Image of God Archives - All Saints Anglican Church, Charlottesville VA

May 19, 2014 By Fr. Spencer

Sermon for Easter IV

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.”

May 12, 2014 By Fr. Spencer

Sermon for Easter III

“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

“O be joyful in God, all ye lands, alleluia: sing praises unto the honor of his Name, alleluia: make his praise to be exceeding glorious, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia… Say unto God, O how wonderful art thou in thy works, O Lord…” from the Introit

I want to begin by identifying the image and likeness of God in man and then say something about how it relates to our lives. It begins with the givenness of experience. Not the experience I preached about a few weeks back in which experience is mistaken for knowing. Nor is it experience as a modern article of faith that drives people from one experience to another, from one job to another, from one spouse to another, trying this and then trying that, fearful of missing out on an experience that might make life meaningful and happy. I mean none of that. Well what do I mean by experience and what does that have to do with the image of God? What I want you to experience, as a Christian, is your own attentive, intelligent and responsible self-consciousness as it takes possession of itself as your own attentive, intelligent and responsible self-consciousness. As you do that you experience the image of God in which you were born, the very image that has been strengthened and refreshed through the heavenly virtues infused into your life when you were regenerated in Holy Baptism.

So the first thing I want you to understand is that the image and likeness of God is not something you will come to know by introspection and contemplation. The image of God will never flash before one’s inner eye as a phantasm to gaze upon while one slumbers in solitude upon a couch. Why not? Because the image God is not a matter of abstract concepts, not nouns like intelligence, or goodness, or love, but rather you will know the image of God as you increase your activity and appropriate the image of God for living reasonably, responsibly, Godly, diligently, humbly, and patiently in the world.

The second thing I want you to understand is this: the image of God is not a thing, not an entity; it is not some piece of yourself that you will see by gazing into a mirror. What then is the image of God? The image of God is quick, living, and powerful; it is what most learned men from Aristotle until the Enlightenment called potency, which means basically potentiality or power or strength, though it is never entirely dormant. The Greek word that is translated potency is dunamis, which we usually find translated in the New Testament as power or strength. So the image of God is a potency that is part and parcel of what it means to be a human being, and it is consciously experienced in your attentiveness, your intelligence, your reasonableness and your intention to live responsibly in the world. And as you practice this you will become consciousness that the image of God is actively shaping your way of life in the world.

And here is the third point I wish to make: far from being something to be gazed upon or a grand idea to hold in your mind you actually consciously and intentionally experience the image of God when you buckle down to being a Christian and get serious about living intelligently, reasonably, and responsibly in every piece of life because when you do that (and frankly no one can do it for you) you experience the image of God not as potency, not as potential, but you experience the image of God in actuality which is how Aristotle and most learned men until the Enlightenment would have referred to it. The word that we usually translate as actual is a Greek word energeia that means basically “being-at-work,” which means the potential has become actualized in your activity. Furthermore 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. And growing an authentic Christian life will keep you close to Jesus as you perform more and more, greater and greater acts self-giving love.

One last important point about the image of God is this: 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 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 do not live like we belong in an episode of Animal Planet. We are creatures sculpted from dirt and made in God’s own image, the very creature that has the potency and the actuality to love and rule reasonably and responsibility over his creation. That is the Image of God and that is the Image of Man; it not only separates you from all other creatures, but it is what makes you fit to rule over creation.

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 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. A perspective is just a perspective, possibly a condition of truth, 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. Nihilism, as Flannery O’Connor said, is the very gas we breathe today. And one reason for that is that our world today is dominated by a philosophy of atheistic materialism that takes all that exists to be matter in motion. I am not disputing the scientific method or evolution or cosmology, but I am disputing the scientists that go from being scientists to making pronouncements as though they are qualified to be philosophers and metaphysicians and even quasi-theologians. But first lets take a look at the contemporary myth of materialism.

The materialist’s narrative begins with the Big Bang, which is always described as the singular mother of all thermonuclear explosions that set the universe in motion. But it is important to remember that it is all matter, all material and nothing else – matter in motion. Strict materialists insist that there is no such thing as mind, or consciousness, or spirit because spirit, consciousness, and mind are non-material and therefore nonexistent. For the materialist mind and consciousness are just so many elegant electrical impulses firing in the material substance of what we call the human brain and the body. Nothing more – in reality there is no such thing as mind or spirit or consciousness and because of that the very things we so highly value like intelligence, reason and responsible living, true decisions or even willing are not real. The whole universe from the beginning including humanity are just so many machines either running well or sputtering out and breaking down; and once the machine breaks down there is nothing; there is no mind or spirit or soul that wings itself away, we simply go silent like the voices on a radio when you pull the plug. It rust or rots and dissolves and is absorbed by other materials – but you, or what you thought you were, is finished, non-existent, no more. All that exist is matter in motion, stimulus and response, or more exactly stimulus and twitch. Materialism remind me of Jack Burden’s nihilism in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men in which Jack comes to the conclusion about midway through the story that “all the words we speak meant nothing and there was only the pulse in the blood and the twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog’s leg in the experiment when the electric current goes through it.”

There you have it, the universe, and all that therein is, is mechanical, machine-like, and what we call human intentionality, or the human subject, or self-consciousness or responsibility are fictions because the only thing that is really real is matter in motion and what we end up with is a universe, including human beings that are really just twitching pieces of material things responding to the spasms of other material things all of which will eventually wear out and stop convulsing – which is what we call being dead. What we call art, or ethics, or decisions, or thinking is nothing but electrical impulses evoking a twitch. For the materialist reality is twitch and response – there is no intentionality because machines do not have intentionality.

Now it is true that all twitching is not equal at least in magnitude; some things produce bigger twitches and jolts than other things – the trembling of a butterfly is nothing compared to a lurching earth quake and that is nothing compared to the unimaginable spasms that are coursing through interstellar space, and that is nothing compared to the great waves of intergalactic twitching. (Warning: at this point I begin to mock materialists.) But here’s the thing: if you use your non-existent mind and think some non-existent thoughts, you have to ask your non-existent self what started everything twitching in the first place? And if you continue to think about it rather than taking a nap or watching some TV, or getting distracted, it will occur to you that nothing begins twitching on its own therefore there must be, as crazy as it sounds, an un-twitched Twitcher who started the ball rolling.

If what we Christians call creation is merely matter in motion what a happy coincidence that all that matter in motion turns out to be not merely mechanistic but intelligible, meaningful, beautiful and good. Futher more what a stroke of good fortune that human beings evolved from matter with the capacity to experience stuff and to grasp the intelligible, to understand it and to order our lives in a responsible manner because instead of an untwitched Twitcher, there is God who created all that is out of nothing but his love. And this one creature, this furless primate standing upright, this human being, he created in his own image and endowed him with the potency to know and understand creation, to frolic in its beauty and wonder, and lead creation to the Altar of God:

“O be joyful in God, all ye lands, alleluia: sing praises unto the honor of his Name, alleluia: make his praise to be exceeding glorious, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia… Say unto God, O how wonderful art thou in thy works, O Lord…”