Christ Church

“That where I am, there ye may be also”
(John 14.3)

Summer in the Maritimes sometimes seems like a midsummer’s night dream, especially in these rural idylls and in the quiet beauty of such holy places as St. Mary’s, Crousetown. There is a marvelous providence, I think, in our midsummer feasts. They speak to our dreams and our hopes and give them deeper meaning; ultimately, they speak to the redemption of our humanity. August 6^th is the Feast of the Transfiguration. It is, we may say, a nine-day wonder which culminates in this lesser known feast, the Feast of the Assumption of Mary on August 15^th. Providentially, again, it seems to me, our Evensong lessons for the 11^th Sunday after Trinity this year flesh out the meaning of our human hopes and aspirations signaled in these feasts.

“‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” Hardly a midsummer’s night dream, you may think! And yet this first line of one of the secular songs of the Christmas season touches upon the holy mystery of Christmas, the mystery of the Incarnation and the mystery of human redemption. It even echoes Zechariah’s prophecy which is read on the night before Christmas at Evening Prayer. It is exactly what we heard tonight in the last three verses of the first lesson.

“Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion; for lo, I come and I will dwell in the midst of you, says the Lord”… “Be silent, all flesh, before the Lord, for he has roused himself from his holy dwelling.” In between, there is the hint of the universal significance for many, if not all peoples, of the return to Jerusalem. At the heart of it all is the idea of God’s dwelling in the midst of his people.

And, if Paul, in the second lesson, can say, through the dialectic of persecution and preaching, that “they glorified God through me,” how much more so, then, through Mary, the one in whom “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”? The Transfiguration and the Assumption speak to the radical consequence of that divine indwelling; the radical consequence of God’s dwelling with us is the hope of our dwelling with him. It is about our participation in the glory of God. “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.” What is contained in that parenthesis – “and we beheld his glory” – is what we celebrate in the Transfiguration and the Assumption. We are being changed by what we behold. It is change that one can believe in; indeed, change that one can only believe in!

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“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

In the mercy of God’s “never-failing providence,” today is the Feast of St. James the Apostle as well as the Eighth Sunday after Trinity. The occasional intersection of the major Saints’ Days with our Sunday celebration of Christ’s Resurrection is, I think, most instructive. The commemoration of the Saints provides an illustration or example of what it means for us to participate in Christ’s redemptive work.

In the Maritimes, St. James is, we might say, a favourite saint. There are an enormous number of Churches, Anglican and otherwise, dedicated to the honour and memory of St. James. It is a feature of our Maritime and sea-faring traditions. St. James is one of the disciples whom Jesus calls from fishing to become a fisher of men. The Collect alludes to his calling. The Lesson from Acts indicates the radical cost of that calling. James is put to death by Herod the king. The Gospel teaches the meaning of that calling. It has to do with our going up to Jerusalem with Jesus.

Jesus explains exactly what it means to go up to Jerusalem. It means his passion, death and resurrection. What this means for us is seen in the lives of the saints, namely, our participation in Christ’s redemption of our humanity: drinking of the cup of which Christ drinks and being baptized into Christ’s baptism. We are consecrated to God by virtue of our incorporation into the death and resurrection of Christ. Suffering and glory are all part of that story.  As Paul tells us in the Epistle for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity, “we have received a spirit of sonship.” We are “the children of God and fellow-heirs with Christ”. But there is a cost: “if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” The martyr saints remind us of the suffering and the glory.

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“I have compassion on the multitude”

The Collect is a loaded prayer. Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, it gathers our lives into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial. It concerns the quality of our lives with God and as standing upon the truth of God revealed. The images of grafting, growing, nurturing and preserving follow upon an understanding of God as the “Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things.” That understanding enters into the meaning of these images. It makes them profoundly sacramental.

The Collect prays the understanding which the Scriptures reveal, particularly in the inter-relation between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle suggests the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. We pray, too, that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel speaks to us about the sacrament of Holy Communion: there is our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things,” through the compassion of Christ who feeds us in the wilderness and sets us upon our way, “he in us and we in him.” Grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” as St. Paul puts it, we must live from that Word of God revealed.

That we are grafted not simply into the name of God but into “the love of thy name” suggests that Baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship which has its continuing in the Eucharist. The fruit of these organic, spiritual, substantial and sacramental relationships is holy lives and a holy end. “But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life.”

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“And after the fire a still small voice”

God was not in the wind. He was not in the earthquake. He was not in the fire. But, “after the fire a still small voice.” It is a powerful image. The text does not explicitly say that God was “a still small voice.” All it says, with economy and eloquence, is that the Lord passed by Elijah, not in the wind of storm and tempest, not in the earthquake and fire, but “after the fire a still small voice.”

We confront the mystery and the wonder of Revelation. Elijah is in despair; a prophet who has endured persecution and who contemplates the radical disobedience of the people of Israel who have “forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thy altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword.” He complains to God that “I, only I am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” Jezebel, the notorious, indeed, nefarious queen of Ahab, king of Israel, is determined to have Elijah killed; he is, from their standpoint the “troubler of Israel.” “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest,” another King would say more than a millennium later about Thomas à Becket. It has been, too, we might say, the recurring complaint of many an authority within and without the Church by kings and bishops alike.

“What makes this rage and spite?” Samuel Crossman asks about Christ’s crucifixion in his lovely hymn, My Song is Love Unknown. Somehow we are meant to consider and contemplate the meaning of persecution, of enmity and hatred, by way of the Cross. Somehow that is part and parcel of the Christian blessing. “Blessed are ye, when men revile you and persecute you,” “for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you,” as Jesus teaches us in the Beatitudes. Strange, isn’t it, that blessings are to be found in the hardest and most disturbing of things? And yet, isn’t that precisely the wonder and the miracle of the Christian gospel? But, if the Beatitudes are not puzzling enough, there is Jesus’ equally strange commandment in the Eucharistic Gospel for today, to “love your enemies.” Love those who seek your hurt. Amazing.

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Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies’

It is a moral imperative. Like so many of the moral imperatives of the gospel, it signals what is at once a divine necessity and a human impossibility.

How can we be commanded to do what we cannot do? Because God makes possible what is humanly impossible. In the commandment to “love your enemies,” we see the real force and character of love; its deep truth and reason, as it were. We are shaken out of the soft sentimentalities of our inconstant hearts. We are shaken into the strong desiring of the love of God whom we ask, in the words of the Collect, to “pour into our hearts such love toward thee.”

The radical, uncompromising and unconditional commandment to love confronts us with what is indeed beyond our human understanding, considered in itself, in order to raise us to a divine understanding. “Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more,” therefore, “likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” What is commanded by God for man is accomplished in Christ Jesus, both God and man. It is to be realized in us by the quality of our life in Christ. “Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” The consequence is that being “with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.”

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“Love your enemies”

The Collect which graces this day and the week following is one of the most beautiful and compelling in the Prayer Book. It captures profoundly the nature of our human longings and the reality of the human condition.

“O God, who hast prepared for them that love thee such good things as pass man’s understanding,” it begins, defining us in terms of God’s love; both our love for God and the love that is God himself. But what do we mean by love? Something of the radical nature of the love of God for us and in us is hinted at in the Collect. Not only does it belong to those “good things [that] pass man’s understanding,” but more significantly to “promises which exceed all that we can desire.” We are directed to something beyond our knowing and beyond our desiring and yet a something more that belongs to what God wants for us.

But is this something more merely something whimsical? A fantasy? An illusion? “Pie in the sky, by and by”? Unreal, unknowable and unattainable? If it is beyond our knowing and our wanting, then how can it have any meaning for us? Because it is something that has been prepared for us, something that has been made known to us. We can enter into it and struggle to know and love the things of God more dearly, more clearly and more freely. In other words “the good things [that] pass man’s understanding” are not of our own devising. They are not simply the products or the projections of ourselves. The promises of God always exceed our desiring precisely because we do not always know clearly what we want. This is part and parcel of our human condition. We confront the limits of our knowing and our desiring. We confront the incompleteness of our knowing and our willing.

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“Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts”

The passage from 1^st Peter, appointed for the epistle for today, begins with the phrase “be ye all of one mind.” It ends with our text “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” Everything in between is held together by these two phrases. And what is in between is an exhortation to a godly life against the forms of wickedness which so easily arise, not only in our hearts, but also in our common life together.

“Be ye all of one mind,” he tells us. But what is that one mind? Is it mere unanimity regardless of what one is agreed about? Surely not. Peter is talking about the mind of Christ for he goes on to describe the qualities of the love of Christ towards us which must become the form of his life within us. A group of people may be united in ways that are quite ungodly. They may arrive at a perfectly fine decision but the manner of their deciding may be perfectly disgraceful, regardless of the decision itself.  Or the process of decision making may be perfectly fine while the decision itself lacks intellectual, spiritual and moral integrity. We see this time after time in every aspect of our culture.  Mere consensus is no surety for truth; nor is pure process. For if “being of one mind” arises out of viciousness, personal abuse, willful ignorance, resentment, envy, paltry excuses, self interest, incompetence and dark prejudice, (and let us be honest, such things are all too evident and all too common), then it is not what Peter is talking about.

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“What went ye out for to see?”

He catches our attention, though not necessarily our affection, unlike St. Francis, the Hippie Saint of the sixties. He catches our attention and, yet, we are even drawn to him, attracted by something strange and yet compelling. “What went ye out for to see?” Jesus asks, highlighting the strange and yet compelling character of John the Baptist whose nativity is celebrated on June 24^th, and whose feast day marks the anniversary of the landing of John Cabot in Newfoundland in 1497. Thus he has become the patron saint of what has subsequently become Canada. His feast day also was the occasion for the baptism of Chief Membertou four hundred years ago in 1610, an event that marked the conversion of the Mi’kmaq to Christianity.

The figure of John the Baptist frames our summer sojourning; his nativity marks the beginning of summer, so close to the summer solstice; and his death, “The Beheading of John the Baptist,” coming at the end of August, marks the end of summer, being so close to the end of cottage season. We are talking about the Maritimes here!

Birth and death. Summer and winter. This birth points us to the winter’s birth of Christ, whose greater nativity signals all the summer of our lives in the grace of God towards us. In a way, that is the point of John the Baptist. He points not to himself but to Christ. The Nativity of John the Baptist signals the preparations which God makes for his coming into our midst as the Incarnate Lord in the Nativity of Jesus Christ. The summer solstice has just past; the long summer’s march to winter, yes, even to Christmas, dare I say, has begun!

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“What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you”

St. Paul’s sermon on the Areopagus is one of the most remarkable and influential sermons of all time. It illustrates wonderfully, I think, the contemplative theme of this Sunday, the theme of mercy, signaled in the Eucharistic Gospel. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” But what is the mercy? It is the mercy of revelation. What was unknown has been made known. We walk in the light of what has been revealed. If we do not, then we walk in the darkness and lead others astray as well; “shall they not both fall into the ditch?” Such is the import of the Gospel parable of “the blind leading the blind.” Our self-righteous judgments point accusing fingers at the minor faults of others while being blind to the major faults in ourselves.

The point of the reading of the Scriptures in the public and common life of the Church is to reveal God to us and us to God. We learn about “the good, the bad and the ugly” of ourselves in the light of God’s mercy and truth. This requires our openness to the Scriptures and our willingness to engage and think the Scriptures. The Old Testament lesson from 1^st Kings is particularly instructive, too, because it illustrates the theme of mercy over harsh judgments in the reign of King Rehoboam who ignores the wise counsel of the old men in favour of the rash advice of the young men. It is a supreme instance of an abusive authority that imposes impossible demands.

“To your tents, O Israel” is the only response, a fleeing from what is persecutory and destructive but only so as to recall ourselves to what is primary and definitive. Ultimately, God has tented among us. “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us;” literally, “tented among us,” a phrase which picks up on the Old Testament image of the tent of meeting between God and man, the tent of meeting where the glory of God is made known.

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“Forgive and ye shall be forgiven”

Forgiveness. It is the hardest thing and yet it is one of the most free things that we can ever do, perhaps even one of the simplest things, in our lives. It is connected to that most free of all things: the power of God’s praise which brings the walls of presumption tumbling to the ground, like the walls of Jericho, for example. It belongs as well to the power of God’s love which moves in human loves; for instance, the love of friendship seen in David and Jonathan which remains a strong and precious bond even in the face of the enmity of a father and a king, namely, Saul. It is the abundance of divine charity that alone can open our eyes and soften our hearts.

What makes forgiveness so hard? It is our hypocrisy. It is not just our saying one thing and our doing another, but also our doing one thing and thinking another. We are divided within ourselves against ourselves, against one another and against God. There is our blindness and there is our judgmentalism – both of which are eloquently illustrated in the Gospel for today. “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?…Cast out first the beam that is in thine own eye, then shall thou see clearly the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.” We presume to know what in fact we do not know. It is not just our ignorance but our arrogance that is the problem. It is a willful blindness, a kind of refusal to see what in fact we have been given to see and know, for instance, in the witness of the Scriptures. But then, again, we frequently refuse to act upon what we do know. It is not our knowing but our indifference or our stubbornness that is the problem.

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