This sermon was never preached to a congregation. I wrote it for practice for the Feast of St. Augustine 2021, and preached it to my friend.

Augustine’s Confessions
John 1:1-5

Gungor – Late Have I Loved You

In the shop where I work, we sell nativity sets. As a few customers have pointed out to me, we sell exclusively nativity sets where the baby Jesus is white.

Why do we make white nativities, and why are they troubling for people of colour?

The answer is: because God became like us. When we make images of Jesus that look like us, we communicate this very clearly, but we also communicate “God became like me, not you.”

For white people, this is even more problematic given our colonial co-option of even more figures in the life of the church. It was only on actually reading St. Augustine’s Confessions, that I realised that he most likely wasn’t white like in my college’s stained glass or on the cover of his book, but a native north African.

Augustine strikes me as the sort of person who would give as gifts, nativities where the Christ figure looked as much like the receiver as possible. The fact that God became like us and that God’s Spirit indwells us makes Augustine’s biographical theology not only possible, but necessary.

The Confessions is the story of Augustine’s search for God. The journey begins with the admission that “Our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.” For Augustine, looking back on his life, he sees his search for God taking place even when he was unaware of for whom he was looking. As he becomes conscious of his search, he looks for God in all manner of places, philosophies, and practices. Eventually though, he finds the God who has the audacity to hide in the very first place we ought to look: the self.

One of the most famous lines in the Confessions is this: Sero te amaui! et ecce intus eras et ego foris.

Late have I loved you! And look, you were within and I was without.

For me, it was a pandemic. Or rather, it was the combination of several factors which occurred immediately before the pandemic, but my journey of knowing God and discerning God’s will for my life had reached such a point that I discovered something about my self. Not as a departure from God, or as a change, but as a theological discovery bringing me closer to the God who indwells me.

I realised that I am a woman, and God embraced me in that realisation just as God always has done, growing around me, growing me, and revealing more of God to me.

God is within me, God is within us, and God beckons us in, to inhabit our selves more fully and honestly, that we might love ourselves, our God, and our neighbour more readily.

So on this feast of St. Augustine, let us follow his example in turning to the Word who became like us, to the Spirit who indwells us, and the God who was within when we were without.