Pilgrim Tales
Sermon 3rd Sunday After Trinity
Readings: Jeremiah 20. 7-13; Romans 6. 1b-11; Matthew 10. 24-39
Theme: Pilgrim Tales
Growing up, I imagine that many of us had roles models that we aspired to become like. In many cases these role models are people who represent the characteristics that we most value when we are young. For me, it was the footballer Kevin Keegan. He was an ideal that I aspired to be like and this attraction brought out in me the desire to emulate him and to play football as he did.
The toy industry has caught on to this process of investing in role models much of what we aspire to be. One needs only to look at the doll industry, with products such as action man and Barbie to recognize that these forces of attraction come with them the capacity to galvanize our ideal aspirations and to crystallize our projections of ideal figures onto what psychologists call “transitional objects” such as dolls. We seem to be destined to idealize ourselves in processes of projection which can lead us into much disappointment when these are not fulfilled in the reality of our ordinary lives.
This process of human emulation is common because as humans we learn through imitation. We copy what we see around us. This is particularly apparent with children and young adults who reproduce patterns of behaviour that they observe in families, school peer groups, and popular icons. The traits that we adopt are often the ones which we admire and value in others, and this learning process is what we call education or formation. It can also become a “deformation,” of course, when these influences are pathological and the consequences can be deleterious or even disastrous in extreme cases.
Such patterns of imitation and emulation are also reproduced in our spiritual lives. We imitate the God that we believe in. Therefore, the image of God that we hold is important for the person we eventually grow into. “It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher and the slave like the master,” says Jesus in today’s gospel from Matthew, reminding us of the importance of this appropriate imitation and emulation in the Christian life.
Imitation of the image of God that we hold shapes us because, as the Book of Genesis recounts, we are “made in the image and likeness of God.” Being made in this image and likeness means that we are made for new life which comes to us through dying to our old self. A theme that Paul expresses in the second reading from Romans in terms of our entry into the baptism of Christ Jesus, which is the way to the newness of the risen life.
For his part, the story of the prophet Jeremiah, in the first reading, was one of being a reluctant icon of God. He would rather not have been chosen to reflect the prophetic image of God to the people of Judah. Yet, it was he who was chosen by God to warn the people that their lack of fidelity to the covenant risked them becoming morally disoriented and lost in the wilderness under the rule of foreign gods and powers. Following the fall of Jerusalem in 586/587 BC this is what would happen as people imitated foreign gods and became idolatrous images in Babylon.
To maintain vigilance in the Christian life, it is good for us to review the images of God that we are imitating and emulating at each phase of our lives, since following Jesus means being shaped by this ongoing process of the imitation of Christ.
In this way, life can be understood as a dialogue between us and the master, as narrated in Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. It becomes our personal tale of reflecting the divine image into the world; life stories with many twists and turns, as portrayed in contrasting ways, through the various characters of Christian classics such as ThePilgrim’s Progress of John Bunyan or The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Each of these figures in Christian literature act as symbolic types that reflect back to us the kinds of figures that are really motivating the processes of imitation and emulation that we are engaged in. For this reason, exploring the image of God that we are operating with is important, because sometimes these images operate in our subconscious and we are not fully aware of the effect that they are having on us. If, for example, we have an image of God as the stern parental figure, demanding, unforgiving and harsh, it is no wonder that deep in our minds we will have a similar assumption of who is for us.
This is why it is necessary for us to be aware of the images of God that we may be operating with. It is important that these are purified of such unhelpful stereotypes of parental or authority figures, which may have deformed our idealization of who God is, and so have actually subjected us to processes of idolatry rather than worship in our Christian lives.
In fact, all images of God should be held lightly as no image can ever fully capture the infinite goodness of God, and only Jesus should be the icon we strive to imitate. Striving not in a self-improvement manner, but rather in a way which is more of an uncovering of our true selves that have been made in the image and likeness of God.
We might refer to this self, as is often common in today’s language, as revealing the best possible version of ourselves. This is the person God calls us to become in the pilgrimage back towards our true self. The self which was always there but which may have been overwritten by all kinds of deformed imitations and emulations along the way. It is this ideal which reflects the image of God in whom we have been made, and we can rest assured that this self truly is the best version of ourselves possible, and the tale of the pilgrimage back to our centre, which our lives narrate in autobiographical form in our own personal versions of the Canterbury tales.
