8: 19, 21,22

But it doesn’t take long to realize that we have not lived up to this great potency and power of being human. And it is clear that the whole creation has suffered because of us, for instead of being attentive we have taken every opportunity for distraction, instead of pursuing the hard earned fruit of intelligibility and instead of being honest and doing the hard work of verifying what we think may be true we have settled for half-truths and biases. It is no accident that good public relations specialists, who are essentially professional liars, are very well paid for their sins. We live with misrepresentation and false judgments and we have instructed others to do the same and in particular we have done so when it comes to the least among us in creation.

For example, American citizens have built an abortion industry that in the case of Planned Parenthood alone aborts around 300,000 pre-born children annually while generating $150,000,000 in taxable revenue, and as they will quickly tell you, also providing jobs. Furthermore, for years our nation has fueled our economy through war – either our own or the wars of other nations. According to a congressional report from 2001 – 2008 our nation made $154.8 billion in “weapon transfers” to developing nations. We are number one in the world. (Russia is #2 with a total of $63 billion in weapons sold.) And when we think about those two grievous issues it is understandable that many Christians do not even want to touch upon questions of the rest of creation – for example, how we obtain our food today – how animals are industrially bred and how their meaning has been reduced to a food source for us, or to our entertainment.

Yes, certain animals were consumed as food after the fall, but they were always more than food because their life’s blood was an essential part of the worship of God in Israel. Why was the blood of animals required for the worship of God? Because only blood would remind everyone that the price of man’s sin was life itself, blood itself, and only blood and never vegetation would signify the depth of man’s shame and disgrace and destruction. But it was not so in the beginning. When God brought the animals to Adam to name them, as one of mankind’s earliest exercises in dominion, God established through that action a bond of trust and familiarity between the creature and man. And the habit of naming continued after the fall and it became more specific as men gave names to their animals, a practice our Lord alludes to in John chapter 10 when he cites the fact that shepherds call their sheep by the name they had given them. Is it not remarkable that the sheep the shepherd and his family ate, the sheep that Abraham and Sarah ate, were in all probability known by name? I know it is remarkable to us, though it would not have been so even in the recent past. But today it is nearly unbelievable because we prefer our meat like our half-truths prepackaged and wrapped neatly in cellophane with an expiration date. (An example of this banality is the Anglosphere’s most recent money making industry of the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens in which they dismantle their straw man version of Christianity never once touching upon a real theologian.) Of course the FDA’s ironic choice of the word “expiration” is another clear example of a distorted, a lying category since it refers not the animal that has already expired, but to our safe utilization of the animal – but now the FDA’s religion department has spoken a final word of truth to the citizen. However it was not so in the beginning. That relation of trust and familiarity that Adam knew was also inscribed in many of the laws of Israel, laws that focused on how food was to be obtained, how working animals were to be worked and treated, and how the animals that were used in the worship of God and for food for the people of God were to be raised, how they were to reproduce and how their young were to be care for and very specifically how they were to be killed and how they were to be treated after their death.

I have hardly touched upon anything exhaustively or even representatively of the plenary impact of our sin upon creation and other creatures, as well as our selves and our children. And this is made all the more difficult as I pointed out last week because of the darkness of the day in which we live. The reason this is so important – the reason I have repeated over and over again that the image of God is summed up in our activity of being attentive, being intelligent, being reasonable, and being responsible is just because we live in a time in history in which these essentially human activities are no longer thought to be valid or meaningful. All that matters today is this or that perspective and what has been lost is a belief that there is truth to be discovered and affirmed and acted upon. Look, a perspective is just a perspective, possibly a condition of truth, or a potential bit of evidence. But in this present darkness perspective is taken for understanding, equivalent to whatever remains of truth, which it is not: at best perspective is evidence, at worse perspective is bias. I am not interested in one perspective or the other; I am only interested in the knowledge of the truth. For that reason I want to make three quick points about truth:

First of all truth is independent of one’s understanding or knowledge. Truth is independent of my grasp of the truth. Secondly, human knowledge, human understanding of truth is achieved only when a judgment has been rendered based on verification. No verification, no human understanding. And thirdly, truth is meaning. There is no meaning apart from truth. If someone asks the question, “Whether it is true or not, what does the virgin birth mean?” the right answer is that it means absolutely nothing. To pretend that untruth is meaningful is nonsense, it is stupidity, and it is a madness that only the mentally ill and a few theologians affirm. If something is not real, it does not exist, if it does not exit it does not participate in being and therefore it has no meaning. But of course someone will say to me, “it might not mean anything to you but it may have profound meaning to someone else,” which would lead me to conclude that such a person has been deceived, or such a person is dim-witted because he has embraced non-being, technically that person is out of touch with reality – such a person has either been tricked or is delusional. If it isn’t true it has no meaning. What I am saying is true, it is objectively true, it is not merely my experience of things, it is absolutely verifiable, and it has meaning that is both wonderful and terrible.

This is what I want to say: God never abandoned his final cause for creation, which is most perfectly and beautifully, portrayed the Incarnation of his Son, which is the peaceable wedding of Heaven and Earth, of matter with Divinity in the one Person of Jesus Christ. In the Incarnation, in the life and Person of Jesus Christ we can know not only God’s purpose for creation but we also know Man in his proper role as God’s vicar, restored, beautified and ruling over creation. There are two duties of mankind as the vicar of God, two offices that only man is equipped to perform on behalf of creation: First of all man is to husband creation, husband her flowering, her decaying and her seedling through seasons of growth and seasons of rest enabling her to fulfill God’s final cause. Thus just as Jesus’ final action will not be an exercise of crude power and domination, but rather the final application of his of redemptive love, so we ought to imitate him now.

And that brings us to man’s second office, which is not merely to experience creation, but to delight in the beauty of creation, to be attentive to the creature, to understand her and to rightly judge the great value of creation to God himself; to give the creature what only we can give; to give to the creature what by nature she does not have – to be her chevalier, her priest,  her poet, her voice and declare her beauty, her glory, and her worth before the Lord with the voice of joy, the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom:

 “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them… Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”