Trinity 17
The collect today mentions “the heavenly city”. That city arrested my attention as I came to grips with writing a sermon for today. St Augustine wrote a book called The City of God. The idea would not leave me alone as I thought about the collect, so I picked up a little book that had some passages from Augustine.
He writes to us from a turbulent time, one where there was war and rumours of war, for the Roman Empire was falling quickly to the Vandal hordes from the north. It would seem that his times are similar to ours. There are rumours of wars riding on the waves of suspicion and the hatred of things foreign slip along even today, and there are even preparations being made for invasions and conflict in this post-modern era.
Augustine wrote about the City of God in these words:“So it is that two cities have been made by two loves; the earthly city by love of self to the exclusion of God, the heavenly by love of God to the exclusion of self. The one boasts in itself, the other in the Lord [as Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians]. The one seeks glory from men, the other finds its greatest glory in God’s witness to its conscience.”
Those two loves are the basic instinct of humanity, one tendency toward the divine, the other to the “carnal” – if I may put it so boldly. These two loves, like loving one’s neighbour as one’s self, pull in opposite directions. The one direction makes one spin into an ever-decreasing circle, that vicious spiral of selfishness. The other direction pulls one outside of oneself for the sake of that Other.
There is a famous book about “the Other” by Martin Buber, to which I have referred before, called I and Thou. There is just one point that I wish to take from it, that everyone is other than myself, but I can relate to them quite easily because they have the same flesh and emotions I have (though they express everything so very differently). But the Thou of whom Buber writes is like that other city of Augustine, for it is so very different from what we ordinarily know. It is essential and it is beyond the semblance we normally deal with, as profoundly other as the beloved is for the lover, yet part of oneself ultimately.
So do Augustine and Buber explain how they know these things of which they write? Not really, but that does not make their message any less disturbing and important than it was for those who first read their words. Our thoughts must be provoked by what we understand to be that city of God for ourselves. Our thoughts must be provoked by that Other whom we confess to be our God.
Buber, like Augustine, lived in interesting times, for his life began in Austria and then he lived in Nazi Germany until 1939 when he went to Jerusalem. The trouble of that period is very well known. So what of our own interesting times? Can we say with Augustine that our leaders are “dominated by the lust of dominion”? I fear that this may be the case, and so we pray for our leaders day by day privately and week by week publicly in this, “the divine service” – our worship. We must hope that some day we may say about our leaders and populace that “they serve each other in charity, by the responsible and their amenable behaviour respectively.” So speaks Augustine about affairs in the heavenly city.
It is the wisdom of the age which perplexes both Augustine and Buber, and also, increasingly, myself about today, for what do we consider the best of the human? The earthly city has people “wise by human standards, they have made the good things of body, or mind, or of both, their ultimate aim.” The noble aspirations of the sciences are applauded by Augustine, but the moral state of humanity is deplored. Even those who aspired to a knowledge of God in the city of men did not honour him properly, but they were lost in their own thoughts “being eaten away by pride and preening themselves on their wisdom.” Ultimately, our human wisdom which we show in this earthly city is reflective of the creature and not the creator. Thus Augustine is querelous with the humanity of the earthly city, he argues about and questions human aims, the hopes and the knowledge which is the foundation of the earthbound citizen. The Confessions tell us all about Augustine’s fiery nature which took on all comers, and his professed sinfulness. In sum, Augustine condemns humanity and its innate wretchedness, but he does hold out grace as the redemption of humanity, through the passion of the Christ.
But Augustine does not condemn us to nothing but the earthly city, for he argues that the heavenly city can be seen in the knowledge of redemption and in the gift of the Spirit. These are merely tokens of the heavenly city, but, because we are mortal, we must live by the laws of the earthly city. We must do good deeds here and now, deeds which are done out of Love, that profound christian charity which reflects the impulse of the heavenly city. That love provokes the world because of its effectiveness and its unworldly nature. That love defends the christian from the slings and arrows of the outrageous and outraged world, this earthly city in which we dwell yet it is a love which aspires to the heavenly city to which we ultimately move.
Augustine’s City of God is something which we can see only fleetingly in this existence, a glimpse achieved in a moment of clarity, perhaps in prayer or contemplation, or even through our reading of bible or literature. That quick look gives us a vision which we know to be true and will haunt us when our eyes are blinded again by worldly wisdom which may have nothing to do with God’s wisdom.
Our collect and our reading from the gospel for today speak about the largess of the master of the heavenly city, that heavenly kingdom, where all are rewarded from the King’s treasury with what the king wishes to give, a reward greater than any can expect. This is what Augustine firmly believed – that was his experience which thrust him into a life in the earthly church, as he hoped to be part of the heavenly city.
So it should be for us as we sojourn here in the earthly city, this small corner we love so dearly. Our love should impel us to let go of the earthly for the sake of that far kingdom which we glimpse through our worship and devotions, our study of what Jesus means to us here and now.