A Sermon for Proper 14, Year B

 “Grant us, Lord, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right, that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you, be enable to live according to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Amen. [1]

“Grant us, Lord, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right…”  So begins this morning’s Collect.  I’ve often thought it a good thing to pray that to think and do always those things that are right --  though I’ve also thought it was a bit unrealistic, at least for me!  Still praying to do right is certainly a good idea.  But these words from Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai have put this prayer in a different, and more troubling, light fro me:

From the place where we are right

Flowers will never grow

In the Spring.

The place where we are right

Is hard and trampled

Like a yard.  [2]

 

From the place where we are right

Flowers will never grow

In the Spring.

The place where we are right

Is hard and trampled

Like a yard.  

What the poet names is the great danger of considering ourselves right.  When we consider ourselves right, the soil of the soul easily becomes hard and trampled.  Thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that differ from what we already know to be “right” do not often get planted in such soil;  very seldom do they take root;  almost never do they grow.

The risk is even greater when we imagine that the “right” thing we know is God’s will, for then the certainty that we are right can become utterly absolute, completely inflexible.  Self-righteousness, rigidity and gracelessness grow in such hard, trampled soil.  Flowers do not.  

Living in the Middle East, the poet knows this all too well.  Many Israelis and Palestinians consider themselves or their cause to be “right,” without question. And when you believe that you are right, always and absolutely right, it becomes possible to do terrible things -- as the history of that conflict has shown us.  

Something similar can happen in a troubled marriage or partnership, when each person is sure of being right while the other is wrong;  or in a work situation, when those who are supposed to be colleagues get locked in a battle of “rightness” over the direction a firm should go.  Communication breaks down;  positions harden;  love dies;  growth does not happen. 

You will no doubt be shocked – shocked! --  to know it happens even in the Church!  Certainly, it is no accident that Jesus spends a fair amount of time in the Gospels challenging the religious folk of his day whenever he encountered self-righteousness in them – and we are as much at risk as they.  A real blessing of the most recent General Convention was that there was a good deal less of that surety of “rightness” than at previous  Conventions --  but it was by no means absent.  So I have to wonder whether we really should pray this collect about being right.

Of course, careful listeners among you will have noticed that the danger the poet names and the gift the collect asks for are not quite the same.  The poet speaks of “the place where we are right.”  The collect asks that we may be given “the spirit to think and do … those things that are right.”  The rightness we ask God to give is not in ourselves;  we do not pray that we may be right;  we pray, rather, for the spirit to think and those things we think and do are right.  It is a subtle difference, but an important one.  For when the issue is no longer claiming that we are right; when we no longer imagine the dangerous lie that doing right grows out of “being right,” then we are freed to see our deep need for God, who is the source of all goodness, rightness, and truth.

And that is exactly where the collect then goes as it continues:

“Grant us, Lord, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right,

 that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you,

be enable to live according to your will.”

that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you,

be enable to live according to your will.”

This collect puts us in our place and teaches us to ask for the help we need.  It reminds us that we depend upon God for our very existence.  It tells us that the capacity to be, think, or do anything, resides not in ourselves, but in God, without whom we cannot exist.  It has been said that if God were to forget us for a moment, we would wink out of existence. Than, by saying to the God on whom we depend moment by moment for our very being that “by you, [we] may be enabled to live according to your will,” the collect reminds us that it is only by God’s help that we have any chance of thinking and doing those things that are right.  We cannot find rightness in ourselves;  we can only be led into rightness by God’s act; God’s gift.  To live rightly, we are utterly dependent on God.

The notion that we must depend upon God not ourselves to think and do those things that are right may seem to you a pessimistic and depressing view of human nature.  I find it freeing and refreshing.  It frees me from the burden & the danger of  “being right.”  It opens me to the “doubts and loves,” which, the poet says,   “dig up the world like a mole, a plow” [3]  -- making it fertile soil.

 Jesus speaks of the need for the digging up of the soil in the famous parable of the sower and the seed: The seeds that fall on the hard-packed path and rocky soil do not grow.  Only seeds that fall on open, fertile soil bear fruit. [4]  

The movement away from the hard and trampled soil of the “place where we are right” to the dug up, broken open, fertile soil where God can make flowers and fruit grow is a profound transformation in human life.  It is a movement from trust in my own capacity for rightness to complete dependence on God. Learning to trust in God rather than myself to find “rightness” is a challenging but essential movement in human life – only in that dependence will we become people in whom flowers grow and fruits flourish. 

 In today’s Psalm, we hear the prayer of someone well along that path of transformation, someone who knows deep dependence on God.  

Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD;

 LORD, hear my voice;
let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication.

 

If you, LORD, were to note what is done amiss,
O Lord, who could stand?

 

For there is forgiveness with you;
therefore you shall be feared.

 

I wait for you, O LORD;

 my soul waits for you;

 in your word is my hope.

 

My soul waits for the LORD,

more than watchers for the morning,

more than watchers for the morning. [5]

For some of us, learning such dependence on God and not on our own sense of rightness does not come easily.  The transformation from the hard and trampled soil of the “place where we are right” to the dug up, broken open, fertile soil from which God can bring forth the fruit of true rightness may be a lifetime’s work. 

Making this Psalm part of our prayer can be one way forward.  So, too, can praying the Collect for today with which I began –  the Collect that puts the possibility of our living rightly where it belongs:  in God’s hands, not our own.

Please pray with me:  

Grant us, Lord, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right, that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you, be enable to live according to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.   

 

The Rev. Jack Zamboni

St. Francis’ Church

August  9, 2009