Christ Church

“The end of all things is at hand”

‘Endism’ is very much with us, I am afraid, the idea that everything is falling apart and that things are in disarray. It is part of the fearfulness and uncertainty of a culture that is no longer sure of itself and its future; all the assumptions of the ideology of material progress, the idea that everything is getting better materially, physically, economically, socially and politically, begin to look like a cruel joke. And yet, globally speaking, it would be unwarranted and wrong to deny the many, many improvements to human life that have occurred in modern times. At the same time, it would also be unwarranted and irresponsible to deny the very real threats to peace and life. So where does this leave us?

With the task of acquiring a much more thoughtful and a more prayerful outlook. At issue is not whether things are improving and getting better but our assumption that things should always be progressing. This is to forget the nature of the finite and the grimmer realities of human sin and presumption. It is really a kind of anti-intellectualism. At issue, then, is our grasp of the spiritual and intellectual principles which shape and inform our understanding. In a way, “to be is to be understood” (Gadamer on Heidegger, in Slavoj Žižek’s Less Than Nothing), which in turn requires some understanding of ourselves in relation to God. It is exactly that idea that is missing in action, I fear, paradoxically, in our churches, as well as in our culture, the absence of which paralyzes us in the face of dark and difficult times, whether culturally or individually.

The Sunday after Ascension Day speaks profoundly to our uncertainties. I do not presume to suggest that it provides us with certainties; after all, it is our dogmatic certainties about material reality that is our problem. I do think that this day offers us a way of thinking about our world and about ourselves, and, more importantly, about how we are understood by God. It does so by recalling us to the dynamic of God’s redemption of our humanity and our world. Ironically, the Ascension is about the truest form of upward mobility, the raising of all things to their end in God, the “lift[ing] up our hearts”. It speaks to us about our home, the homeland of the spirit, our home with God, not just by-and-by but here and now in prayer and praise. In short, we find our place with God because God has placed us with him through his Son. “I go to prepare a place for you,” Jesus tells us.

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“I came forth from the Father and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.”

The life of the resurrection is the life of the church. There is, however, the constant struggle to enter into its meaning; in short, to live it in our lives, especially in the face of hardships, sufferings and sorrows. At the very least, it means being called not only out of death as the defining reality of life, but also out of the ways of death which we know simply as sin, which is Paul’s point in this morning’s second lesson from Romans (6. 1-14).

The American spiritual writer, Annie Dillard, marvels at the complacency of Christians, especially in Church, and especially in the light of certain Scripture readings. Given the power of Biblical images, she advises that we should be wearing crash helmets and be given life-jackets and lashed to our pews! There is a kind of shock and awe quality to many a Scripture passage. We become anesthetized because of the calming beauty and order of the Liturgy and fail to be surprised by joy or shocked by fear. Some stories truly are amazing, even shocking, and yet they have so much to teach us. One such shocking and perplexing story, it seems to me, is there in our first lesson which is the story or, actually, the concluding part of a much longer story, known as the story of Balaam’s ass (Numbers 24).

Here is headline news: God makes dumb asses speak. In a way, that means me in the effort to speak God’s word clearly but also you, in terms of your lively participation in the service. The point is that God gives us words to say and think, words to live by and act upon in our lives. We need the shocking and difficult stories to awaken us to the grandeur of God’s engagement with our humanity without which we are dead in ourselves and therefore not alive to God. So what is the story?

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“Receive with meekness the implanted word”

Today is the Fourth Sunday after Easter. It coincides with another important commemoration in Canadian Culture. Today is also the Sunday which recalls the Battle of the Atlantic.

The Battle of the Atlantic was a tremendous war effort in which Canadians played a most significant role. It was one of our defining moments. Against the darkness of storm and sea, against the threat of the unseen enemy – the German U-boats in their wolfpacks – there was the determination and the will to provide for our war-torn and embattled allies in Europe. The task was undertaken at a time when the outcome of the war was by no means certain.

In those dark and uncertain early years of the Second World War, the dangers that the convoys and their escorts faced in setting out from Halifax Harbour were very real; the prospects truly fearful. It was not only to face the wild and elemental sea – the North Atlantic in all its majestic fury and power – but also the terror of torpedoes, the sudden destruction and explosive power that sank ships and sailors, soldiers and supplies in far shorter order than the iceberg which sank the Titanic.

The Battle of the Atlantic was an enterprise of real courage undertaken in the face of great fearfulness. We do well to remember it. What enables peoples to face such fearful prospects? Why embark upon such fearful and fateful voyages? Because of the conviction that there are things worth dying for, things without which we cannot live. They are our rational and political freedoms. They belong to the spiritual dignity of our humanity, to who we are in the sight of God, the very things that Christ is at pains to teach us in these Eastertide Sundays.

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Reflections 2012 – “Dance me to the end of love”
KES Cadet Corps Church Parade
Christ Church, April 27^th, 3:00pm

I.

“If music be the food of love, play on,” as Shakespeare puts it in Twelfth Night. There is “the sweet power of music,” he suggests, in The Merchant of Venice. Indeed, “the man that hath no music in himself/ Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils … Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.”

And it has been a year of music and dance, a dance that embraces the highs and the lows of every aspect of our year at King’s-Edgehill. It is, perhaps, in the music of the spheres and in the dance of the understanding that we have learned something more about ourselves, about one another and about our world. “Mark the music.” Enter the dance. Dance me to the end of love.

II.

Leonard Cohen’s lyrical masterpiece, “Dance Me to the End of Love,” is about the triumph of love even in the midst of the greatest horrors such as the holocaust.

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance Me To The End Of Love…

The song was inspired by the story of the death camps in the Holocaust when Jewish musicians were required to play classical music, the music of Mozart and Haydn, for instance, while their people were being led to their deaths and their bodies to the burning. It is a haunting image. A string quartet plays with passionate intensity for those whose fate is their own, playing with passionate intensity the music which belongs to human dignity and beauty in the face of unspeakable and utterly inhuman indignities and horror. The Jews of Europe were betrayed by the culture that betrayed itself. And yet, there is the haunting and compelling beauty of the refrain, Dance me to the end of love.

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“He showed me the holy city Jerusalem
coming down out of heaven from God.”

The Ten Commandments are given to us both in the Book of Exodus and in the Book of Deuteronomy. In Exodus, of course, they are given to us twice because of the idolatry of Israel in making the molten calf which resulted in the tablets of the Law being smashed; only in the mercy of God are they remade, and while they are not recounted in their fullness the second time in Exodus; nevertheless, we are given to understand that they are exactly and precisely the same words. But, really, what are we to make of this evening’s readings about the Law in its fundamental aspect as the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy and the wonderful vision of the City of God in Revelation? What do they have to do with the joys and the delights of the Easter season of the Resurrection?

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“A little while and ye shall not see me;
and again a little while and ye shall see me.”

What on earth does it mean? Peek-a-boo with Jesus? What kind of game is this? Well, it is a profound and important part of our thinking about the meaning of the Resurrection. It relates as well to the various forms of human knowing and the way those are challenged by the God who creates and redeems; in short, by the Risen Christ.

Seeing is believing, it is commonly said, and surely that point-of-view has ample confirmation, it might seem, in the story of doubting Thomas. And yet, the whole point is that the truths of religion go far beyond the physical and the material yet without denying them; the whole point is that human experience, too, cannot be reduced to the empirical, to the sensuous and experiential. Perhaps, no thought is harder for our church and world, and, yet, perhaps, no thought is more necessary.

The stories of the Resurrection are full of the questions of wonderment and awe. There is confusion and uncertainty, to be sure, like the disciples huddled in fear behind closed doors or fleeing in dismay and terror from the Jerusalem of their crushed hopes. There is sorrow and grief, like Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb in the early morning. There are the stories of strange things, like the suspicion that the disciples might “come by night and steal” the body of Christ away, like the empty tomb with the stone rolled away, like the rumours of angels, like the report of the women; all the strange, strange dawnings of an awareness of things seen and unseen.

The Gospel readings for the remaining Sundays of Easter are full of a different sort of questioning. They are taken from the so-called Farewell Discourse of Jesus in John’s Gospel. In a way, Jesus is preparing for his going from them in two senses: his crucifixion and his ascension, itself the culmination of the meaning of his Resurrection. The meaning of these gospel readings is captured for us in the memorable mantra, “because I go to the Father.” Through the images and the reality of the physical and material world, Jesus opens us out to the greater reality of God, of things spiritual that embrace but cannot be reduced to the physical and the material. This is the great teaching and central idea of the Christian faith: the Incarnation gathers us into the mystery of the Trinity.

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“Christ is risen from the dead”

The Resurrection changes everything. But only if we will be changed, only if we are open to its truth and meaning. But what kind of change? The Christian religion is the religion of the hope of transformation, the hope that we can be something more than our dead and deadly selves. And all because of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It changes how we look upon our selves, how we look upon our humanity and how we look upon our world, and, certainly, it changes how we look upon death.

But the change that is the Resurrection requires death. Only so can death be changed. The death that is required is not only our physical death – none of us get out of this alive, after all – but more importantly, it requires our dying to our selves. The Christian religion is, in so many ways, the counter to the culture of self-fulfillment and entitlement. It is the religion of love and sacrifice, the love that is sacrifice without which there can be no resurrection, no life. The paradox of change, here, is that we can only live if we are dead, dead to the illusions about ourselves, dead to the deceits and mistakes which are the sad and sorry tale about ourselves, dead to what the Church simply calls sin.

To be dead to ourselves is to be alive to God. The accounts of the Resurrection show us the transformation of the understanding, the transformation of the understanding that changes lives, that sets lives in motion. In a way, it is very simple. Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb in the early morning. What she seeks is not there. She tells Peter and “that other disciple” and they both run to the sepulchre. “That other disciple” runs faster and looks in but does not enter. Simon Peter comes and enters in and is followed by “that other disciple”, who then sees and believes. What do they behold? Simply the empty tomb and the discarded burying clothes, described in terms of exactly where they were found.

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“And they came to the Valley of Eshcol,
and cut down from there a branch with a single cluster of grapes,
and they carried it on a pole between two of them”

This Sunday is known as Good Shepherd Sunday because of the traditional Gospel reading at Holy Communion on this day about Christ the Good Shepherd. It is a familiar and a comforting image but I fear we overlook its radical meaning. It is one of the great images of God’s providential care for his wayward and wandering sheep, meaning you and me. It is an image, too, which belongs to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christ bears us in his arms. The same arms that are stretched out upon the cross are the arms that have embraced our humanity, the arms which gather us into the love of the son for the father. He carries us into the hands of the Father.

The great image of God’s care, its greatness lies in the cure it provides. The cure is the triumph of God over human sin and death. Christ the Good Shepherd, after all, is the “Lamb of God that takest away the sin of the world” as we pray constantly in the Liturgy. The Good Shepherd is the one who has laid down his life for the sheep, for you and for me. The image is rich in meaning and quite powerful in its symbolism.  We live in the care of the Good Shepherd who has triumphed over human sin to carry us home to the Father.

But the image is even stronger because we live in that care now in the power of the Risen Christ. God’s providential care is the active principle which sustains and maintains creation redeemed and restored, the active principle which sustains and maintains our redeemed humanity. In a way, so many of the biblical images of God’s providential care meet in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. As I Peter 2 puts it, we “are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of [our] souls.”

We live in the care of the Good Shepherd. Yes, but how do we relate to that care? Are we grateful and alive in the joy of redemption as the community of the redeemed? Or are we a pack of complainers? Do we rejoice or do we murmur? Do we give praise or do we mock? These are the questions which are also set before us, the questions which speak directly to human freedom and dignity. I fear that the therapeutic culture which, on the one hand, calls us to take care of one another and wonderfully and rightly so, yet, on the other hand, creates a culture of dependency, a culture of the depressed and the walking dead. Which will we be?

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“Jesus said, I am the good shepherd”

It is a familiar and a comforting image but I fear we overlook its radical meaning. It is one of the great images of God’s providential care for his wayward and wandering sheep, meaning us. It is an image, too, which belongs at once to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christ bears us in his arms. The same arms that are stretched out upon the cross are the arms that have embraced our humanity, the arms that gather us into the love of the son for the father. He carries us into the hands of the Father.

The great image of God’s care, its greatness lies in the cure it provides. The cure is the triumph of God over human sin and death. Christ the Good Shepherd, after all, is the “Lamb of God that takest away the sin of the world,” as we pray so often in our Liturgy. The Good Shepherd is the one who has laid down his life for the sheep, for you and for me. The image is rich in meaning. We live in the care of the Good Shepherd who has triumphed over human sin to carry us home to the Father.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word opens us out, quite literally, to the words of the Incarnate Christ, “the word made flesh,” but most especially and, perhaps, most tellingly to the words of the Risen Christ. It is not too much to say that the words of the Risen Christ inaugurate the most dramatic change in human outlook and understanding that there has ever been. The effect of the presence and words of the Risen Christ on the disciples leads to the intense recollection of all the details of the Passion of Christ and, by extension, to the accounts as well of all the other words and deeds of Christ including his nativity that comprise the Gospels and, then, the other writings that make up the New Testament.

In other words, there is something dramatic and compelling about the Resurrection. Death and Resurrection are two of the foundational themes and principles of Christianity, though not entirely unique to Christianity. There is, in late Judaism, the idea of the resurrection and resurrection, too, is a feature of the Islamic religion. But for Christians the focus is on Christ, on his death and resurrection. And Christ is the primary teacher of the Resurrection.

What is that teaching? That we are more though not less than our bodies, which is probably good news for some of us. That we are not the “slave[s] to fate, chance, kings and desperate men,” as John Donne puts it, the mere pathetic victims of the fatalistic determinisms of our social, economic, political and therapeutic culture. No. We are freed to God in whom we find the very truth of our being and life, the God in whom we become who we are truly called to be and in whom we are more and not less than ourselves.

This is, I think, pretty amazing and quite profound. It is the case historically and theologically that the Resurrection effected the greatest sea-change in human culture imaginable. It quite literally changed the world. And it changed the world because it changes our outlook. It changes our minds and it changes our thinking.

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