Trinity 19 – Go into Your House

Ephesians 4:23-28       St Matthew 9:1-8

Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house.

These final Sundays in Trinity season are about the heights of our sanctification – union with God in heart and soul and mind and body.  It is such an exalted state that we need the help of the early Church Fathers to guide us.  This morning I’d like to look at quotations from St Augustine and from Gregory the Great, from the 5th and 6th centuries.  They can speak to us profoundly about our difficulty with the normal temptations, the passions we’ve looked at earlier in the season, but also some new engagements with the world that our generation knows for the first time in human history.  More on that later.

In the Epistle this morning, St Paul calls on us to “put on the new self”.  The longer quotation including the verses just before this morning’s lesson are as follows:

“put off your old self [or man], which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and… be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and… put on the new self [or man], created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.  [Eph 4:22-24]

Put off the old self, and put on the new self.

This is about a choice we have to make continually - to put off the old and put on the new - we must will it.  And this is where St Augustine’s words are so helpful.  (For those of you who read the Newsletter, the longer version is there.)  St Augustine writes:

“[The soul] must not fall back on the senses any more than necessity demands; but it should rather retire into itself, away from the senses, and become a child of God again.  This is what it means to become a new man by putting off the old.  To undertake this is absolutely necessary… Sacred Scripture contains no greater truth, none more profound.” [De Quantitate Animae, c. 28, p. 55]

As human beings we engage in the world through our senses – sight, sound, smell, taste, touch.  And these are gifts of God, but if we attend to them excessively, we lose ourselves into the world.  Remember Eve, “when she saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes…she took of its fruit and ate…”  If you think about the passions, it is clear with greed, gluttony and lust, that they can easily become an engagement with the world that is destructive.  We must pull ourselves back, restrain ourselves, or as Augustine says, “not fall back on the senses any more than necessity demands.”

And Augustine agrees that this restraint, this not acting on the desire our senses elicit, is difficult and really impossible without grace, our wills have become weak through the Fall:

“But to my mind this calls for action than which is none more laborious, none that is more akin to inaction, for it is such as the soul cannot begin or complete except with the help of Him to whom it yields itself.  Hence it is that man's reformation is dependent on the mercy of him to whose goodness and power he owes his formation.” [ibid.]

We can think about this Fall of man into the world through the senses more easily when it comes to sensual pleasures, but there is also a falling into the world, out of our souls through the thoughts of our minds.  Pride, envy, dejection, anxiety, anger or a slothful not caring where our mind goes: these are also passions, where the thoughts of our minds dwell on things destructive or just useless.  And the call to recollectedness, is a call to gather up the thoughts of our minds so that they are not scattered everywhere, dispersed, and leading to fruitlessness or destructive actions.  We are to put off the old man, with wandering useless or damaging thoughts, and be renewed in the spirit of our minds and put on the new self.  That is to be recalled to ourselves that we might look up.  St Bernard of Clairvaux used the image of our thoughts being like bees buzzing around and that if they are recalled to the hive they will make honey! We will have wise thoughts, wisdom is sweeter than honey! [Proverbs]

St Augustine outlined this threefold pattern: moving away from being absorbed in the world, to a movement within, and then above, to God.

Can you think of what might draw our minds out of ourselves and into the world to be dispersed and fruitless in our lives?  Think of our engagement with technology in a way that no other generation has had to contend with.  The introduction of the internet and then “smart” phones.  Of course we understand that pornography is profoundly affecting many and is so easily accessed.  But I think we should also be concerned about the far more subtle ways these technologies are destructive.  How easy it is to lose ourselves in news feeds, in endless information, in push notifications, interrupting us in our flow of thought, leading us often nowhere, and certainly not usually to a love of our neighbour.  Social media companies, motivated by greed, develop algorithms that analyse our online behaviour to create personalized engaging feeds to keep us online.  Which one of us has not succumbed to such feeds?  How many evenings have been wasted, or time during work, distracting us from the human beings who are physically close to us, distracting us from looking up?  If this is a falling away from ourselves, and a squandering of our minds, then it is sin.  This technology is interfering with putting on the new man, the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.  

This week I listened to an interview with an Orthodox Christian, Paul Kingsnorth who has written a book, Against The Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.  After hearing it I decided to not carry my mobile with me when I go on walks.  I often listen to lectures or to news podcasts...every spare moment filled with more information!  Instead I chose to use that time to be recollected, to put on the new self.  One fruit was the preparation of a draft of this sermon on Wednesday (for years that almost always happens on Saturday night or Sunday morning!).

It led me to read a book.  (Have any of you noticed that you are not reading books anymore?)  I bought this book a while ago but it has sat unread because of distractions (!): The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (pronounced Height).  He focusses on our youth, who are especially vulnerable as their brains are developing still, but its insights I think also apply to us all.  One study had university students come to a lab to do a cognitive test.  Some were told to leave their phones in a locker outside the room, some were told they could keep their phones in their pocket or purse, others were told to leave their phone on the desk where they were doing the test.  They found cognitive focus declined significantly the closer they were to their phones.

The practical implications of this?  Should we leave our phones outside in our cars before we come into the church?  Do we really need any push notifications from all those apps distracting us throughout the day? (especially Whatsapp!)

As well, our minds respond to positive reactions we get online with a dopamine hit and it can lead easily to a real addiction.

Haidt notes there has been a massive increase in mental health issues among the youth since 2010 and it is the same year as the introduction of “smart” phones.  The evidence is correlative, not causal, yet is there any other factor that could account for it?  The dramatic increase in mental health effects especially include depression, feelings of isolation, even though this technology boasts of connecting us, and an inability to focus.

In the spiritual life we are very aware of the need for temperance, for figuring out ways to limit our engagement with the world through the senses – fasting, prayer being principle ways to deal with gluttony and lust.  Are we consciously placing limits on our use of screens?  Screen time can lead to our unmaking.

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In the Gospel today we have another reason described for why we can become stuck outside ourselves, unable to put on the new self.

Jesus heals a man who is paralysed.  Physical healings in Scripture point to the spiritual healings Jesus has come to bring to all - giving sight to the blind is about opening our eyes to the truth.  Physical paralysis is associated with the spiritual paralysis of the will – we cannot act as we would like.  St Paul describes it in Romans [7:19, 24, 25] – “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do…who will deliver me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

A paralytic man was brought to Jesus by his friends and when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.”  Jesus saw this as the man’s more important need than healing from physical paralysis.  And to prove that he has power on earth to forgive sins, Jesus then tells the man, “Rise, pick up your bed and go into your house.”  Doesn’t that last part seem a bit strange to say?  Why should “go into your house” be a part of Jesus’ healing command?

Gregory the Great [Moralia in Job, vii, 10, p 33] comments on this last part of Jesus’ statement.  You will see that there is a common mind among the Fathers about how the soul works:

“House is also used to mean the dwelling-place of the heart. So to a certain man who was cured was it said: Go into your house (Mk. v. 19); for it is fitting that a sinner, after he is forgiven, should return to his own mind, lest he yield again to that for which he will justly be punished. But he who has gone down to hell, he shall come up no more to his own house: for he whom despair has overwhelmed, it sends forth from the dwelling place of his heart, and he is unable to return within again; for, once driven forth, urged on he falls daily to lower and lower things. For man was made to look upon his Creator, to dwell upon His beauty, to live in the joy of His love. But sent out of himself through disobedience, he has lost the place of his soul; for wandering in darkened ways, he has gone far from the dwelling place of the true light.”

Do you see how this compares with what St Augustine was talking about earlier – that putting off the old man and putting on the new self is about no longer falling away from one’s own self into the world, but returning within, being recollected?  It a movement from absorption without, to being recollected within, and then a movement above.

Think about how we are paralysed when we sin against another?  If we haven’t acknowledged the truth about an offence against another, but give a half-hearted apology, the relationship remains stuck.  We are paralysed.  We are not returning within and facing ourselves.  We are stuck in a state of inauthenticity, we are stuck, in a sense, outside ourselves.  And it would be the same in our relationship with God if we are not fully repentant for our sins, we are frozen in our ascent into the life of God, stuck outside ourselves, not allowing the light of truth to shine in us.

Jesus has come to remove this obstacle, this cause of paralysis, by offering perfect forgiveness.  And then we can move forward again, as we can move forward again in our relationship with another, only once we acknowledge fully our sin and are able to be forgiven.

Sunday is an opportunity in the midst of an increasingly stifling technological world to return to our house.  We come to God’s Temple, we are led by grace, through the liturgy, through hearing God’s Word, to self-reflection and to true repentance.  Then we receive Christ’s Body and Blood assuring us of forgiveness, we experience the remission of sins, and can have comfort once again in our own skin.   The liturgy helps us in this movement from absorption without to a return within (to our own house) and then to above (the enjoyment of God).

St Paul says, “Be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and… put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.  [Eph 4:22-24]

Jesus says, “Take heart, [my sons and daughters], your sins are forgiven … Arise, take up your bed, and go into your house.”

Amen +