God and the paradox of life

A sermon on Matthew 22:34-46 for Year A Proper 25 (30), inspired by Dr Andrew Root’s Ministry in a Secular Age podcast “Your nursery is a monastery”

Here’s a thought to get us started: What is a lifetime, and how do we live it?

I will come back to this in a bit, but here it is again: What is a lifetime, and how do we live it?

This one time, the religious experts put aside their academic one-upmanship in order to go after their common enemy, an itinerant preacher who had developed a name for himself as a miracle worker. They had set a cunning trap, which would get to the heart of the theological arguments of the time. In the lively debate in which they were all engaged, there was a key question. What was the most important commandment? There are said to be 365 of them – one for every day of the year, and, presumably, most of them, if not all of them, would have had their proponents. Which side would Jesus take?

While the details are far from clear, at least to me, what is clear is that they thought they were setting a cunning trap, that Jesus would come down on one side or another, that he would conform to their framing of the question, and either join them – and, I guess, stop making so much trouble – or say something that would rule him out of court entirely, and puncture his growing popularity, and remove him as a threat to their movement of religious reform.

Jesus’ reply, that there are two things, both of which you must do, seems to have taken them by surprise. Can you love both God and neighbour? Surely one or the other of them will take precedence?

The thing is, it seems quite obvious to us, the heirs of Jesus’ preaching, and two thousand years of well meaning, though often dull, sermons. We need to love both God, and neighbour.

He then follows on with a deep textual question of his own, which need not detain us, but obviously put the Pharisees in their place, and established him as an expert in his own right.

But why? Why must we do these things? Is it just because that is what Scripture demands? In which case, why should we be bothered with it?

In our atomised, disoriented culture, which has exiled God-talk to what we do in private, where the question of “how do we live” is becoming ever more difficult to answer, but ever more vital, and ever more pressing. In a world where even the future is not what it used to be, how do we live?

When we are born, if all goes well, we are born into love. We are not aware of a universe other than ourselves. All we know, if know is even the right word, that our needs are met almost as soon as we express them. We are in a state of complete dependence. Of course, things do not always go well, and it cannot be good for a child’s development if their needs are not, in fact met. But, generally speaking, as far as I understand it, that is what happens.

However, after a few months, and, again, no expert here, the baby becomes aware of the face of its caregiver. But, in a hard irony, the child simultaneously becomes aware that that face can be taken away. The baby must then begin to become aware of itself as no longer the whole of the universe, but, rather, something which exists in a universe which extends beyond the self. And it quickly becomes apparent, that universe is not quite as responsive to our needs as we had first thought. The baby experiences the “no” of the universe. Just because you desire something does not mean that it will inevitably be supplied.

As soon as they become aware of something meeting their needs, they also become aware of that presence being withdrawn.

In a pre-verbal sense, the baby has ventured upon the great existential question that we are finite beings in a limitless universe. The realisation that we are, in fact, alive is accompanied by the realisation that that life will one day end.

Or, as contemporary Lutheran theologian Andrew Root put it in a podcast about the late James Loader, there are questions which compel all of us throughout our lives. What is a lifetime, and how do we live it?

What is a lifetime, and how do we live it?

Imagine yourself sitting on the beach with someone you love, watching the sun set in an astonishing blaze of glory, and being deeply moved by the transcendent beauty of it. At that same moment, we are also aware of how temporary it is. The moment you become aware of it, it is over.

This beautiful moment will pass – is already passing – has already passed, and, with it, all moments will pass, and we experience the great negation of death. It is not just that we will experience it in some point at the future; rather, that we are, in a sense, experiencing it now.

It is the fundamental paradox of life that as soon as we are aware of it as “life”, as something we are living, that we are not the same thing as the universe as a whole, we are aware that we are going to die. Perhaps not as a verbal understanding – I don’t suppose even very highly advanced one year old is saying that sort of thing, both, as I say, I’m no expert.

This the absurdity of the human condition: That to be born, to be gifted with a life, is to immediately know that you are doomed to that gift being taken away.

This is the thing which fundamentally drives our lives, this thing that drives us outwards, this restlessness that lies at the heart of every human being. What does it even mean to be alive, given that I, and everyone, and everything, that I love is doomed?

There are various ways in which we can distract ourselves from this fundamental reality, and I suspect every culture has its own favourite and characteristic ways of doing so. In our culture, the affluent, consumerist, individualistic, post-war West, our way of avoiding it has been our successful more or less social-democratic bargain that, if we just obey the rules – get educated, get a job, then we will be comfortably off – probably richer than our parents.  And, for a while, the bargain held. After the second world war, health and productivity, and hence wealth, soared. It looked as though things would only get better economically, and our we would not have to worry about poverty or war or sickness anymore, just the tedium of being alive and without problems amidst all this plenty. With nothing to strive for, how would we live? This is the land of Nietzsche’s “last man.”

But the financial crises in the West, and especially insofar as the protests and riots in France are really to do with school funding and such, it seems like the promises of liberalism are creaking at the seams, and threatening to take the political and ethical structures of the post-war world down with them.

And, of course, we can add to that old-fashioned territorial war for national glory in Europe, and here in Australia not only our very own pogrom, but a level of political violence which had seemed very remote from our pragmatic, easy-going culture. All of us, and particularly the young, are beginning to wonder whether the future is all it was cracked up to be.

According to the Existentialists like Camus, the answer to this absurdity of human life is to create our own value. But, it would seem to me that we are no more capable of creating our own values than we are of creating a new colour. It seems more likely that it can lead only to atomism and nihilism, and the sort of rage that seems to be turning the protests into riots in France, and, perhaps, the sort of rage that drove the horrific attack that has left Helen Haines in a critical condition in hospital.

So, if the promise of liberalism is fraying at the seams, and such promises that the various political factions and philosophers propose just leave us wanting something more than all this. Some sort of answer which will provide for practical day to day living of life, but also to scratch the itch that even wealth cannot provide.

What is a lifetime, and how do I live it?

How do I live?

Jesus said: There are two great commandments: love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbour as yourself.

This is not some existential value that we create for ourselves, and could create others if we so desired. Nor is it the materialistic good life that we think we desire, but which ultimately does not satisfy.

At one level, this is the answer to all the problems of liberalism and economics and philosophy I alluded to before.

It would definitely solve the questions of “what is a life and how do I live it” if we could live in harmony with God and one another. If people actually did it, then everything really would be OK.

The problem is, though, not merely that we do not do it, as though better education, better moral formation, better opportunities in life would mean people naturally loved God and their neighbour. All these things are good and very much to be desired, but all of us who have been the beneficiaries of good (or at least good-enough) education, clear moral formation, and have had many opportunities in life know that, even with all these advantages, we do not do them. It’s easy to pretend that we love God and our neighbour when it is pretty cost free – to give from our wealth, to anticipate win-win solutions to the problems of the world. But, still, we are restless, because we know we are not truly tapped into the heart root and source of life.

This is the crisis point that Luther talks about: we know that to be saved, to be plugged into all the good stuff we need to be plugged into, we need to do these simple sounding things – but the more we attempt to do them, the more that we fail to do so!

As St Paul exclaimed “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

The solution for us, as for Luther, and as for St Paul before him, is to realise the deep paradox that these are not things we can ultimately do for ourselves, but things that we have to receive as a gift.

In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has decisively intervened in the world. There are a lot of theories to explain precisely how it works, but all our theories are secondary to this amazing fact: that God has come into a world where our quest to answer the question of what a lifetime is and how do we live it has not been to love God and our neighbours, but rather to erect various sorts of idols which give us permission to persecute our enemies.

God reaches into our lives, and, through the power of the Holy Spirit, transforms us.

The paradox of our lives, where to be aware of our lives is immediately to be aware that it is limited and fleeting meets the even greater paradox that God, who by definition lives outside of time and beyond human limitations has in God’s own self experienced what it is to have a life, and to have to decide how to live it – something that would otherwise be entirely outside God’s own experience.

And the purpose of this paradoxical reaching into our lives is so that God can transform us. Or, as St Athanasius put it: God became human so that we could become God.

So this is why the restlessness we feel is actually what is right with us. It is because it is a little window of honesty in our heart of hearts, destroying the various idols we are always erecting, beckoning us to God, opening us up to the transformation that God offers.

Which is to be joined into the self-giving life of the three-personned God, and answers the question of what is a lifetime and how do we live it, not by a reasoned factual statement, but by connection to the fountain of life and light and goodness which lies at the heart of all things, which is not some static monad, but who invites us to join with the three-personned dance of God’s life and love, and to actually become people who do in fact love God with all their hearts and minds and souls, and love our neighbours as ourselves.

And from that, everything else flows.

To the holy, blessed and glorious Trinity,
three persons and one God,
be all glory and praise, dominion and power,
now and forever.
Amen.

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