“When icicles hang by the wall,/ And Dick the Shepherd blows his nail,/ And Tom bears logs into the hall,/ and milk comes frozen home in pail,/ When blood is nipped and ways be foul” … “When all aloud the wind doth blow,/ And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,/ And birds sit brooding in the snow,/ And Marion’s nose looks red and raw,/ When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,/ Then nightly sings the staring owl,/ Tu-who/ Tu-whit, Tu-who – a merry note,/ While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.” Ah, winter, at least as Shakespeare envisions it in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a wee bit threatening but mostly manageable, even “a merry note”.

How do we think about winter? Is it something that we dread and fear? Something from which we seek to flee, seeking out some warmer clime, fleeing the bitter cold as if fleeing from discomfort if not from death itself? Or is winter, as another poet, William Cowper puts it, the “king of intimate delights”? Certainly, the season and experience of winter varies from place to place, from culture to culture, and even from age to age. “Winter in Venice”, Adam Gopnik observes, “is very different from winter in Whitehorse”, or, for that matter, Windsor! It is “a truth”, as Alden Nowlan, the Canadian poet from Stanley, just down the road from Windsor, puts it in a poem entitled “January Night”, “that all men share but almost never utter. This is a country where a man can die simply from being caught outside.” Winter has to be respected.

But how we think about winter is part of a larger question about how we think about nature and how we think about the created order. In other words, it belongs to how we think about God and about creation and redemption. This Gospel story speaks directly to those ideas and extends them into the world of our hearts and minds as well. There is a storm at sea and all seems lost. Jesus is with them, asleep. He seems indifferent to the fearful fatalism of the men. They awaken him: “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” It isn’t a request for anything to be done; only a wake-up call to our imminent death and destruction in the storm.

We know only too well about the winter storms of nature. There are, too, the winter storms of our hearts and souls, the winter storms of our discontent and unease. How do we face such things? Jesus is with us in the winter storms and that makes all the difference. So the Gospel would teach us. How?

Because we are recalled to the world as God’s world. We are recalled to the truth of the Creator and to the idea of creation itself. It is God’s world and it exists for his will and purpose and not simply for ours. Creation is not only spoken into being which signifies that it exists for and by the uttered thought of God; it is also said to be good; indeed very good. Winter, too, is part of the created order. Somehow it is good. Our challenge with respect to winter is the same as our challenge about every other aspect of the world. To take delight in what God creates and redeems. To take delight in what ultimately exists, as we do, for no other purpose than for the praise of God. One of the canticles drawn from the apocryphal text, The Song of the Three Young Men, better known in our Prayer Book as the Benedicite, Omnia Opera, reminds us of this important aspect of our relation to the world as God’s creation.

Ananias, Azarias and Misael, also known as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, to use their Persian names, are thrown into a burning fiery furnace because they refused to repudiate the worship of God and worship King Nebuchadnezzar. Yet, instead of being consumed in the flames, they are seen with one who looks “like the Son of Man” and they are heard singing the great litany of nature’s praise of God. All the works of the Lord “bless the Lord” and “praise him and magnify him for ever”, including the winter and the summer, the frost and the cold, the ice and the snow. It is a wonderful perspective and one that we do well to remember in the winter of our lives, whether individually or collectively.

It is also concentrated here for us in this Gospel story. Jesus is awakened in the ship to join the company of the fearful. But instead, he arises to rebuke the wind and says to the sea, “peace, be still.” “The wind ceased and there was a great calm.” “Why are ye so fearful?” Jesus asks, “Have ye no faith?” The story is, of course, an epiphany, a making known of the essential divinity of Christ revealed through his humanity and his presence with us. It is not that there are no storms but knowing the love of God for us and his presence with us in Jesus Christ is the counter to the storms of the winter as well as to the winter storms of our hearts. The Master cares. Ironically, as it may seem, his words awaken a greater fear in the sailors; the fear that is awe and wonder, awe and wonder at the one who is in our midst. “What manner of man is this”, they ask, “that even the wind and the sea obey him.” The fear that is delight.

The winter is part of God’s creation. God’s redemptive work in Jesus Christ reminds us that the world and so the winter, too, exists for God’s will and purpose. Therein we find our good and the truth of our humanity. Our challenge is to learn to take delight in all that God has made and redeemed. Winter, too, belongs to our delight in the Lord God of all creation who seeks the peace and calm of our hearts even in the midst of the winter storms of our fearful and bitter hearts. This is what Epiphany would teach us not just in spite of winter storms but by means of them. To be awakened to awe and wonder at the God of Creation redeemed counters our fears and brings us delight, a delight in God.

“What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Fr. David Curry
Epiphany IV, 2012

Saul, the Persecutor of the Way – it wasn’t even known as Christianity at this point – becomes Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. As with the idea of the Epiphany itself, the Gospel goes viral through Paul’s conversion; it becomes for all peoples everywhere. The Conversion of St. Paul is a signal moment in the break-out of the Gospel to the whole world.

With the Conversion of St. Paul, the Gospel of Jesus Christ first captures the world’s attention, for he will take it to Caesar, as it were; second, it captures the world’s imagination, for his writings form not only such a large part of what we call the New Testament but also provide much of the impetus towards the possibility of a Canon of Sacred Texts; and third, it captures the hearts of the world’s people for all times and in all places. Something of the Conversion of St. Paul moves in the conversion of the nations, in the conversion of souls in every age, and even more, in that re-consecration of heart and soul to the things of Christ at times of reform and renewal.

Paul tells us about his conversion, not just once, not even twice, but actually three times. But before we complain that seems somewhat excessive, let us remember that we find these accounts, not in his hand, but in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, from the hand of another, probably Luke. The poet/preacher John Donne reminds us of the observation of Chrysostom and Jerome that “the Book is called the Acts of the Apostles; but…it might be called the Acts of St. Paul, so much more is it conversant about him, then [sic] all the rest”.

Therein lies the difficulty. That “much more” is,  perhaps, too much. Paul, it seems, is too much. The nature of strong personalities is that they repel as much as they attract. They challenge our understanding and that is just too much. We have to struggle to grasp what they are really all about and we don’t always like to have to work at such things. But this is all part of our conversion.

For without struggle there can be no conversion. The conversion of St. Paul is, above all else, a struggle. It is, as I like to say, the breakthrough of the understanding.

The struggle concerns the integrity of the images of salvation. How to reconcile the glory of the Messiah with the sufferings of the crucified Christ? The entire personality of Paul is taken up with this question. His relentless persecution of this tiny little sect is driven by a much larger question, namely, the sense of the opposition between conflicting images of Scripture about the glory of the Messiah and the sufferings of Israel. He is an intellectual, after all, someone who has sat at the feet of the learned teacher, Gamaliel, in Jerusalem. Intellectual and spiritual questions are for him the questions of life. So there is a struggle. Something new has come into the world which challenges the understanding. That something new is the Way of Christ.

Certainly, Saul who becomes Paul looked for a Messiah, but not one who would die for our sins. Rather, Israel herself was the Suffering Servant, the true Israel who would be faithful to God by doing the law, who would bear the iniquities of others, who would be herself the acceptable sacrifice for the redemption of the world and who would be raised up and exalted by the coming of the Messiah in whose glory Israel hoped to share. But the sufferings of the Servant are the sufferings of Israel, not the sufferings of the Messiah. To the Messiah belongs only the glory.

Saul persecutes the Way because the glory is held in utter opposition to the suffering.  He persecutes the Way because the will to righteousness – our doing the law – confronts the grace of Christ without which “all our doings are nothing worth”. Jesus unites in himself the sufferings of Israel and the glory of the Messiah; he is both God and man.

His conversion is the breakthrough of the understanding in which he sees that the glory of the Messiah is precisely and most fully realised in the sufferings of the crucified Christ. It is not a question of the glory giving way to the suffering or the suffering being denied in the face of the glory.  No. The glory is in the suffering and the suffering belongs to the glory.

John Donne wisely observes with respect to the Scriptures that “all the actions of the holiest man are not holy”. Paul would undoubtedly agree. It is, after all, not his personality that we celebrate. We are, in the words of the Collect, bidden to “follow the holy doctrine which he taught”.

Paul demands that we honour with our hearts and minds “the things that are written for our learning”. Only so might there be that breakthrough of the understanding which is conversion and which continues in that constant re-consecration of our hearts and minds to the things of Christ.

“I saw a light above the brightness of the sun”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Conversion of St. Paul
January 24, 2012

Epiphany is, par excellence, the season of teaching. It begins with the Magi-Kings bearing gifts to the Child Christ, gifts that primarily teach; “sacred gifts of mystic meaning,” as one of the hymns puts it. And then, there is this Gospel story, the only Gospel story about the boyhood of Jesus. He is found in the Temple in Jerusalem by his parents. He is with the doctors, the teachers of the Law. He is both listening and asking questions and providing answers. He is at once both student, humanly speaking, and teacher, divinely speaking. Epiphany is about what God makes known to us through the humanity of Jesus Christ.

This Gospel story challenges us about education. It does so from within the meaning of the story of the Epiphany itself which is primarily about adoration, a concept which we have, perhaps, lost or forgotten in our contemporary culture and which then affects how we think about education, about teaching. Education, too, is often described as a kind of journey, an adventure in learning, and so forth. But what kind of journey?

There is a journey to be sure, the journey to and from Bethlehem by the Magi-Kings. And there is a journey to Jerusalem and, ultimately, back to Nazareth in the Gospel story of Christ teaching in the Temple.

We seem to like our journeys, our trips and travels. But what are they about? Are they a flight from reality? A kind of escape from the pressures of the day-to-day? A desire to get away from it all? This contrasts completely with the biblical journeys of the Epiphany. You see, the Magi are the original truth-seekers. They come with purpose. They come prepared with gifts, gifts that honour and respect the truth they seek and before which they bow in the presence of the Holy Child of Bethlehem. The gifts they bring are hardly useful gifts; they are, instead, gifts that teach us who the Child Christ is. They are offered and opened in worship. The greater journey is about teaching and adoration. God opens out to us the truth of himself and calls forth in us an attitude of devotion and worship. The Truth is both taught and adored.

The gifts signal their deep commitment to the Truth, namely, their adoration of God. And this marks a special feature of the biblical journeys. They are not about a flight from reality, from Truth, but a journey to the Truth which is always to be adored. In a way, the Gospel story of the boy Christ in the Temple complements that fundamental Epiphany theme. The story emphasizes Christ engaged with the doctors, the teachers of the Law, in the Temple. The Law is about the truth of God revealed in the witness of the Hebrew Scriptures and, ultimately, fulfilled in the witness to the truth of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Mary and Joseph “found him in the Temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.”

In this Gospel, Jesus says to Joseph and Mary, who have found him and questioned him, “did ye not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” It is a challenging question and one which opens out to the greater mystery of God. What is his father’s business?

It is about creation and redemption, about the dignity of our humanity as enveloped in the cloak of God’ glory, a glory that cannot be cheapened. But it requires our commitment to the Truth in all our journeyings. It is about the recovery of that capacity to adore. Epiphany teaches us how to “come and worship;” in short, to adore and to learn to love what we are being taught.

“They found him in the Temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors,
both hearing them, and asking them questions.”

Fr. David Curry
January 23^rd, 2012
AMD Service of the Deaf

Mean thoughts, mean words and mean deeds result in a mean world of mean people. How great the contrast with healing words and deeds that arise from healing thoughts?

Words can make or break our day. A word spoken in kindness and truth can build us up and encourage us. A word spoken in disdain and hate can unsettle and disturb us.

Here is an Epiphany story of two miracles. It is simply about the power and the truth of the Divine Word which challenges us about our thoughts, our words and our deeds.

Two miracles. Miracles, we have suggested are part of the teaching programme of the Epiphany season. They belong to God’s will and purpose for our humanity, to our being able to take delight and find joy in one another and in God’s world. All the healing miracles of the Gospel point to that picture of the restoration and perfection of our humanity. They signal the idea of creation redeemed and sanctified. But only through the encounter with Christ. Only through the manifestations of his essential divinity communicated through his perfect humanity.

Two miracles. One within the confines of the religion of Israel; the other, beyond its scope, and universal in its extent. A leper comes to Jesus. If you will, he says, you can make me clean. He is an Israelite and yet an outcast, an untouchable, if you will, someone pushed to the margins of society because of a grievous and contagious disease, as it was understood. Jesus’s response is absolutely astounding. First, he reaches out and touches the untouchable but then he says, “I will; be clean.” The leper has grasped something of the power and truth of the Divine Word in Jesus Christ. And Jesus has acted and spoken. There is a healing but it is accomplished within the confines of the religion of Judaism. The leper is bidden to do what Moses commanded and to offer a gift as testament to what God does through Israel. Fair enough.

But this miracle is followed by Jesus’ going to Capernaum and encountering there a Centurion who besought him on behalf of his servant, sick of the palsy. Jesus, in a manner similar to the healing of the Leper says, “I will come and heal him.” But the interest of the Gospel passage lies in the extraordinary indeed marvelous and astounding response of the Centurion. Who is he? Well as a Centurion he is from outside of Israel, a Roman officer in fact who is in charge of one hundred soldiers. When he hears Jesus response to his request for the healing of his servant, he responds with these amazing words. “Lord,” he says, “I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only and my servant shall be healed.”

It is quite a moment. He explains, of course. He has men who are under his authority. To the one he says, go and he goes. To another he says come and he comes. To another he says do and he does. So speak the Word only! Amazing. Why?

Because he recognizes the truth and power of the Divine Word which cannot be confined by the limits of time and space. The Word of Jesus he is saying can be passed on down the line and it will effect what it purposes. That is to have a hold of the transcendent power and truth of the Divine Word.

Jesus marvels. His remark at this point is a kind of critique of Israel. The story as a whole captures both the religion of Israel and what will emerge as the religion of Christianity. Jesus says that he has found no faith so great, no not in Israel. And yet, what the Centurion is saying actually belongs to the vocation of Israel as defined by Isaiah:  a light to lighten the Gentiles, a covenant to the peoples. God is not confined to Israel but makes himself known through Israel. Jesus rebukes Israel for having forgotten their true mandate and mission. Ultimately, Isaiah’s prophecy will be understood as fulfilled in Jesus.

The whole gospel story is however a testimony to the power and truth of the divine Word, something which belongs to the religious understanding of Jews and Christians and Muslims, especially through their common commitment to the philosophical traditions of the Greeks. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” may be from John’s Gospel but it articulates a way of thinking that all three religions have in common philosophically. It is about a commitment to an intellectual principle, the Divine Word which accounts for reality. The Leper senses this in Jesus as does the Roman soldier. Do we?

There have been times in the history of the relations between Jews and Christians and Muslims that this sensibility has been understood and appreciated, particularly in Spain during the 9^th to the 11^th centuries (though not without some exceptions), a time of relatively respectful inter-relation and toleration; the convicentia of Jews and Christians and Muslims. But only through the Divine Word to which all are held accountable. The phrase which sometimes has been used is the people of the book which is not exactly correct. There is no one book that all three have exactly and authoritatively in common. It would be truer to say “people of the Word”, the intellectual and philosophical word which cannot be contained to one place and time.

This is the Centurion’s insight and it challenges us about the thoughts, words and deeds which we use with one another. His reply to Jesus is about humility. It is about nothing less than an openness to that transcendent power and truth of the Divine Word, the Word that seeks our health and happiness, our good and truth. What is needed in us is the same attitude of mind. To be humble and open in awe and wonder to the healing power of God’s Word in Jesus Christ. It makes all the difference.

“Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof,
but speak the word only and my servant shall be healed.”

Fr. David Curry
Epiphany III, 2012

Epiphany is the season of teaching, we have said. It is, also, it seems the season of miracles. Epiphany abounds with the miracles of Jesus. Is there a connection? Yes. The miracles teach. They belong to what is being made manifest, to what is being made known to us about who Jesus is and what he means for us. Importantly, the miracles reveal God’s will and purpose for our humanity.

Yet, miracles may trouble us. Some have thought of them as being little more than the stuff of superstition and nonsense. Thomas Jefferson, for example, in the almost typical exuberance and arrogance of the reason of the Enlightenment, took his scissors to the New Testament and cut out of it all the miracles, leaving merely a kind of core of moral teaching as he thought. But this, I am afraid, to have missed the whole point of the miracles. Without them we miss the greater story of God’s will and purpose for our humanity and our world. After all, as theologians like Augustine pointed out long ago, the great miracle is the miracle of creation itself to which the miracles recall us in one way or another.

The miracle stories of the New Testament open us out to the truth of God as Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier and, perhaps, nowhere do we see that more clearly and more profoundly in this Gospel story of the Wedding Feast at Cana of Galilee where Jesus turned the water into wine. John tells us, and it is something he is at pains to tell us, that this was “the beginning of signs” which Jesus did, the first of the miracles as it were. I think he wants us to appreciate how much this Gospel story makes manifest – there is that Epiphany word again – the true meaning of all the miracle stories.

And yet, there is something special about this miracle story. Unlike most of the miracle stories of the Gospel it is not about a healing; it is not about the blind receiving their sight, the deaf hearing, the lame walking, the dead being raised up. These are all important aspects of the theological idea of human redemption. God seeks our healing. But for what end?

In a way, this Gospel story tells us. It is a touching and compelling scene. Jesus is a guest at a country wedding along with Mary his mother and some of his disciples. The wine failed, we simply told, meaning that the party ran out of wine. A social disaster. Mary names the dilemma – “they have no wine”, she says; even more, she names the human predicament – ‘we have no wine’, meaning that we lack the  means of joy and blessedness in ourselves. In the background of the story is an old Jewish saying, that without wine there is no joy.

She names the human predicament. Jesus’s response is most intriguing. “O woman, what is that to me and to thee. Mine hour has not yet come.” What is his hour? I think it refers unmistakably to the hour of his passion and death, to the crucifixion, to the critical event in the story of human redemption. It is about the purpose of his coming. An important connection is made between this first miracle and the crucifixion, between this beginning of signs and the ultimate accomplishment of human redemption. Here then is a miracle that will open us out to the presence of the Creator and the Redeemer, both of which principles belong to the essential divinity of Christ that Epiphany makes manifest.

“Whatever he tells you to do”, Mary then says, “do it”. There is something wondrous here as well. It has to do with the miracle of obedience that overturns the misery of our disobedience. It is about a mindful obedience, too. It has to do with our commitment to truth. It is Mary’s command to us to obey Christ.

What follows is the miracle of the water turned into wine and not just ordinary wine but the best wine. Water into wine. A kind of new creation and yet one which also speaks to the theme of redemption in the Epiphany context where the things of this world and things of our humanity become the means by which the  things of God are communicated and known; “God in man made manifest”, as one of our  hymns puts it. For that, too, is part of the larger meaning of turning water into wine, sacramental images, too, that remind us of how the themes of creation and redemption are concentrated for us in the sacraments.

And sanctification. In the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer, the marriage service makes reference to this miracle story because of Christ’s presence. He beautifies and adorns marriage it is said, because of “his presence and first miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galilee”. This brings out the idea of sanctification, the idea of our being made holy because of our engagement with the Holy One who is in our midst.

But for what end? Our joy and blessedness. This is the profound point. This Gospel miracle, unlike any other, teaches us about the purpose of human redemption. It signals the perfection of our humanity because of God’s will and purpose for our humanity. God seeks the very best for us. He seeks our joy and our blessedness. It is to be found in our taking delight in what God delights in – his creation, redeemed and sanctified. In this miracle story we are opened out to life and light and love, the life and light and love of God in whom we find life and light and love; in short, blessedness.

“This beginning of signs”, John tells us, “Jesus did in Cana of Galilee and manifested forth his glory”. We can see, I think, the obvious connection to Epiphany. This miracle, like all the miracles, makes something known to us about Jesus and about God’s will and purpose for our humanity. John concludes though by saying “and his disciples believed on him.” Through what is made known to us we come to a new and deeper understanding. We are enlightened and challenged to become disciples, believing on him whose glory has been made manifest.

“This beginning of signs” is the great miracle which opens us out to the truth of God as Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier. In this miracle story, God signals his will and purpose for our humanity. It is about our delight in God and in what he seeks for us.

“This beginning of signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee
and manifested forth his glory and his disciples believed on him.”

Fr. David Curry
Epiphany II, 2012

Epiphany is, par excellence, the season of teaching. It begins with the Magi-Kings bearing gifts to the Child Christ, gifts that primarily teach; “sacred gifts of mystic meaning,” as one of the hymns puts it. And then, on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, we have this Gospel story, the only Gospel story about the boyhood of Jesus. He is found in the Temple in Jerusalem by his parents. He is with the doctors, the teachers of the Law. He is both listening and asking questions and providing answers. He is at once both student, humanly speaking, and teacher, divinely speaking. Epiphany is about what God makes known to us through the things of humanity.

This Gospel story challenges us about education. It does so from within the meaning of the story of the Epiphany itself which is primarily about adoration, a concept which we have, perhaps, lost or forgotten in our contemporary culture and which then effects how we think about education, about the teaching. T.S. Eliot’s marvelous poem, The Journey of the Magi, begins with an arresting quote from the 17^th century preacher and divine, Lancelot Andrewes.

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long  journey;
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.

Eliot goes on to reflect on the nature of the journey, talking about the hardships of the way, “the camels galled, sore-footed and refractory,” though the biblical account makes no mention of any camels, about the recalcitrance and uncertainty of the servants, and about the unfriendly reception in the towns and cities along the way; in short, “a hard time we had of it,” referring to the journey. About that journey, he says,

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?…

He reflects on the ambiguities of life and death that somehow belong to the uncertainties of the journey. Birth and Death. Our lives, too, are often described and spoken about as being a kind of journey. But what kind of journey? Education, too, is often described as a kind of journey, an adventure in learning, and so forth. But, again, what kind of journey?

There is a journey to be sure, the journey to and from Bethlehem by the Magi. And there is a journey to Jerusalem and ultimately back to Nazareth in the Gospel story of Christ teaching in the Temple. But for the tradition artistically, devotionally and spiritually, the story of the Epiphany is known as the Adoration of the Magi, not the journey. Journey seems to speak to a more contemporary perspective.

We seem to like our journeys, our trips and travels. But what are they about? A flight from reality? A kind of escape from the pressures of the day-to-day? A desire to get away from it all? This contrasts completely with the biblical journeys of the Epiphany. You see, the Magi are not only the original and greatest ‘come-from-aways,’ they are the original truth-seekers. They come with purpose. They come prepared with gifts, gifts that honour and respect the truth they seek and before which they bow in the presence of Holy Child of Bethlehem. The gifts they bring are hardly useful gifts; they are, instead, gifts that teach us who the Child Christ is and they are offered and opened in worship. The greater journey is about teaching and adoration, God’s opening out to us the truth of himself and calling forth an attitude of devotion and worship in us. The Truth is both taught and adored.

We have perhaps lost this sensibility about adoration, about worship. We are only too quick to turn everything into something practical and useful according to our lights. But the gifts of the Magi are really useless gifts for a child. That doesn’t stop us of course from thinking about them precisely in terms of use and utility. Gold, we might think, is always useful as currency. But what about Frankincense? Surely there is nothing useful about that? And yet, we may think it useful to cover over other odours, like the smell of bacon and eggs from the men’s club breakfast this morning! But what about Myrrh? Surely we cannot turn that into something practical and useful! But no, someone will say how the Gospel has kindly prepared for the tasks and labour of the funeral industry in dealing with corpses!

And yet, this is to miss the point entirely about the gifts. They are fundamentally and essentially gifts that teach us about the one to whom they are given, the truth before which we bow down and adore. Gold honours Christ as King; Frankincense honours him as God; and Myrrh, most disturbingly of all, as Sacrifice. King, God and Sacrifice. That is the real point of the Epiphany gifts of the Magi. As Lancelot Andrewes puts it, “they came, they saw, they worshipped,” a point largely overlooked in Eliot’s poem. We have, it seems, lost the sense of adoration.

The gifts signal their deep commitment to the Truth, their adoration of God. And this marks a special feature of the biblical journeys. They are not about a flight from reality, from Truth but a journey to the Truth which is always to be adored. In a way, the Gospel story for today complements that fundamental Epiphany theme. The story emphasizes Christ engaged with the doctors, the teachers of the Law, in the Temple. While we are made aware of the unease and, no doubt, the anxiety and consternation of Mary and Joseph when they discover that he is not with them in the crowd of Passover pilgrims on the return, that emotional side of things is remarkably restrained. “They found him in the Temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.”

I know. We want education to be something practical and useful. I know of no parent who does not want their child’s education to lead to success in life measured in terms of getting ahead, in terms of jobs and careers, in terms of material sustenance. But is that what education is really about? There is of course no direct and causal connection between education and a successful career, however much a good education contributes in lots of indirect ways to all kinds of success, even the success, dare I say, of living with failure, with hardships and sorrows; in short, to endure “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/that flesh is heir to” in human experience.

It is an old story, of course. Augustine in his Confessions recognized that his parents saw his education as a means to an end, as a way towards getting ahead in life. He came to recognize that it was so very much more. Reading Cicero’s Hortensius, now lost to us, he realized the power and truth of philosophy, of the sheer delight in truth for truth’s sake, of learning for the sake of learning. It was a freeing and a defining moment for him.

We are perhaps quite perplexed and confused about education, about teaching, all the more when we are demand that it all be useful and practical, as if there were a one-to-one correspondence between studies and careers. There isn’t.

I am reminded of a story by Somerset Maugham who described himself as “the best of the second raters.” His story entitled “The Verger” challenges us precisely about the nature and purpose of education.

Albert Edward Foreman, a distinguished looking man, had been the Verger of St. Peters for many years. He was conscientious and proud of his office in the Church. But the new vicar or minister of St. Peter’s, which was a rather upscale Church, was distressed to find out that the Verger could not read. He had tried as a younger person but as he explained, he “never got the hang’ of it.”

Though it had no effect whatsoever on the execution of his duties, his illiteracy became the occasion in the eyes of the new vicar for his having to leave his job as Verger. Sadly, Albert Edward Foreman hung up his gown.

Leaving the St. Peter’s, he took a wrong turn and found himself on a long street full of shops. Thinking it would be nice to have a smoke, he looked for a tobacconist only to find that there was none. All manner of shops and no smoke-shop! An idea came into his head and sighting a store-front that was empty, he arranged to rent it and to set up a tobacconist shop. One thing led to the other. After ten years, he had a chain of ten tobacconist shops and was making a lot of money.

One day, depositing his earnings at the bank, the Bank Manager approached him, suggesting that he invest his profits rather than leave them in the Savings Account. All he would have to do is sign for the transfer and it would be done. Albert Edward Foreman, said, well yes, he could sign things, but how would he know what was being done with his money. To which the Bank Manager replied, ‘well, you can read, can’t you?’ to which Albert replied, ‘well, no, I can’t.’ The Manager, astonished, replied, ‘what, you can’t read?’ My God, just think what you would be if you could read!” To which, Albert Edward Foreman replied, “Well, I would be verger of St. Peter’s, Neville Square.”

The story is told to counter the assumption that education serves business success. In the Gospel for today, Jesus says to Joseph and Mary, who have found him and questioned him, “did ye not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” It is a challenging question and one which opens out to the greater mystery of God. What is his father’s business? It is, emphatically, not about opening shops in Nazareth!

It is about creation and redemption, about the dignity of our humanity as enveloped in the cloak of God’ glory, a glory that cannot be cheapened. But it requires our commitment to the Truth in all our journeyings. It is about the recovery of that capacity to adore. Epiphany teaches us and teaches us how to “come and worship;” in short, to adore.

“They found him in the Temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors,
both hearing them, and asking them questions.”

Fr. David Curry
A version of the Homily preached at 8:00 and 10:30am
January 8^th, 2012

The tradition of giving gifts at Christmas time originates with the coming of the Magi to the Child Christ in Bethlehem. From the three gifts comes the idea of the three magi from the East, from Anatolia. They are the proverbial come-from-aways. They are the original truth-seekers. They come having followed a star. They have come seeking the light of truth and led by that light they have come to Christ.

But they have not come empty-handed. They have come bearing gifts to the one who is the greatest gift of all. Love, suggests Aquinas, is in the nature of a first gift through which all other gifts are given. But what about the gifts of the Magi?

These are gifts which teach us about the nature of gift-giving. They are not exactly useful gifts – like socks and mittens, scarves and mufflers or like the useful gifts at a baby shower, diapers and wipes, soft blankets and towels. Beyond the useful gifts that we give to one another there are the useless gifts, the gifts that honour the one to whom they are given. In a way, the three gifts of the Magi are really useless gifts, gifts that essentially teach us about the meaning of the One to whom they are given.

Gold, frankincense and myrrh. I suppose we might think that gold is useful as easily converted into money and coin but even so is it not a strange gift to give to the child? Even stranger are the other two gifts, the gifts of frankincense and myrrh. How utterly useless with respect to a new-born child!

But that is just the point of the gifts of the magi. They are utterly utterly useless in an immediate and practical sense. They are gifts which teach. They signify the meaning of the one who has come, the meaning of the child lying in a manger. The gifts honour who he really is and who he is for us. Gold honours a king and a king Christ is, the King of all Creation; frankincense is an exotic resin and gum that when burned gives off a lovely odor; it signifies prayer which rises like the smoke to heaven, to God; myrrh, of course, is the most disturbing of the three gifts of the magi for it is an ancient burying spice and reminds us profoundly of the mission of Christ, the mystery of redemption, which entails Christ’s death on the Cross. It signifies Christ as sacrifice.

Three gifts that honour Christ and teach us about who Christ is and who he is for us. They are, as the hymn puts it, “sacred gifts of mystic meaning.” They teach us about Christ the King who is God and Sacrifice. The gifts of the Magi challenge us about the gifts we give and the gifts we receive.

It opens us out to one of the paradoxes of the Christian Faith. God gives us everything. Give everything back to God. You can’t. What can we give him? As the carol wonderfully puts it, ‘I’ll give him my heart.’ God seeks our good, the good of our whole being, so much so that he has come as the lowly babe of Bethlehem. The gifts make visible how great that little one truly is. He is God and King and Sacrifice. The gifts of the Magi honour who Christ is. They challenge us to honour one another.

“They presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Epiphany
January 5^th, 2012

I love this passage from St. Luke’s gospel. Not just at Christmas but as a maxim for the life of the Church, year in and year out. And how wonderful that it is heard, year in and year out, on New Year’s Day, at the ending of one civil year and the beginning of another! How perplexing though that what is kept and pondered in the heart of Mary is connected with what must seem to be a most arcane and disturbing event, the circumcision of Christ.

The rite is associated with what it means to be Jewish. In the context of the Gospel, it is intended to be understood in terms of Christ’s submission to the Law, the Torah, in its particular forms. An allegiance and loyalty to what is transcendent and utterly beyond the phenomenal world is signaled in the flesh, in what is simply most, well, there is no getting around it, most male. Intriguingly, in more modern times, until very recently, the medical profession, especially in North America, tried to provide medical reasons for the practice.

This misses the point historically and religiously from the standpoint of ancient Israel and contributes very little to the metaphorical transformation that circumcision undergoes via the New Testament, especially through Paul. The circumcision of the heart, he argues, is what is necessary for our true commitment to God, not simply some questionable surgical procedure, about which there continues to be debate within and without Judaism, a debate which is only heightened by the disturbing and hideous matter of female genital mutilation in Arabic countries closely associated with the aspects of African tribalism. There is simply no getting around these things in the contemporary culture. There is, instead, the need to think through them and beyond them but in a way that does complete justice to the foundational principles of Christianity and Judaism and Islam.

On that score, Mary’s response to what is said and heard about her son is most instructive and profound. She ponders, weighs within herself, the meaning of what is being said. It is not too much to say that what is being said about the Child Christ is written in the flesh, circumscribed on the heart, circumcised in the core of our being spiritually, we might say. In a way, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ is the fullest possible affirmation of the very flesh and being of our humanity at the same time as it is the most complete liberation of our being. The things of the body have become the perfect vehicles of the matters of the spirit. This does not mean a kind of antinominian rejection of the law; it conveys, instead, the deeper concept that laws have to be held accountable to intellectual and spiritual principles. Without that they become perfectly hideous and altogether tyrannous.

What Luke reveals here about Mary in the context of the nativity narratives is absolutely profound. It signals the very life of the Church, the precise attitude of the Christian soul. We cannot be like Christ if we are not like Mary. Her attitude is the quintessential attitude of faith, namely, a thinking upon the things that are said and a loving appropriation of all the words of Christ into our hearts. Only so is our love the weight of our being, to use Augustine’s wonderful phrase which arises, I think, out of this passage from Luke. Pondus meum amor meus. Love is the weight of my soul. In the long end of the day, we are and we shall be measured by our love.

Christmas is the feast of divine love. God embraces our humanity in the intimacy of Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Our humanity finds its fullest expression in the ‘yes’ of Mary to the Divine will by which God becomes man without ceasing to be God. This is the profoundest mystery and one with the profoundest consequences.

It is the precise counter to our contemporary dis-ease and disarray. We want to collapse what is absolute and perfect into the realm of the relative and the imperfect and incomplete. The Incarnation is about the exact opposite. It argues that the world of flesh and matter only has meaning and comprehension through the divine embrace of that world in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.

The story shows us the fullest possible affirmation of human dignity and purpose. It is captured in the figure of Mary, keeping all the things that are said about her son and child and pondering them in her heart; in short, weighing the meaning of such things, even as she has been the bearer of that meaning into our world and day. Through her, “the Word [is] made flesh and dwel[s] among us” and we behold a whole new way of looking at ourselves and our world and day, seeing everything as belonging to the glory of God in which we find the truth of our humanity.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in his Christmas Sermon, referred to the 350th commemoration of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer in 2012, “a book,” he said, “that defined what a whole society said to God together,” and as providing “a source of vision for an entire society.” It is, as he noted “a treasury of words and phrases that are still for countless English-speaking people the nearest you can come to an adequate language for the mysteries of faith. It gives us words that say where and who we are before God;” in short, a way of responding to the Word like Mary. It requires our hearing and keeping those words, and pondering them in our heart. Only so can they begin to be expressed in our lives.

He noted that “we’re much the poorer for forgetting it and pushing it to the margins as much as we often do in the Church. And it is crucial to remember the point about the Prayer Book as something for a whole society, binding together our obligations to God and to one another, in a dense interweaving of love and duty joyfully performed.”

Because of that “the coming year’s celebration is not a museum piece,” he stated. The Prayer Book if used thoughtfully and prayerfully in worship teaches us “how to join up” what the Archbishop called “the muddle of [our] experience in a coherent pattern by relating it to the unchanging truth and grace of God.” It is our constant struggle to let the Word of God that is heard and proclaimed define us. For “once the word is spoken in the world, there is no way back. Your response to it, says the gospel again and again, is what shows who and what you really are, what is deepest in you, what means most;” in short, the love that is the weight of your being. I pray that we may take these words to heart and that we may be worthy of the spiritual legacy that defines our Anglican identity especially in a year that will mark as well the 50th anniversary of the 1962 Book of Common Prayer, the only modern, post-World War II Prayer Book that stands in conscience fidelity to the Common Prayer tradition captured in the 1662 book.

Today, on the Octave Day of Christmas, we are bidden to ponder the mystery of “the Word made flesh,” to see in Bethlehem the holy significance of God’s great will and purpose for our humanity. Our task is nothing less and nothing more than to keep all the things that have been said in the witness of the Scriptures about the child Christ and to ponder them in our hearts. It is nothing less than to be thoughtfully engaged with the Scriptural witness to the Incarnation. Its truth challenges our world and day, then and now. But always, the Church is called to be like Mary, keeping these things and pondering them in her heart. Such is the mystery and the wonder of Christmas. Such is the glorious beginning of each and every New Year.

“But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”

Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Christmas, New Years
January 1st, 2012

It is a compelling and yet a most disturbing Christmas story but, like the other festal days of Christmas, it reflects upon the deeper meaning of Christ’s holy birth. Unlike the commemorations of St. Stephen and St. John, however, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, as this day has come to be called, actually belongs to the narratives of the nativity.

Like so many biblical passages, the story is multi-layered. It is, on the one hand, an account of the fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy about the Messiah. “Out of Egypt have I called my son,” locating the Flight into Egypt in terms of a New Testament riff on the Exodus story of Pharaoh’s policy of infanticide as a way of controlling the minority worker population of the Hebrews within Egypt. Here it takes on a further political aspect: Herod’s fear of a child-king who would be a rival to his throne.

Joseph takes Mary and the child Christ into Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath and fury but “out of Egypt” Jesus the Son will return to Nazareth and beyond to bring redemption to all people just as Moses led the people of the Hebrews out of the Pharonic captivity and into the wilderness to become the people of God, the people of the Law. On that score alone it is a powerful narrative and unfolds before our eyes something of the Christian understanding of divine Providence at work in and through the Scriptures.

It is, on the other hand, a powerful story about the meaning of redemption in the face of the most horrible sufferings and loss that is imaginable; the slaughter of little children. The Collect takes our breath away with its incredible insight that “thou madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths.” It is for many utterly unthinkable, a most disturbing claim that unsettles us and makes us most uncomfortable. I fear that for some this story and the theological idea expressed in the Collect is so revolting that they become atheists. The scene, even as told in the restrained language of Matthew, is such an affront to our conceptions of justice, especially divine justice. How revolting and impossible to say, at least at first glance, that children were made to die for Christ’s glory!

At first glance. And, of course, as Voltaire, the great philosophe and wit of the 18^th century, recognized about all such statements of theodicy (the justice of God); they lend themselves so easily to parody and satirical ridicule. Such is the nature of his tour de force, his novel, Candide, itself an extended take-off on the philosopher Leibniz’ statement that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” How does that jive with the many, many forms of human suffering both natural and human?

The Feast of the Holy Innocents reminds us inescapably of the harsh cruelties of the world of power and politics unhinged from intellectual and moral principles. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” as Lord Acton put it. In the biblical and philosophical understanding of politics, the misuse of power is a willful forgetting of the divine power upon which all power derives and all power depends. “Thou couldest have no power at all over me,” Jesus says to Pilate, “except it were given thee from above.”

The Feast of Holy Innocents makes an important theological point and one which certainly does not avoid the harshness of human suffering but addresses it head on. We live in a world of atrocities where the abuse and slaughter of children is constant: from the killing fields of Rwanda to the famines of the Sudan; from the sexual exploitation of children to the modern form of infanticide known as abortion. In every case, the powerless and the voiceless, the innocent and the infant, are the victims of those who wield a kind of power over them, however complicated their own situations may be. The theological point is that God’s grace and love is greater than the horrific and horrendous forms of our misuse of power. There is, perhaps, no tougher lesson and yet no greater lesson than what The  Feast of the Holy Innocents proclaims.

For it says that the deaths of the little ones are not in vain. It says that the deaths of the little ones participate by anticipation in the sacrifice of God’s “great little one,” born in the stable of Bethlehem and who is Christ the Saviour. Holy Innocents reminds us of the meaning of the one who comes as Redeemer and whose redemption extends to the victims of the darkest acts of human cruelty and ambition, folly and wickedness. To my mind, such teachings are what make us believers. There is nothing sentimental and trivial about the Christian faith. We face the full horror of our human potential for evil in this feast and yet we contemplate the compassion and providence of God at work in and through our evil. Otherwise we remain atheists but in reality, dualists, facing an incomprehensible world of rigidly opposed principles of good acts and bad but without any way of understanding the divisions within our own hearts let alone any way of dealing with human suffering and its overcoming.

The Feast of Holy Innocents places all the deaths of the little ones with the sacrifice of Christ as “being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb.” Our hearts may be broken, like “Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not,” but our hearts are also opened to the healing grace of God because in the mercies of Christ we may place them through prayer with Christ. To do so is to contend against the abuse of all of the children of God.

The Holy Innocents are not outside the embrace of Christ’s redemption of the world and our humanity. They are a telling instance of its radical meaning.

“These were redeemed from among men,
being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb”

Fr. David Curry
Feast of the Holy Innocents
December 28^th, 2011

No one more fully conveys the deep wonder and mystery of Christmas than John the Evangelist commemorated on the second day after Christmas. The Prologue of his Gospel has been the great Christmas gospel for more than a millennium and a half; his epistles, too, provide the most theological apologia for the essential doctrine that Christmas celebrates, namely, the doctrine of the Incarnation.

From the blood-soaked ground of Stephen’s martyrdom we rise on eagles’ wings to the contemplative vision of John. It is his insight into what we see and hear that makes the Christmas mystery. The theological insight of John informs most profoundly what comes to be the Church’s creedal proclamation. This child is “the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light; Very God of Very God; Begotten not made.” Such creedal statements echo the words of John at Christmas. Without doubt such statements are the fruit of a theological reflection upon John’s witness. “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you,” he says. And that which has been seen and declared to us is “that which was from the beginning,” a phrase which captures at once the opening phrase of his Gospel, itself a commentary on the opening statement of The Book of Genesis. “In the beginning God”… “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

In the epistle reading for his Christmas feast day, “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life” is the essential revelation of the Word made flesh. And like the Christmas gospel, the purpose of this holy understanding is also revealed, namely, “that ye also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” The essential Christmas message is about God with us.

Theology is a dance of prepositions. The preposition of Advent is the word ‘towards;’ the whole season celebrates the idea of God’s coming towards us in the Word and divine Person of Jesus Christ. The great preposition of Christmas is the little word, ‘with’. God is with us. That mystery is also the great mystery of God himself; the Word who is with God and who is God opens us out to the very life of God himself without which his being with us is, well, rather small beer indeed. John opens us out to the mystery of the Trinity through the mystery of the Incarnation.

The miracle and wonder of Christmas lies in John’s insight that God has entered into the very fabric of our world and day in the intimacy of the humanity of Jesus Christ. All that is distinctive in Christian theology and all that connects it to the great traditions of Jewish and Greek thought are captured in John’s crucial and essential insight about “the Word made flesh,” a phrase that is absolutely central to Christian life and doctrine.

The First Epistle of John is a defense of the Incarnation. We can sense, I think, his intellectual excitement and sense of wonder about what he has come to understand and his determination to unfold that wonder to us, refusing to let it be compromised or denied. “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, That God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”

“Without forsaking what he was,” namely God, “he became what he was not,” namely man, as Athanasius, a later disciple, we might say, of the theological thinking of John puts it. It is upon such insights that the true nature of Christian fellowship with God and with one another ultimately depends. It is a divine fellowship that is about eternal life manifested to us in Jesus Christ and in which we participate even now through the sacramental life of the Church. Such is the wonder of Christmas, we might say, the wonder of Emmanuel, of God with us. It is the great gift of God to our world and our humanity.

The Collect for this day emphasizes the essential nature of John’s witness. We pray for those “bright beams of light” for the life of the Church, praying that the Church may be “enlightened by the doctrine” of John and may “so walk in the light” of that truth. No Christmastide prayer, perhaps, speaks more directly to our contemporary confusions and uncertainties. Is John’s witness just so much theological bafflegab? Utter nonsense to a people immersed in the sensual and the empirical? Isn’t Jesus whatever he means to me?

The Gospel reading for his feast day is taken from the last chapter of the Gospel according to St. John. It is a kind of testament to his own witness. An encounter between Jesus and Peter about following Christ is described within which a debate about “the disciple whom Jesus loved” who “also leaned on his breast at supper” is also related. “This is the disciple which beareth witness of these things and wrote these things, and we know that his witness is true,” we are told. But do we? And how? For the contemporary Church and for what passes for theology in contemporary circles, the writings of John are given rather short shrift historically. They are regarded as being later in their composition than the writings of Matthew, Mark and Luke and, of course, later than the writings of Paul.

That is to assume that whatever is earliest is somehow more true; a questionable assumption. Certainly for the bulk of the Christian tradition, historically speaking John’s Gospel has had a kind of primacy theologically. Distinguishing the synoptic gospels as they have come to be called, namely Matthew, Mark and Luke, from John’s gospel, is a modern way of speaking that belongs to a sense of historical narrative as having primacy. But by definition, the historical aspect of things is much harder to determine. In the long end of the day, notwithstanding an almost endless series of theories and hypotheses, all we really have are the texts themselves. About the historical Jesus, suffice to say and safe to say that there is general scholarly consensus about his existence, but who exactly he is and who he thought he was continues to be the subject area of much discussion, assertion and opinion of varying quality.

The Feast of John sets before us the theological understanding of orthodox Christianity. It provides the essential insight and understanding of the Christian faith about who Jesus is and what he means for us and for our humanity. The historical questions are located within the primacy of the theological. “This then is the message.” And it is for our joy and for our good.

“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you”

Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. John the Evangelist
December 27^th, 2011