The Fourth Sunday after Easter
“Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”
In two days time, the Christian world will commemorate the 1700th anniversary of the opening of the Council of Nicaea – the very first of the early Councils or gatherings of the entire church – that took place in 325AD. These councils of the church were a response to the growing need to gather and listen together as one body of Christians to the Holy Spirit and how God was directing the church, and to codify and agree upon the core tenets of our faith. It wasn’t that we hadn’t already been thinking theologically about who Jesus was or what Jesus’ relationship was to the Father, as the second person of the Trinity, or that Christians weren’t generally in agreement about these things, but there were many making their own claims about who Jesus was or how salvation functioned. It was pertinent to prayerfully convene and agree upon what the boundaries of the faith would be, to be able to say this is what Christians believe.
Nicaea was the council that produced the Nicene Creed that we say every Sunday, the creed which proclaims and hands on the truth of God as Holy Trinity who, out of love for us and His creation, becomes one of us in his Son, Jesus, dying for us on the cross. Now all of these lines of the Creed, the sentences, can be spelled out in more depth and detail, but the Creed – literally meaning credo, or I believe – spells it out succinctly, and gives a kind of shape or outline to the truth of our faith, so that we aren’t left to try and forge it ourselves.
But try we do – that is, to make the world, to shape ourselves and others, to forge our values – that is, the things we desire – and mould our beliefs not after God’s image, likeness, or guidance, but after us, in our image, according to my will. Imagine the chaos that would be if every single one of us shaped the world around us, and our lives, and our values and beliefs only after what we wanted, if we all believed that what we thought was true was only what was true, and that there isn’t is some fixed and immovable truth beyond our own imaginations.
In Parliament in the United Kingdom right now, there much talk about passing the UK equivalent of ‘MAID’ (Medical Assistance in Dying), following other Countries, our own included, and the Netherlands where such things have been legalized for over 20 years, and where, as of two years ago, the laws were expanded to extend assisted suicide to children of all ages. This is a topic around which we hear much about values – what is it that we value in our lives, our suffering, and our deaths. One refrain you hear over and again in these discussions is the refrain of dignity.That it’s a good thing to offer people the dignity to die as they wish or when they wish, to spare people from the indignity of being unable to feed themselves, change themselves; alongside dignity you also hear cruder talk of empowering people not to suffer the indignity of diapers, drooling, and being in a vegetative state.
But what do such value statements about dignity say about those who live those kinds of things every day? What does it say to those who have developmental or cognitive or disabilities, to the mentally ill, the demented, stroke-sufferers in nursing homes who require significant care to live – if giving the option of taking your own life is giving dignity, then is it not suggesting that their lives now are without dignity? In Denmark 97% of foetus’ diagnosed with Downs Syndrome are terminated, in France 77%, because there it is unthinkable that such people – perhaps because they are so different from you and me – can live happy, fulfiling or dignified lives. An abhorrent thought for any of us who know anyone with Downs Syndrome, people who so often show us what it means to love and to be happy.
Sure, we may look at some people who suffer physically or mentally and hope that we never have to suffer the same things, but who are we to judge the value or the dignity of their life or their experience? The point is that these things are subjective, personal judgments, based on what someone else feels is dignified or valuable, and not on any kind of eternal or unmoving truth.
Sensitive topics to be sure, and ones I won’t speak more about in this sermon, but this is to say that as Christians, it is things like MAID, or Denmark or France, or the most vulnerable people among us, that we mustapproach in a careful way always remembering that for us, it is not our values which give shape to truth, it is not our feelings or our thoughts that define reality – but God. However much we may be tempted to look at another and their life, even if it is a truly suffering-filled and pitiable life, and to think that they are without dignity in their living, that their life is different value than ours given the type of life they live, we must recall ourselves to the ultimate truth and reality: that their dignity and their value has nothing to do with what we think or feel, but has everything to do with them being made in the image of God, and that in God’s eyes they are children of infinite value and worth.
Now during the last few weeks we’ve been hearing in the Gospels from what we call the Farewell Discourse of Jesus – his goodbye speech to the disciples – and in it he is preparing them for his going away at his ascension to the Father. In this blessed time after his resurrection, he has appeared in various ways and at various times to the disciples, and they’ve enjoyed the company of their friend and teacher, but another pain has yet to be felt – when he will go away for good. But as he’s preparing them for this departure, he makes them a promise of a comfort that is to come – the Holy Spirit whom he will send. This Spirit, Jesus says, will lead them into truth, becaues the Spirit communicates what it hears from above, and it will teach them as the Spirit teaches us if we devote ourselves as students. Truth comes from above. “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” writes St. James in the Epistle today. Truth is from above, because truth does not change, and God does not change.
Listening to the Spirit is to listen for God, and it is by our listening and our obedience to what we hear (our trusting in it) that we come to know what truth means, because we come to know God. Truth comes from above. “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” writes St. James in the Epistle today. What is true is from above, and truth does not change, because God does not change.
But it’s this truth that we sometimes turn from in favour of the truth we try to make for ourselves. The Collect today instructs us in this by first acknowledging that our wills and our affections – the ways our hearts move us towards the things we want – can be unruly and untrustworthy. It continues by asking God to help us to love what God commands and desire what God promises, so that among all of the sundry and manifold changes of the world – amidst the chaos and uncertainty of life in this world – the chaos and uncertainty of our health, our mental wellbeing, our future, and among all of our truths that we concoct to shape our reality to our own liking and comfort – among all of this uncertainty we pray that God might help us to focus our hearts on the truth that never changes.It's a truth that revealed itself most clearly to us when it hung on the cross and showed us the shape of its love, its desire, and its promise.
The point is that amidst all of the chaos, all of the sickness, the grief, the sadness, the pain, the loss, the shame, and all the thousands of little ways that we try to make things better for ourselves, and the platitudes we utter when things are rough to try and scrape through the day – amidst it all there is this one, constant, never fading, never failing, never wavering truth on which we must hang everything because nothing else will hold the weight – and that truth is that God loves us, lived with us, died and rose for us, and if ever in our darkest hours we wonder where that truth is, we need only to turn and look beside us to realize that even though every other hope we had has changed or fled, this truth has not, because it is a love that walks with us, suffers with us, and redeems us.
