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!

It means, of course, our transformation. The Transfiguration of Christ – “his face did shine as the sun and his raiment was white as the light” – points to the transformation of our humanity. Such is the meaning of God’s engagement with our humanity; it is about the hope of glory. The epistle readings throughout the Trinity season speak repeatedly to this theme of our being transformed by grace into glory. Ultimately, what we hope for ourselves is what we celebrate as realized in Mary.

Near the front of the Prayer Book, you will find a calendar for each month with a number of days and dates that span the centuries from the New Testament age to the twentieth century. It presents a pageant of the Christian faith over the course of time; the parade of time sanctified, we might say. It reminds us of the continuum of the Faith, of the “great cloud of witnesses” in whose fellowship we rejoice while we “run with patience the race that is set before us” so that “together with them [we] may receive the crown of glory that fadeth not away.” And, sometimes, too, there is reference to some aspect or other of the life of Christ, and in relation to Christ, reference to certain celebrations of Mary. On page xi, you will find the month of August and for the fifteenth day, you will find “The Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary”. No year is given. By all accounts, it must seem a most curious phrase. What does it mean?

It refers to the death of Mary but in the greater context of our Christian hope in the resurrection. The phrase itself is a wonderful euphemism, an ancient and biblical way of speaking about death, about our resting in Jesus. It is Mary’s requiescat in pace. The Falling Asleep is the literal English translation of dormition or κοιμησις. The Falling Asleep, the Dormition or the Assumption are all various titles for the Church’s remembrance of Mary’s death and her place in Christian teaching. The latter term belongs more to the Western Church. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Assumption of Mary became a dogma of the Faith as recently as 1950. For Anglicans, however, it cannot be required to be believed as essential to salvation. It belongs to pious and holy opinion as a kind of prayerful reflection upon the essentials of the Faith, particularly the dogmas of the Incarnation, Redemption and the Trinity.

The Scriptures tell us nothing about the death of Mary directly but the logic of this feast derives from what the Scriptures teach us about the role of Mary in the economy of salvation and about our hope. For what is redemption except the taking up of all things into God? “What is not assumed by God cannot be saved by God”, as Athanasius explains with respect to the doctrine of the Incarnation.

We have an end in God and that hope is understood as realized in Mary, that where Christ is, there she is, even as Christ prayed for us, “that where I am, there ye may be also”. If that is not true of her, then what hope can there be for any of us? He comes to us through her – such is the meaning of the Advent and the Nativity of Christ – and so we come to him through her. Mary, as even Luther and the Jesuits agree, does not want us to come to her but through her to him, ad Jesum per Mariam.

That hope is not just “pie-in-the-sky, by-and-by,” as if religion were merely “the opiate of the masses,” as someone who was once famous once famously said. It is also here and now. It shapes our lives, illuminating the darkness of our fears and anxieties with light and hope, with grace and glory. Mary is the temple of God, the “habitaculum dei”, the little dwelling place of God where, as John Donne so wonderfully puts it, “immensity [is] cloyster’d in thy dear womb”. She reminds us of the quality of our being with Christ.

That quality is about our waiting upon the words of Christ, “the measuring line” of the “breadth and length” of Jerusalem in us, as it were. The Church is profoundly and essentially Marian in keeping the words of Christ and pondering them, in letting their weight of holy understanding to sink into us and take shape within us, in desiring the indwelling Word to transform our hearts and minds and, indeed, our whole being. The body, too, is part of that mystery of redemption. “I believe in the resurrection of the body.”

What does that mean exactly? It is enough to say that we shall be like him who has become like us through Mary. For “we all,” says St. Paul, “with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” We are changed by what we hear and see. “Be it unto me, according to thy word,” Mary says.

“Guarda et escolta,” Dante is told in the terrestrial garden at the top of the Mountain of Purgatory in his superb allegory of the journey of the soul to God, the Divine Comedy. “Look and listen.” Only so, can we be made “pure and prepared to leap up to the stars”, to the paradise of God which is more than the garden of Eden, more than the seeming paradises of our summertime idylls.

Dante, in his Paradiso, coins a term in Italian to speak of this wonder. Trashumanar, transhumanised. The word captures, I think, the profound and great mystery of human redemption. We are more, though not less, than all of the bits and pieces of our fractured and fragmented lives, more, though not less, than all of the fragments of our memories and midsummer’s night dreams that we cling to in the ruin of our lives whether in the face of death and dying or in the face of the ups and downs of human experience. Through prayer and praise, through Word and Sacrament, we are being gathered into the mystery of the Trinity, into the communion of God.

What we celebrate in Mary is what we hope for ourselves and for one another. With Mary, we can sing and rejoice in the mystery of human redemption. The Lord who has “roused himself from his heavenly dwelling” to dwell with us through her goes to prepare a place for her and for us, that where he is, there we may be also. It is his word to us.

“That where I am, there ye may be also”

Fr. David Curry
The Feast of the Assumption
St. Mary’s, Crousetown
August 15^th, 2010

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.

To be a martyr means to bear witness. The Saints are more than Christian heroes and more than mere role models. What defines them and what is meant to define us is the calling or vocation which we share with the Saints. What moves in them is the redemptive life of Christ made visible in them. They have found their wills in the will of Christ. It is “not I but Christ who lives in me”; that has to be the constant theme and struggle of Christian witness. It cannot be about calling attention to ourselves. It is not “look at me, look at me” but “look to Jesus.” See Jesus and see yourself in him.

Our liturgy calmly and consistently makes the point about our incorporation and participation in the life of God through Jesus Christ. The witness of the Saints complements the witness of the Scriptures to that divine life which the liturgy proclaims and provides for us sacramentally.

There are the Saints of the Scriptures; the Apostolic Saints, we might say and there are the Saints of the Tradition of the Church. Legends about both abound; sometimes quaint and edifying stories, sometimes not; sometimes invented and non-historical and sometimes with a certain weight of evidence and truth. Quite often we don’t have a whole lot of historical and biographical detail about the Saints, either of the Scriptures or the Tradition. And in a way, it is the idea of the Saints that captures most the imagination and holds our attention.

Our readings this morning, for instance, simply tell us about what is known about the end of James’ life – his death at the hand of Herod – as recorded in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles. Yet, it is presented almost as just a passing mention and more as indicating the inauguration of the further persecution of the followers of Jesus. The greater point about St. James and martyrdom is signalled in the Gospel.

It suggests the real meaning of our sonship and discipleship. “We go up to Jerusalem”, Jesus says and he tells the disciples what that will mean. Luke, in his account of this story, which we hear on Quinquagesima Sunday at the beginning of Lent, adds that “they understood none of these things”, the things of his passion, death and resurrection. Mark proceeds directly to the coming of James and John the sons of Zebedee to Jesus. This is similar to the Matthew’s account which we read on Passion Sunday; only Matthew has their Mother making the initial request. She is looking for special places of prominence for her sons in Jesus’ kingdom. Mark has James and John ask Jesus directly. In both cases, Jesus remarks that “you do not know not what you are asking.”

There is our desiring, our wanting something good and glorious, it seems, for ourselves and even for others. Jesus’ response is twofold. First, there is the paradox that we do not really know what it is that we really want. This is because of the disorder of our wills, our minds and our lives. Secondly, we don’t realise the cost; a cost greater than what we can pay, again because of the disorder of our wills, our minds and our lives. The cost is his passion and death.

And yet, there is the greater wonder of his grace, his gift to us, as it were. It is the privilege of participating in his redemptive work. “We go up,” he says, not “I alone go up” nor simply, “you go up.” No. It is, emphatically, “we go up.” At the heart of Christian witness and life is the fellowship between man and God in Jesus Christ. That is what our liturgy constantly proclaims and provides.

We go up to Jerusalem in the lifting up of our hearts in prayer and praise. We go up to Jerusalem in the reading and hearing of the Scriptures. We go up to Jerusalem in our getting up off our seats literally and going up to receive the sacrament of the altar. The Jerusalem of Jesus made audible and visible to us in the ordered pattern of the liturgy. Augustine, commenting on the psalms of ascent, the psalms that mark the ancient journey of the people of Israel to Jerusalem for the Passover, says that “we ascend in the ascension of our hearts.” Such is prayer.

This is supposed to be our witness, like the witness of St. James, who “without delay was obedient unto the calling of Jesus and followed him.” As the Collect suggests, it means “forsaking all worldly and carnal affections.” What is that about? It means the putting aside of our selfish ambitions and desires. In a way, what James and his brother John desire has to be purged of the pride and ambition that is self-serving and self-promoting. And which creates invidious distinctions because it seeks something for oneself at the expense of others. There has to be a learning about service and sacrifice. The phrase, “worldly and carnal affections,” also recalls us to our baptismal profession. What is going to define us? The devices and desires of our constantly wayward and wicked hearts? Or our wills and desires as purified and perfected in the love and service of Jesus?

The pattern of sainthood is the pattern of our Christian witness to the truth of Jesus Christ. It always means, first, the repudiation of all that stands opposed to God and his truth and, second, the recapitulation of what belongs to the truth of our humanity as redeemed in Christ. It means death and resurrection in our daily lives through our participation in Christ’s death and resurrection, liturgically and sacramentally.

It is a life-long project and one in which we are meant to be constantly learning. “O Lord, make perfect my will.” Today, in the Providence of God, we celebrate the life and witness of St. James and are challenged to renew our commitment to Christ in his body the Church. We are reminded by the witness of St. James about what it means to “go up to Jerusalem,” trusting not in ourselves, but in the one who says,

“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor & St. George’s, Falmouth
July 25^th, 2010

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.”

The interplay between the Epistle and the Gospel is like the connection between Baptism and Communion. This is, of course, classical Anglican teaching and captures the distinctive interplay between justification and sanctification; to put it simply, Christ for us and Christ in us. As Richard Hooker notes: “we receive Christ Jesus in baptism once as the first beginner, in the eucharist often as being by continual degrees the finisher of our life”(Lawes, Bk. V, ch. LVII). And it is a basic Christian understanding: “nevertheless touching Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, we may with consent of the whole Christian world conclude they are necessary, the one to initiate or begin, the other to consummate or make perfect our life in Christ” (Lawes, Bk. V, ch. LXVII).

A branch is grafted into a living vine without which it is only a dead stick. It lives not from itself but from the vine. It is no longer dead or dying but alive and growing. Imputed, “put into” the vine, the vine then infuses, “pours into,” the branch its life-force. The branch lives from the vine to bring forth what belongs to the truth of the branch in the vine, namely, its blossom and fruit. The branch does not cease to be itself by being grafted into the vine; rather it becomes its living self, a living branch. Apart from the vine, it would be dead. “Apart from me,” Jesus says, “ye can do nothing.” Apart from God, we are the walking dead.

But what does it mean to be grafted into “thy Name”? What is “thy Name”? In Scripture, in Liturgy and in Prayer, the word “Lord” is frequently the circumlocution, the way of speaking around, the holy name of God revealed to Moses in the Burning Bush (Gen.3). The holy Name is “I am who I am.” It conveys an understanding about something known which is altogether beyond the ordinary and beyond the natural; in principle, beyond empirical, scientific verification. It is instead wholly spiritual and metaphysical. God reveals himself as “I am who I am,” as that upon which everything else depends. Everything else – the phenomenal, natural, empirical world – is secondary. It is revealed as a product of what is primary – God alone.

But what exactly is the relation of everything else to that principle of origin? Jesus intensifies and clarifies the understanding of God as “I am who I am” into the spiritual relationship of the Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. God in his perfect self-relation is the basis of his relation to all else. The division between God and what is other than God is brought into the life and unity of God himself. Such is the meaning of the Word and Son of God, Jesus Christ, the divine mediator between God and Man.

“Increase in us true religion.” The word religion comes from religo, religere – to bind. Religion is about the bond, the element which binds the soul and God. True religion is about that true bond between God and Man in Jesus Christ into which we have been grafted so that from him we might live and grow as branches in the vine. In Christ we are nourished “with all goodness” even in the wilderness of our lives. Grafted into him, we would have our life and our growth and our abiding in him. He has compassion on us in the wilderness of our lives.

What stands in the way? Primarily our refusals to understand. We refuse the Word in the images of Scripture and in the metaphors of existence. In the prosaic muddle of our daily lives, we refuse the understanding. We forget the primacy of the Word. We forget that the Word gives life to the natural and sensual aspects of our lives and gives them purpose and direction.

Christianity without the living Word is not only mindless; it is brain dead; our praises mere self-congratulatory folly. When we forget to live from the Word, we are dead. Ours is the culture of death precisely because we have despaired of the understanding. We have despaired of the understanding in our idolatry of the practical, in our adolescent adulation about the merely technological, in our weariness and will to despair. And yet, there, in the wilderness of our bewilderment, Christ has compassion on us. His love reaches out to us.

Perhaps it is Thomas Aquinas who puts it best and in so doing recalls us to “that pattern of teaching”:

He who does not nourish himself on the word of God is no longer living. For, as the human body cannot live without earthly food, so the soul cannot live without the word of God. But the Word proceeds from the mouth of God when he reveals his will through the witness of Scripture.

That will is signaled for us in Jesus’ word. It is his compassion for us. It is his word.

“I have compassion on the multitude”

Fr. David Curry
Trinity VII, 2010
Christ Church

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.

This is high wisdom. And totally impossible merely on human terms. That is why we need the word from on high, the Word of God which comes to us in our distress and despair. Such is the Word of God to Elijah. Through the “still small voice,” Elijah is reminded of God’s providence which has not only already fed him in the wilderness, but now speaks to him and proclaims his purpose. God tells Elijah that there will be a successor to him in his prophetic role; the mantle of Elijah will fall upon Elisha. And God tells Elijah, too, that no, he is not the only one who is true to God; there are seven thousand in Israel, that have not bowed the knee to Baal, that is to say, to the gods and interests of this world.

It is, I think, a powerful message. But what about this “still small voice?” A marvelous phrase, it speaks directly to us about the miracle of translation and interpretation, particularly in English. Tyndale’s version had “a small still voice” and Coverdale’s “a still soft hissing.” But Lancelot Andrewes, one of the chief figures in the creation of the King James Version of the English Bible, took Tyndale’s words and Coverdale’s phrasing to achieve the memorable and quiet eloquence of “a still small voice.” The phrase introduces us to a wonderful conversation between God and Elijah. God speaks to our conscience, to our inner being, to awaken us to something more and greater than what belongs to our griefs and sorrows, our anger and wrath, our despair and disillusionment.

Nowhere is that sensibility more wonderfully captured than in the Collect for this day which, in a way, speaks to us like “a still small voice” reminding us that “God … hast prepared for them that love [him] such good things as pass man’s understanding.” On the basis of that realization, one which has been made known to us by Revelation, we can pray to God to “pour into our hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire.” The last phrase is key. The promises of God, the good things which God seeks for us, “exceed all that we can desire.”

And so, even in the face of enmity and strife, in the face of persecution and hatred, something else is known and understood; “a still, small voice” reminds us of God’s greater will and purpose for our humanity. The effects of this are astounding.

In a way, they are illustrated for us in the second lesson from The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, which might equally be called the Acts of Paul, so taken up it is with the journeys and the accounts of Paul’s encounters with the early Christian communities and with religious and civil authorities bent on persecution. In Miletus, Paul tells the elders from Ephesus, that he is “going to Jerusalem.” Like Jesus before him, going to Jerusalem will be fraught with consequence. In Paul’s case, it will lead to persecution at the hands of the Jews and his being arrested by the Roman authorities. It will ultimately lead to his appealing to Caesar and hence his martyrdom in Rome. His friends from Ephesus all sense the seriousness of his decision to go to Jerusalem. They weep, “sorrowing most of all because of the word he had spoken, that they should see his face no more.”

And yet, they know that he must go regardless of the afflictions that await him. There is something more that “God has prepared for them that love him.” Something more that “exceeds all that we can desire.” How is that conceivable, let alone believable? Because of the “still small voice” that speaks to our souls. Because of the Revelation of God in the witness of the Scriptures.

It requires translation and interpretation, of course. That, too, belongs to the power of the “still small voice.” The whole point of translation is to open out to us the high things of God. “Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place….” as Miles Smith puts it in his Preface to the King James Version. Through the “still small voice,” we catch a glimpse of the grandeur of God in spite of all our adversities and even our adversaries. It is meant as well to draw us into the divine fellowship, into the mystery of our incorporation and participation in the life of Christ. After all, he has borne all our “rage and spite” that we might know the depths of the divine love that seeks our good and blessedness.

The Preface to the King James Version concludes on this note. “Ye are brought unto fountains of living water which ye digged not; do not cast earth into them…. If light be come into the world, love not darkness more than light; if food, if clothing be offered, goe not naked, starve not yourselves… It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God: but a blessed thing it is, and will bring us to everlasting blessedness in the end, when God speaketh unto us, to hearken; when he setteth his word before us, to read it; when he stretcheth out his hand and calleth, to answer, Here am I”.

Here he speaks “after the fire a still small voice.” Listen and take heart.

“And after the fire a still small voice”

Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Trinity VI, 2010
Morning Prayer (Year II), 10:30am

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.”

If we were simply commanded to do what cannot be done, then we would be left with the contradiction of the Old Testament; indeed, the tragedy of the ancient world, more generally speaking. There would be our wanting what we cannot realize. We would know what is true and right but which we cannot attain. There would simply be our futility and despair.

The contradiction is only overcome in Jesus Christ. And it is overcome at the most extreme moment of division and tension. Only so can this moral imperative to love your enemies make any possible sense. What is the overcoming? It is the demonstration and the realization of the love of God for us in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,” the righteous for the unrighteous.

You see, we are all divided in our loves. Those whom we love the most we hurt the most. We can hardly love ourselves, our families, our friends, let alone God, let alone our enemies. “The good that I would I do not; the evil that I would not do that do I do.” And yet this is what God commands because this is what God makes possible.

And he makes it possible humanly. It belongs to the truth of our humanity that we should be commanded to love our enemies; in other words, to look beyond the enmities in our souls, our families, our communities, our churches. Jesus Christ shows us the truth of our humanity in unity with divinity. He is that unity, that perfect and divine mediation between God and man, between where we want to be and where we find ourselves in our enmity against God, against one another, and against ourselves. You see, we are the enemies whom God loves. “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son” and he loves us “while we were yet enemies.”

To love our enemies is to place them – whomever they and we might be, the enemies that are ourselves in the disarray of our sins – in the compassionate love of God in Jesus Christ. He who is the Word and Son of the Father shows us the deep logic and reason of love, its perfect and perfecting power. He commands that his love be the ruling principle in our lives. He commands us to do what is possible but only in him, only by the quality of our lives and our loves as rooted and grounded in the free and self-giving love of God.

To love your enemies is to know t hem in Christ. It means to know them in the love of him who on the cross prays “Father, forgive them.” It means to see ourselves and one another in the motion of God’s love towards us. Such is the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His death and resurrection is given to be the pattern of our lives, our lives in him, in Christ. “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves” – know yourselves – in Christ and in him “love your enemies.”

Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies’

Fr. David Curry
Trinity VI, 2010
St. Michael’s, Windsor Forks, 9:00am

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.

In the ancient view of things, this is both the beginning and the end of wisdom. The wisdom of the Delphic Oracle to “know thyself” is the ancient maxim of the Greeks and it means to accept your place in the cosmos. To do so means “to know that you do not know,” as Socrates puts it. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” is the Jewish form of the same teaching. Both would remind us of our essential finitude and of the great, unbridgeable gulf between God and ourselves. To accept this without looking for anything more is the ancient wisdom. “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man,” as Ecclesiastes puts it. “There is,” after all, “nothing new under the sun.” The phenomenal world, the world that presents itself to our senses, is all much of a sameness. “I have seen everything that is done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.”

There is something quite wonderful and free in such a perspective. To accept the world as a rational and ordered whole and not to demand of it any more than what it offers, to insist on the reasonableness of the world as against the view that everything is arbitrary, indifferent and irrational; this is astounding. But it cannot hide the dangers of a kind of fatalism, frustration and futility.

There is something about our humanity which speaks to us about something more. Even Ecclesiastes acknowledges this, for “God has put eternity into the mind of man,” though to be aware of the eternal does not mean that there is any hope of eternity for man himself. Aristotle, too, argues that friendship between God and man is a thing impossible – there is a kind of incommensurability between the human and the divine, a gulf that cannot be bridged. For the ancient Greeks, we remain endlessly separated from the free and perfect realm of the gods whose life we can only approximate in the freedom of the games, in the political community, and, above all, in contemplative life. And for the ancient Jews, the highest end is about walking with God through obedience to his laws – once again, living one’s life in accord with the reason of God in the world but with no expectation of anything more than what the law provides. “My delight is in the law of the Lord,” as the Psalmist says. This is high wisdom.

And it belongs to that high wisdom to have a corresponding high ethic of behaviour. For both Jew and Greek, there is a moral obligation towards the stranger, the sojourner. The laws of hospitality are sacrosanct – this is a wisdom that carries on into the modern world. But why should you love the sojourner – the stranger? Because “you, too, were once a sojourner in the land of Egypt,” God reminds Israel in Exodus.  Because the stranger and the wayfarer are under the protection of the gods, says Homer and the poets.

But to “love your enemies”? This is the distinctive Christian wisdom. And how is it possible? Because, as Jesus says, “I have called you friends.” What we cannot imagine or think, what we could not even desire or look for, has happened and has been made know to us. The Epistle lesson for today shows us the nature of the friendship between God and man through our “being baptized into the death of Christ” so that through his resurrection “we also should walk in newness of life,” “dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord”.

This gives a completely new foundation and a new orientation to our lives. It is something which has been revealed to us. It is something which speaks to the deepest desires of our hearts and more. The Epistle establishes that new principle of identity – an identity with God through Christ, a friendship between God and man which does not obliterate the distinction between heaven and earth, God and man, but which gives us the hope of heaven. The fulfillment and perfection of our humanity is to be found with God.

We are, however, always in the process of becoming what we are in Christ. And this requires a new ethic with even higher, indeed, impossible demands. Once again, the Gospel is the illustration of the new and Christian ethical demand which follows from this principle of identity and friendship in Christ.

In St. Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain parallels the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel, conveying many of the same teachings. The fact that the lesson here is from the Sermon on the Plain is, however, instructive. We cannot, after all, climb up to God by virtue of some power in ourselves; no, the friendship between God and man is accomplished by God’s grace towards us in the mercy of Christ. God’s grace has come down to us. It is precisely this that is beyond human knowing and desiring – we could not invent this, anymore than from the perspective of the revealed religions of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, one could invent the transcendent God of all reality. We can know God because he makes himself known to us. But even more, our reason is transformed and lifted up to contemplate and participate in the divine life itself.

The Gospel illustrates the new ethical demand that follows from this new ontology, this new sense of identity presented in the Epistle. “Love your enemies,” Jesus says, commanding what is simply and utterly impossible. Why, we have the hardest time loving those whom we profess to love and care for, let alone those whose will is dead set against us! And yet, this new ethical demand, impossible as it may seem, is made not only possible but necessary because of that other impossible thing, the friendship between God and man realized in Jesus Christ. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” While we were the enemies of God, God loved us. We are bidden to act out of that love, a love which goes beyond “the devices and the desires of our own hearts.” In other words, there is something more than just what is “under the sun” for us. It changes how we are to think and act towards one another in the world.

There is something more beyond the seemingly endless animosities and divisions within our hearts and between one another. Our identity in Christ compels us to transcend the animosities which belong to our sinfulness, our brokenness, our wounded and fallen nature. Impossible, is it not? By ourselves, yes. It is beyond what we can imagine, let alone do. But God in his mercy does not leave us in our distress and anxiety.  “For them that love [him]” – an impossibility made possible in Jesus Christ – he has prepared “such good things as pass man’s understanding“ and that “exceed all that we can desire”.

And here, in the liturgy, we are invited to take hold of those “good things” that we may become what we are in Christ Jesus, “alive unto God,” learning to love even our enemies through the one who loves us while we yet his enemies.

“Love your enemies”

Fr. David Curry
Trinity 6, 2010
Christ Church, 8:00am

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.

Such things do not arise from the love of Christ and do not display anything like compassion, respect, brotherly love, mercy or even simple courtesy. It is unanimity without a blessing for it neither seeks a blessing nor desires a blessing for others. In short, there is nothing holy in it. And it is not actually unanimity for there can be no “being of one mind” where our hearts are endlessly divided and where we seek to inflict hurt out of a sense of resentment and fear, or out of a sense of entitlement and privilege. We do not refrain “[our] tongue[s] from evil” and “[our] lips that they speak no guile”; we do not “forsake evil and do good.” Peace is but the brooding calm hiding a hurricane of hurts and hates deep within.

Where there is no peace of God, there can be no peace among ourselves. We forget that we are called to inherit a blessing and so must act in accord with our calling. We forget, in other words, that our “being of one mind” does not arise simply from ourselves, but only from our life together consecrated to God in obedience to his Word. When that is remembered, however, then there can be reasonable and charitable differences among us about what to do or not to do because there is a true “being of one mind” about the essential form of our Christian faith and life. We have, I fear, always a long ways to go.

When Jesus stood by the lake of Gennesaret, “the people pressed upon him to hear the Word of God.” They pressed upon him. There was a hunger and a thirst for God’s Word, for something more beyond the contrary words and divided affections of human hearts. That pressing upon him, that hungering and thirsting, shows the awareness of a deeply felt need. It acknowledges an emptiness within us that can only be filled by God. They came wanting to hear and willing to be taught. And Jesus responds to their desire, for it is a godly desire and one in which, we may say, they are truly “of one mind.”

Jesus makes a fishing boat his pulpit. We are drawn into the net of his teaching. The Word of God goes forth from God’s Word and Son and we are willingly caught in the net of his teaching. Yet Jesus does something more. He provides for the continuation of his teaching through those whom he calls to be his “fishers of men.” They are to be the teachers of his Word, under his Word and through his Word. He calls them, moreover, out of the recognition of the barren emptiness of human endeavour simply considered in itself. By itself, it doesn’t and cannot satisfy.

Our labours and our lives have to be gathered into the purpose of God’s Word and be measured by it. “Master, we have toiled all the night long and have taken nothing.” This is, in a way, the human condition, especially when we refuse to attend to what God would have us know about our home and end in his love, and when we refuse to act out of what he has given us to do in his name in our dealings with one another. But “nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.” Appropriately for Petertide, this is Peter’s word, the word of him who tells us “be of one mind.” In a way, it echoes his realization that “thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” a statement which Jesus, in a kind of amazement, says “flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee but my Father which is in heaven.” He has a hold of something divine.

In the commemoration of Peter and Paul, we see the essential unity in faith of two vastly different and powerful personalities who have shaped the life and witness of the Church. They are of one mind in the unity of God’s Word; in spite of themselves, too, one might add.

“At thy word” is the opening to salvation, not on account of a full net of prosperity and material gain, but because it is obedient to God’s Word. God alone makes something out of the nothingness of our lives. He alone brings true unity out of the mean divisions of our hearts. But only if “at thy word” is followed in our hearts. Only if, indeed, we will see that the rule of his Word is the only means by which “the course of this world,” as the Collect puts it, may be “peaceably ordered” and governed, and the only way by which “[his] Church may joyfully serve [him] in all godly quietness.”

“In all godly quietness” is not about doing nothing. It means “being of one mind” in prayerful attentiveness to God’s Word and Son. It is, however, the counter to the net of our growing disconnectness and our increasing discomfort. Our lives, I fear, are those of cyberspace orphans, divorced from God, from one another and from ourselves even when we think we are most connected, an alienation that captures precisely the unbearable shallowness of our contemporary world. The counter is to be found precisely in Peter’s willingness to let down the net again “out into the deep,” the willingness, in other words, to be defined by something more and something other than the vagaries of time, circumstance and our own vanities. Such is the deep truth and meaning that belongs to the theology of revelation. God has something to say to us. Are we willing to listen? Are we willing to enter into the deep reading that our Liturgy demands?

To attend faithfully and charitably to the common form of essential faith is to “sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts.” Then, even in our differences, whatever they may be, we shall be of one mind and our decisions may even have about them the odour of sanctity, if they be accomplished in the compassion and charity of Christ. For he shall be held as holy in our hearts and only then shall we be blessed and a blessing to others.

“Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts”

Fr. David Curry,
Trinity V/Petertide
July 4^th, 2010
Christ Church & St. Thomas’, 3-Mile Plains

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!

But this summer’s feast signals something more. Beyond the reminder of God’s coming to us, there is the purpose of his coming in us – the motions of his grace taking shape in our lives. From that standpoint, the strange and compelling message of John the Baptist is constant and necessary; he points us to Christ, yes, but as well to Christ in us.

The Scripture readings for this feast highlight the strange and compelling character of John the Baptist but only so as to awaken us to the greater wonder of God’s being with us in Christ, in the greater wonder of Christ’s holy birth and death. Like the birth of Isaac to ancient Sarah and Abraham, there is a kind of miracle of nature in the conception and birth of John the Baptist to the elderly and skeptical Zechariah and Elizabeth. Indeed, Zechariah’s scoffing will be rebuked by his being silenced and unable to speak until the birth of John. His challenge to the angel, “how shall I know this?” contrasts with Mary’s question, “how shall this be?” There is a huge difference between a doubting that is a denial of possibilities and the intellectual inquiry that is open to their realization.

The birth and ministry of the John prepares us for the coming of Christ. But what is that preparation? Simply this. John the Baptist is the instrument of God’s grace sent to “prepare the way of the Lord” by “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins;” in other words, awakening us to our need for repentance and salvation. He is not the forgiveness of sins but the instrument of God preparing us for the coming one whom, he says, “is mightier than I, the thong of whose sandals,” he says, “I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose.”

It is, I fear, not quite what we always want to hear. We have an altogether too negative a view of repentance and forget that it belongs to the positive possibilities of transformation and renewal. In looking at John the Baptist, no doubt, we see a moral rigour and an ascetic demand that seems judgmental and restrictive, forgetting that he is pointing not to himself but to Christ. But repentance is about the hope of change for the better and about the triumph of truth over the lies of our lives.

Look at it this way. You don’t need to be stuck in a rut. You don’t need to be defined by the circumstances and happenstances of your lives, or even by sins and follies, both past and present. There is a grace that is given in the midst of things. John the Baptist would awaken us to the possibilities of change, a change of attitude, of mind, of the spirit within us. It simply makes all the difference. There is forgiveness. It is the meaning of Christ’s death and sacrifice and it is given to be realized in us, in our lives of service and sacrifice. Such things stand in a strange and compelling contrast to the easy indulgence and destructive narcissisms of our lives.

The changes are within. They recall us to the truth of our humanity against all that separates us from that truth in God. It doesn’t mean that we won’t grow old, for instance, but it suggests something about how we grow old.  Graciously or complainingly?

In a way, there is a necessary unease about John the Baptist; after all, it is a birth that necessarily awakens us to death as well. That necessary unease is the meaning of his preaching about repentance for such is the dying to sin and self that leads to resurrection and life. That necessary unease is about the pattern of praise and worship. As always it seeks to awaken us to the something more of God’s grace and forgiveness signaled and realized in Christ so that it may be seen and realized in us.

“What went ye out for to see?”

Fr. David Curry
AMD Service of the Deaf
June 27^th, 2010

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.

We are not strangers, of course, to abusive authority whether within or without the church. “To your tents,” recalls us to what defines us, namely, the matters of revelation and redemption; in this case, the lessons of mercy proclaimed in and through the ordered pattern of the liturgy.

Portia’s wise counsel to Shylock in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, makes the point that our liturgy constantly teaches, namely, “that in the course of justice none of us/should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,/and that same prayer doth teach us all to render/ The deeds of mercy.” Mercy, she explains “is an attribute to God himself/and earthly power doth then show likest God’s/when mercy seasons justice.” The seasoning of justice by mercy is the perfection of justice; ultimately, it is about our participation in God’s justice which is equally his love.

But the mercy of God has to be made known. That is what St. Paul is doing on the Areopagus to the Greeks of Athens and, by extension, to us today. His sermon is addressed to the philosophic spirits, mentioning by name the Epicureans and the Stoics who are skeptical and even hostile to the idea of a God who can be known, even as today there is a skeptical and hostile spirit within and without the Church about the idea of God and his revelation. The Epicureans and the Stoics of the ancient world have their modern day counterparts.

Epicureanism is associated with hedonism, the philosophy of sensual pleasure. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die” captures something of its fundamental outlook, as well as its sense of fatalism and despair, though it has to be said on Epicurus’ behalf that his philosophy is quite moral and cautious. There is a God but he cannot be known and his will cannot be known to us, therefore all our actions are at best but provisional, restrained and very circumspect. It is really a philosophy of cautious restraint lest one over-commit and experience a certain perturbation of soul as a result. This was before the age of Prozac to keep us calm (and before Viagra, to keep us happy!) In a way, it is about suspending judgment for fear of being mistaken.

The Stoic philosophy, we associate, I suppose, with the qualities of endurance and suffering, “keeping a stiff upper lip.” Like Epicureanism, it seeks a certain imperturbability of the soul in the face of the hardships of life and in the course of an implacable and unknowable fate. What will be, will be and there’s no doing anything about it. There is a kind of despair in such an outlook.

That there is wisdom in these positions should not be denied. It is important to know the limits of our knowing and to be aware of the dangers of our presumption. These are the lessons that the Gospel parable and the story from 1^st Kings also teach. Yet, it is equally important to realize the nature of the assumptions that are made, the assumptions about the unknowability of God and, as a consequence, of human actions, too. What is at stake is human freedom and responsibility and, most importantly, human dignity. The great medieval poet, Dante, puts the Epicureans in Hell, for instance, in the circles of the violent, not for their failure to belief in any particular tenet of Christianity, but because he sees in their denial of God and the denial of the soul – which according to the Epicureans also cannot be known – a violence against reason itself.

St. Paul, in his Areopagus sermon, is speaking to the positive qualities of the ancient Greeks. He perceives that they are a religious people and he recognizes their humility of mind. As with Plato, truth is constantly to be sought but without presuming that you can ever possesses it completely, rather the truth possesses you. And that is Paul’s point, too. He proclaims the spiritual reality of God who has created the whole world and our human minds – “we are his offspring,” he says. And he proclaims the resurrection of Christ. Such things are about a fuller realization of our participation in the truth and life of God than the ancients could ever have imagined. It is, in a way, the seasoning of our souls. As always, both then and now, some are prepared to listen and others are not.

But there is an important point to his sermon. God is not a deus absconditus, a hidden God. This does not mean that God is captive to our minds, but rather, through revelation, there is our reasoning upon what is made known and there is the captivity of our minds to the God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ. In the light of that revelation, we are accountable for “our thoughts, words and deeds,” which is another way of saying that our lives are not nothing. Nor are we cramped and constrained in some sort of suspended animation, in the paralyzing fear of making decisions. That would be our unfreedom. The challenge is to be careful about our judgments, without pointing fingers of accusation at one another while ignoring our own great faults and failings, on the one hand, and without imposing harsh condemnations and abusive expectations upon one another, on the other hand.

As St. Paul’s sermon points out, what is at stake is the nature of God who is not to be confused with the things of this world. Such is idolatry, the idolatry of our minds, both in mistaking the things of this world for God and in denying the making known of God by reason and by revelation. We are to walk in the light of that truth, the truth of God revealed. We do so by way of the witness of the Scriptures, a witness which shows us a way of understanding and opens us out to God’s dwelling with us, even his tenting among us.

Something of what that theology of revelation means is captured best, perhaps, in a wonderful phrase by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.

He that keepeth the word of Christ, is promised the love and favour of God,
and that he shall be the dwelling-place or temple of the blessed Trinity.

Or even a tent! St. Paul’s Sermon on the Areopagus reminds us of God’s Revelation of himself to us in “the Word made flesh” who tented among us.

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

Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor
Trinity IV, ‘2010
10:30am (Morning Prayer)

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.

We are constantly in a state of contradiction with ourselves and so with one another and with God. We are divided within ourselves. But to be aware of this state of inward contradiction is actually good news. It means the possibility of an openness to what transcends the divisions within ourselves and among ourselves and with God. It means suffering through the conditions of our incompleteness in the acknowledgment, not only of our own sinfulness, but of the redemption that is at work even through suffering. To be aware of the contradictions within ourselves is to embrace the suffering as redemptive. In a way, it is the simplest thing. We look beyond ourselves out of our condition of contradiction. We look to God. It changes how we look upon ourselves and one another.

Our need for forgiveness throws us into the arms of Christ. To know our own need for forgiveness impells our willingness to forgive one another. It places us in the forgiveness of God. Yet the acknowledgment of our own need for forgiveness and our willingness to forgive one another does not create the forgiveness we seek for ourselves and for one another. That, after all, can only come from God. Forgiveness is of God. But it is of God for man and for the whole created order which our sins have disturbed – “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together until now.” The power of forgiveness and the need for forgiveness meet together in Jesus Christ. He is simply the forgiveness of sins. Our own forgiveness and our forgiveness towards one another arise out of our being with Christ. In him we see a whole new world, a world that is embraced in the love of God.

It doesn’t mean that it is easy. Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner describes the heart-rending and brutal world of Afghanistan as the backdrop for depicting the power and the desire for forgiveness that arise out of the awareness of things done that should not have been done and things not done that should have been done. The story is set within the forms of the Islamic religion amid the ethnic and political conflicts in Afghanistan. It offers a poignant illustration of the realistic dynamic of forgiveness as something which is lived out through the pains and sorrows of the human heart that has had to come to terms with its own failings and betrayals and the pains and sorrows that it has created.

In the story, forgiveness is a somewhat elusive quality but, at the very least, remains as something hoped for once the sting of self-accusation begins to pass. Forgiveness buds forth, perhaps, “not with the fanfare of epiphany,” a sudden eureka moment, “but with pain gathering its things, packing up and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.” That is a nice image, I think, of the way in which the idea of forgiveness sometimes takes effect in us. But it requires that we be confronted not only with the idea but its reality. For Christians, the idea and the reality are one in Christ. In the pain and agony of the Cross he prays for our forgiveness. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The task is to let his mercy begin to take shape in us.

Forgiveness is the reconciliation between God and man which he is and which he effects in us. What stands in the way is often just the hardness of our hearts – our unwillingness to accept our need for forgiveness and to embrace the sufferings in our lives as redemptive in Christ through his sufferings. Yet that challenge is constantly before us in the Lord’s Prayer and here in this Gospel and always in the Cross. It means to want what God wants and provides for us. We do not come to him presuming upon our righteousness but trusting only in his infinite mercy. But it is a mercy which has been shown to us and one which we struggle to live.

“Forgive and ye shall be forgiven.”

Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor
Trinity IV, 2010
8:00am