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Lent 3-C & St. David’s Day
March 3, 2013
Exodus
3:1-15
Ps. 63-1-8
1 Thessalonians 2:2b-12
Luke
13:1-9
“Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves
to help ourselves …”
In the first few hundred years of Christianity, those would
have been fighting words. That phrase sums up one of the major theological
controversies of the church, a battle which raged over what it meant to say
that humans had “free will” – over what the grace of God meant in our lives.
Were human beings born into “original sin” and so helpless – “we have no power
in ourselves to help ourselves” – or were we born innocent of wrong-doing, and
so able to reject sin and choose goodness on our own? Were we utterly dependent
on the grace of God, or could we go it on our own? David, the patron saint of
Wales, our own parish namesake, a kindly and good bishop, a scholarly and
eloquent preacher, a man who just wanted to stay home in his own monastery and
cell, to pray, to study, to receive the sacrament and dwell in peace, was drawn
into two major councils, synods, conferences, where his eloquent denunciation won
the day, and the heresy of Pelagianism was defeated.
Pelagius was an English theologian, from the 4th century –
200 years before David – and that phrase “we have no power in ourselves to help
ourselves” seemed to him the ultimate cop-out. Pelagius was a reformer: clergy
and laity alike, he believed, needed to improve their moral behavior, and that
improvement would be impossible with all this talk about dependence on the grace
of God. For Pelagius, the line, “we are all sinners from before our birth”
meant that no matter how badly anyone behaved, they could claim the depravity
of original sin; why be good, if the grace of God would always save you? Human
beings should choose to follow the example of goodness in Christ; human beings
could progress from sinfulness to holiness.
I don’t know if any of you have ever been around any church
meetings where controversial topics are discussed, but the phrase, “How many
angels can dance on the head of a pin?” about sums up how arcane and
complicated the arguments on both sides can become. But in this fight, what
Augustine, and his followers like our very own David, cared about was grace:
the grace of God, God’s free gift that we cannot possibly ever earn or deserve
or work hard enough to attain. God’s grace, theologians like David believed,
was so expansive and so good, that we could not possibly work out a plan to get
there on our own. All God wanted was for us to bask in that grace – “to love
God and do what we will,” in Augustine’s words.
So if you think about grace as something we humans could
never possibly earn or deserve, this peculiar story from today’s Gospel begins
to make sense. Jesus uses these strange parables – about the tower that fell
and killed 18 people, and about the fig tree that might need a little more
manure to flourish – to shake up his hearers and to get them thinking about the
power of God.
Let’s take these two parables one at a time: the suffering
and death Jesus talks about comes to everyone, the sinners and the repentant,
the just and the unjust. So from what is he saying we are supposed to repent?
How sinless can one be to prevent one’s death? And how foolish does that sound
for us humans to say such a thing – that if those 18 killed when the tower of
Siloam fell on them had just been a little better they would not have died? How
foolish does that sound when the only truly sinless one – Jesus, the God in
human flesh – is marching toward a horrible and undeserved death on a cross?
And then the fig tree: do we really think that if we do a
little bit here, a little bit there, it will all work out? The figs will grow
and we will all live happily ever after?
That is what grace is about: we can never possibly do enough.
But at the same time, we are free: if we acknowledge there is nothing worse
that can happen to us than death, then we have nothing to fear. We are let off
Scot-free, just as Pelagius feared. The grace of God frees us from being
trapped by our own bad behavior, frees us to love God and to love our neighbors
and all the rest of creation, just as God would have us do. No work, no worry;
just let go.
David of Wales came into this world in difficult
circumstances. His mother was “seduced” by the son of the local strongman, and
she went off to live in a remote place to bear the child. Legend has it David
was born during a great thunderstorm. All the accounts of David’s life agree
that his mother was “outraged by violence,” and retired to a chaste and holy
life. As a bishop, David cared for widows and orphans, protecting these
vulnerable victims of the violence of their time. He lived a rigorously
abstemious life, drinking only water and eating no meat, and, as is common to
the accounts of lives of Celtic saints, the natural world always rose up to
bless and nurture David.
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At the church council where David was pressed to make his
case against the Pelagian heresy, the synod where he was made the bishop of all
Wales, the accounts tell us,
While S. David’s speech continued, a snow white dove
descending from heaven sat upon his shoulders; and moreover the earth on which
he stood raised itself under him till it became a hill, from whence his voice
was heard like a trumpet, and was understood by all, both near and far off: on
the top of which hill a church was afterwards built, and remains to this day.[i]
“Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves
to help ourselves …”
Why should we want such power to help ourselves, when the
grace of God sends snow white doves to sit on our shoulders, and raises the
very earth under our feet?
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