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Let’s do some systematic theology, shall we? I’ll try to keep it interesting, and relevant. It may even be urgently important! Let’s do some theology together. Ready? Okay. Here we go.
If I take a hammer and bear its weight down upon a nail, the nail will comply and descend into a plank of wood. (Or it will slam onto my fingernail and bruise me badly.) Aristotle would call this an example of efficient cause: I employed a hammer to cause the nail to go into another object.
But there are three other classic, Aristotelian types of causes, three other ways one can make something happen, or bring something into being, or change something. There is the efficient cause, which I just described. Then there is the material cause: hammer, nail, wood, and fingernail — these objects are made of metal and trees and human flesh. The material causes the interaction of the four objects, simply by being the “stuff” the four objects are made of.
Then there is the formal cause: the conceptual form of the thing I’m making when I hammer a nail into wood. Maybe I’m building a table, or assembling a cabinet, or fashioning a door. The imagined form in my mind causes the thing to take shape in physical reality.
And finally there is the final cause: If I am building a table, the final cause is the dinner we will share at that table. The dinner is the motivation — the final cause — that compels me to start building, guided by the form of the thing I want to make, consisting of the stuff I’m using to make it, the stuff I manipulate efficiently with my hands.
Efficient, material, formal, final: these are Aristotle’s four causes of all that comes into existence, all that moves and develops, all that changes, all that transforms.
And it is, I think, deeply disappointing that God does not seem to create with the efficient cause! God does not hammer nails; God invites Noah to hammer them into boards to build an ark. God does not resist temptation; the human person of Jesus does that, and God’s Spirit only drives him, with inspiration, into the wilderness.
But oh, how this world might quickly improve if God efficiently caused things! God creates ingenious doctors and compassionate caregivers, but God could instantly and magically zap cancer cells, rather than permitting them to grow. Those doctors and caregivers are wondrous, but they’re not omnipotent. God could simply reverse climate damage, instead of driving us into the wilderness as advocates for the earth and all living creatures. God could directly save children from harm, instead of stirring and sending us to create a world that actually nurtures children. But God is the Humble One. God enters creation abundantly, but always in deep humility. God is not a carpenter; that’s the job of Jesus’s human father. And God is certainly not a superhero or wizard. God seems to intervene only indirectly in this serendipitous and phenomenal world. Alas.
But God intervenes nonetheless. God creates all the stuff of the universe. God creates material: the word material comes from mater terra, Mother Earth. God creates the atmosphere, then, and God tells Noah in today’s portion of Genesis that God will “bring clouds over the earth” — “bring clouds”: that sounds like efficient cause! — but God is still not taking direct control, not hammering nails, even if God is “bringing” clouds. No, God simply creates the material that makes up the clouds, and the material that makes up the whole atmosphere, and the material that makes up the sun and the sun’s rays, and all of that material interacts in such a way that clouds are “brought” over the land.
So God, in turn, does not efficiently or directly “set” the rainbow in those clouds, the rainbow that will remind God to be merciful with all created life. God perceives the rainbow, and God will make meaning of the rainbow, and take a course of action in relationship with the rainbow; but God does not efficiently create it. As we know, the rainbow is created not by God, but by sunlight passing through raindrops. God may point to the rainbow as a profound atmospheric sign of God’s grace, but the rainbow itself is created by ordinary atmospheric phenomena.
So let’s review things so far: God apparently does not create efficiently, like striking a nail with a hammer, but God makes all matter — all stuff — that interacts in this astonishing, splendid universe: God creates Mother Earth; God creates material. And all of that material flourishes freely, forming into planets and cities and people and rainbows and art and music.
Next: God causes things to happen — causes things to come into being — by formal cause. God imagines a form: a world of land and sea and air; a world teeming with creatures; a world with a moral and ethical arena; a world vulnerable to destruction; a world that remains in relationship with God its creator, a world that has the capacity to overcome evil. In this way, God employs the formal cause. Some key examples:
God imagines the form of a good and just human race, and inspires Noah and his family to strive through great hardship to become good and just themselves, and then to fill the land with good and just people.
God begets God’s own self with a particular human being, the perfect form of a human being capable of defeating the powers of Sin and Death. God’s Spirit then drives that being into the wilderness, into the praxis of human struggle, where that being chooses righteousness. And then God sends God’s messengers to serve that being, Jesus, with nourishing bread, and consolation, and companionship.
All of this corresponds to what Aristotle calls the “formal cause”: the Holy One, Blessed be God, creates a great form for the universe, and by that form God inspires random stuff to coalesce and organize, to come into order; by that form God encourages the flourishing of Noah and the whole human family; and by that form God sends us Jesus to lead us toward redemption and wholeness, and the world toward goodness and glory.
And finally — literally, finally — God creates by “final cause.” God calls to us from the destination we are striving to reach. God calls to us from the future. If we’re hammering nails to assemble a table, God is already at that table on God’s holy mountain, the mountain where everyone shares a feast of rich foods and well-aged wines; the mountain where we feast on food while God dines on death – the mountain where the prophet Isaiah says that God “swallows up death forever.” God is calling to us, even now, from that mountain. God feasting with us in the future: that is The final cause. That’s where creation wants to be.
And today, we draw closer to that mountain. Today we pray the Great Litany, perhaps the first Christian liturgical text to be translated into the English language, a litany that goes on, and on, and on, invoking God’s mercy and power; pleading with God to spare and save us, to empower us to trample Satan under our feet. But we do not pray that God will simply do these things, striking hammer to nail. We pray for all of these things because God has already accomplished them, in the future from which God calls to us. The Great Litany is not a song we sing; it is God’s song that pulls us forward into God’s future. Where do we get all these ideas that fire our prayers? Where do we get our desire for the defeat of pride, the destruction of “sinful affections,” the end of hypocrisy and malice and all the rest? We get them from God’s mountain, where all of those things are already being swallowed up.
And we touch God’s mountain every time we set this Table, where we enjoy a foretaste of that rainbowed mountaintop feast of victory and peace and justice. The stuff of the feast — bread and wine — is consecrated into the form of Body and Blood, but the final Feast itself is the thing: God is there, even now, creating a universe that bends toward that mountain, toward the rainbow that arcs above that mountain, toward the end of all suffering, toward God.
And so we do not lose hope. As the earth stirs and the trees bud; as springtime finds its way across the landscape and warms our wintry hearts; as the days lengthen and we long for the renewal of all things, we sing our Great Litany to God, the Creator who loves all creatures who live beneath the rainbow; the Savior who embraces us in the wilderness of our difficult lives; the Spirit who drives us into our vocations with power, with gladness, and with purpose.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the Good News.
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Preached on the First Sunday in Lent (Year B), February 18, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25:1-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15