What are you worth?
Sermon on the Day of Pentecost at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Llandudno and St Tudno’s Church on the Great Orme in the Ministry Area of Bro Tudno
The Ministry Area’s order of service with the lections, including a poem in addition to the First Reading and the Holy Gospel, can be found here.
What are you worth?
What are you worth, as a person? I don’t mean what’s in your savings account, but what’s in your being. What are you worth? Or, put differently, how are you worthy?
Come with me, into my head. It’s the end of May 1998. Tony Blair is Prime Minister. Dana International has just won the Eurovision Song Contest. The Good Friday Agreement has been ratified in a referendum. Frank Sinatra dies on the 14th. But eighteen-year-old me has a Pure Maths exam in the morning, and I know nothing. I have been negligent in my revision; it’s complicated — I should have chosen Physics instead. And now I have this exam, and I’m going to fail, and everybody will be embarrassed, and I won’t get to go to my first-choice university, and my best-friend-stroke-enemy will get better grades than me, and I am worthless.
That’s my anxiety dream. And for the past 23 years, whenever I’m feeling anxious about something in life, whenever I’m doubting my own worth, that night in my sleep, I’m taken back to May 1998, and Tony Blair is Prime Minister, and Frank Sinatra is alive and dead, and there’s a Pure Maths exam in the morning.
What are you worth, as a person? How are you worthy?
We’re living through a time when people’s communal sense of their own identity, of their own self-worth relative to others, is in a state of flux.
On the Census form, do I tick Welsh, or English, or British? Is he a Brexiteer or a Remainer? Should we take down that statue, because it ascribes worth to unworthiness? Black Lives Matter. Some long-established customs about worth — which have usually placed middle-aged, professional, white, straight, able-bodied, men at the head of the worthy — are being questioned.
What are you worth, as a person? How are you worthy?
One way in which we, the people of God, have answered that question is to say that everybody is infinitely precious. We trace that back to the beginning, to God saying, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” And we trace that sense of infinite, equal preciousness and worth through the Bible, to Paul’s letter to the Galatians, as he writes, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
The way we shape our life as the community of the Church in our tradition tries to embody that understanding of humankind, of infinite, equal human worth. Anybody can be baptised here. Anybody who lives in the parish or has a form of connection to it, has the legal right to by married at Holy Trinity or St Tudno’s (as long as it’s too somebody of the opposite sex). The departed are entrusted to God’s care from this place with the same words of commendation, no matter who they are; “Go forth, Christian soul, from this world in the name of God the almighty Father, who created you…”
Though we have often not lived up to it, though we often still don’t live up to it, our first answer to any question of human worth is that all are infinitely worthy. At dawn, at sunrise, in the first light of Creation, the image and likeness of God shines from each one of us.
What are you worth, as a person? How are you worthy?
A lawyer, a Pharisee, asks Jesus a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” And Jesus says to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
In that language of commandment, law and prophecy — of things to do and be done — there’s a second sense of worth. We are worthy when we follow Christ’s commandments, when we cultivate virtue, when we live wisely, when we nurture within ourselves a moral character; we are worthy, we are worthier, as we become more Christ-like.
Think of it as the responsibility that accompanies the right — the free gift of ourselves in obedience to God’s ways that flows from God’s gift of being to us. Or think of it, perhaps better this way, as the imitation of Christ, in whom God is revealed to us as “the very substance of Good” (de Lubac).
If Christ is the measure, the shape, the form, the dimension, the revelation of what is Good and worthy, we are worthy in proportion to the conformity of our nature to his.
What are you worth, as a person? How are you worthy?
We are body and soul. We are our physical selves, and we are also our reason and our character, our feeling and our consciousness, our memory and our thinking. We are body and soul. That is how we are, made in the image and likeness of God. And, in our bodies and souls, we are to become more like God, like Good, like Christ.
But we are also more than body and soul. At our Baptism, we were born again in the Spirit. It was our own little Pentecost. In our baby screams as water was poured on us, we were as though we were the Apostles, each of us speaking in our own language about God’s deeds of power.
And, as for the Apostles, who we are changed then. Since then, we have been body, soul, and spirit; and we “received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God” (1 Corinthians 2:12), which “allows us to comprehend what is truly” of God (11).
And while that can sound like fulfilment, it is, in fact, restlessness and yearning, “our fingers on the curtains, in the mesh / Of chords and concepts which your glory hides” (“Prayer to the Holy Ghost”, George Every). It is the realisation, planted within us, that the maturity, the summit, the fruition of our worth is beyond us, is our destiny, “the grace desired and the grace of our desire” (ibid.), when we will then become what God created us to be.
