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The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
O Lord, we beseech thee, make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name, for thou never failest to help and govern those whom thou hast set upon the sure foundation of thy loving-kindness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 7)
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The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 8:26-39
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Luke 8:26-39
✛
Father Austin's Last Sermon
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In the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
If I may, I would begin this my final sermon with a point of humility. May I say to each of you that I am truly sorry for my sins, and if I have sinned against you in some particular way, by a thing done or a thing left undone, I ask that you forgive me.
This point of humility is important for Christians to grasp, not only day to day and week to week, but at the end. With such wit as I have, in print, in class, and in pulpit, I deplore the practice of eulogies at funerals precisely because, at the time of death, we need to be honest above all else. The departed person may have been quite beloved, and she may have been a pretty good person even objectively considered. But it is not on account of her pretty-good-ness that we commend her to God; we commend the departed to God because of what God has done for us sinners and given to us sinners in Christ Jesus.
I’m thinking about humility because, over the past couple of months, a number of you have told me of good things that I have done for you or meant for you, often things I had no awareness of. About this I have, first, a serious thing to say. Every one of us has influence on other people far beyond what we are aware of. It feels good, on occasion, to have the curtain of ignorance pulled back a wee bit so that we see something of our influence on others. And to appreciate that feeling is no offense against humility. Yet for the most part to live by faith is to live in hope, and hope is about things we do not see. For the most part, you do not see the good effects you have on other people. But God knows. Don’t forget that.
The second thing, not so serious, is that I have started to feel like a character in one of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories, a fellow who died and all sorts of people in the town came out to his wake and were telling all the good things he had meant to them, and what a shame it was; if only he had lived another couple of days he could have heard them!
A friend reminded me recently of what I said in my first class here at Saint Thomas, and he connected it to something I said just last month, seeing in those two things significant bookends of my teaching. They are, indeed, my fundamental themes.
In my first class here I said that God is no thing. God is strange. He is not a being in the universe, but is rather the reason there is a universe at all. You will never experience God, as you might experience springtime in Paris or riding a bull in a rodeo. Those are deliberate examples. God can be said to be beautiful, because he is the cause of such things as a spring in Paris. But God is not under our control; he is the wildness that is the creative cause of a bucking bull in a rodeo. God, who is no thing, is beyond all comparison with any thing. Even stranger, however, is that God the Creator decided to be a creature among us, the Word become flesh. This is as unimaginable as an author becoming a character in his own story.
So my first theme is the wonderful strangeness of God, and the consequent great intellectual excitement of Christian theology, which makes vastly more sense and is more beautiful than people realize. The joy of being a theologian in New York is to get to show intelligent and highly educated people that the Christian faith—which our world ignores—has more to commend it than they ever dreamed.
My second theme is man, the human being, creature of God. In my lecture on Losing Susan, I said that each one of us is the center of God’s undivided attention. At the end of Perelandra (I think it is), C. S. Lewis shows that the entire universe is created for each person within it. Everything that God has done, from giving being to the Big Bang through this morning’s sunrise, everything from one edge of the time-space continuum to another, everything including Jesus himself, his conception, his humanity, his death, his resurrection: all of it has been done for you. This (by the way) is what we ought to mean when we say “Jesus died for you”: you are the center, you are the reason God did any of this at all.
The dignity, the infinite value, the preciousness of any human being is in no wise diminished by the fact of there being seven billion or fourteen billion or a hundred trillion of them. The reason this is true is because (again!) God is strange. God is not like us. When I focus on one thing that means I am not focusing on other things. But when God attends to me, he does not stop attending to you.
And what are we humans, anyway? The answer is not obvious, because our experience is unreliable. We experience only sinners, and when we attempt to be philosophical or psychological and we think about our human experience, we who are thinking are ourselves sinners. Our only exposure to authentic humanity is in Jesus, whose humanity is conveyed to us in the gospels, themselves given to us by the church.
What are we humans, anyway?
The gospels show that to be human is to be at danger in the world. We are, as it were, in a little boat in the middle of a vast sea of water, and the storms come in and the waves rise up and the wind beats hard upon us, and we can barely see anything; but Jesus comes to us, and the dangers of the physical world are unable to disturb the calm that he brings.
To be human is to be at danger within ourselves. We are, as it were, possessed of desires and wild emotions that cause us to do things that are greatly harmful to ourselves. We can barely live with one another. That crazy man, whose abode is outside the city amongst the tombs, that man whom no iron shackles can hold, that man who throws himself upon the rocks and dashes himself to the ground: we know about him, and we somehow know that he is us. But when Jesus comes to exercise authority over all that is wrong with that man, he is able to sit down, calmly, at the feet of Jesus.
The human being. And do you know? A real human being is just as strange and awesome as God, and can be just as frightening. The people of the town, when they came and saw the man, who had had the demons, sitting now at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind, they were afraid. And they asked Jesus to go away.
To become a Christian is to awaken to the dangerousness of human life. The world often is not friendly to human beings. Our psyches likewise often are not friendly. Dangers are around us, dangers are within us, and becoming a Christian does not make all of this safe. Instead, it poses a fearful alternative, the strange God who has become the real human being, the one who lives still in the storms and walks into the most fearful situations and dies in the most painful way: the real human being, who, in and through all that, remains himself. Calm. In his right mind.
When I read today’s gospel, I know I am that lost man out in the tombs, but I also identify strongly with the people of the town. I can imagine myself asking Jesus to go away—it’s just too scary, this real human business is just too scary. But the person I most want to be is the person sitting at his feet. Is it not also what you want? To be calm. To be in your right mind. To be human.
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
