Christ Church

“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. … Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.”

Nothing concentrates the meaning of Christmas more directly and more disturbingly, perhaps, than the Feast of St. Stephen celebrated on the day after Christmas. He is commemorated as the first martyr, the proto-martyr, whose witness, for that is the proper meaning of martyr, namely, witness, is the prototype, the model of all martyrdom. As the lesson from The Book of the Acts of the Apostles makes abundantly clear, Stephen achieves his eponymous crown (stephanos in Greek means crown) by losing his life not simply at the stone-throwing hands of a vicious mob but by losing himself in Jesus Christ. He has taken the Christ whose holy birth we have just celebrated as the model of life itself, the life of forgiveness. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit… Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” Suddenly, the Christmas mystery illumines the mystery of the Passion of Christ and vice versa.

Following Christ is our Christian vocation. The Feast of Stephen opens out to us the radical nature of that following. It is to let the life of Christ define your outlook and being. More poignantly, it is to let the essential element of sacrifice and forgiveness have complete rule and sway. The Feast of Stephen is one of the three holy days of Christmas that open out to us the radical meaning of Christ’s holy birth. Human redemption comes with a price, the heart-blood of the Son of God become the Son of Man. Our witness, too, necessarily means sacrifice … and forgiveness.

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“And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city”

Nothing is more certain in this world than death and taxes, it is commonly said, a saying attributed to Daniel Defoe and Benjamin Franklin. How intriguing that death and taxes should be the features of the two centers of Christian contemplation: Bethlehem and the mystery of Christmas; Jerusalem and the mystery of Easter! Somehow God uses the matter of our common mortality, death, and the matter of our social and political lives, taxes, to teach us about his grace and goodness. Easter is the overcoming of death by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the mystery which is centered on Jerusalem. Christmas is the birth of Child Christ, which is centered on Bethlehem, where Christ is born because of the decree of Caesar Augustus “that all the world should be taxed.”

It is, I think, a pleasing overstatement which captures the power and the extent of the Roman Empire into which world Christ is born. Somehow all of the mechanisms of Empire and Government become, in spite of themselves, the instruments of divine and heavenly providence. In a way, it is the logic of the Incarnation itself; God embraces and redeems his Creation to himself. Even by way of taxation!

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“Of his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace”

Christmas, it seems, is all about excess, about fullness. At least, in our material culture we want it to be about more and more, whether it will be or not is our contemporary anxiety and worry. Christmas sometimes seems to be altogether too much of a muchness, whether it is gifts or food (or books!) or drink or parties or more and more anxieties. The pressures can be altogether too much; the pressures are great to get it all just right, whatever that means.

The paradoxes are even greater. Christ is born in a lowly stable. We want the glitter and glitz, the dazzling brightness of gold and silver, of rich silks and perfumes, of gadgets that whirl and whizz, of wine and chocolate, of all manner of sensual delights. We want the more and more of all that delights the senses only to find that it is, perhaps, really all too much, a sensory overload, and yet empty and nothing. We are caught up too much with ourselves only to find that we have missed the real meaning of Christmas. We have missed the real paradox of God’s great little one who brings us so much and more than we can ever embrace and comprehend, so much and more spiritually.

It is not about the stuff. It is about God with us, “the Word made flesh,” the mystery of Emmanuel, the great blessing which is the extravagance of God’s grace, even “grace upon grace.” “Of his fullness have we all received.”

Lost in the desire for ‘stuff & things’ (sounds like the name of a new chain of stores), we forget the greater mystery. It is not the mystery of matter, an endless succession of stuff and things; no, Christmas is the mystery of God’s embrace of our world and humanity. It is the mystery of human redemption and the redemption of creation itself. The extravagance of Christmas is God’s embrace of the material world, its redemption, we might say, that allows the world of our material pleasures to become the greater vehicles of heavenly grace, if only we will behold and see.

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“The Lord is at hand”

Advent is the season of watching and waiting. So we have been saying, over and over again, it seems. Yet it needs to be said and it needs to be heard. There are always four Sundays of Advent that bring us to Christmas but there are not always four full weeks of Advent. This year the Advent season is as long as it can possibly be because Christmas falls on a Sunday. We get the full benefit of the Advent season, if we will take advantage of this time of watching and waiting. We need it for it is the counter to what I sometimes call the ‘frenectitude’, if I may coin a term, for this frantic and frenetic time. Our busyness becomes a kind of mindless madness. I speak, I am afraid to say, from personal experience!

We need the quiet darkness of Advent, especially in a culture of fearful anxiety. “In nothing be anxious,” Paul tells us this morning, literally “be not careful” in its older translation by William Tyndale, meaning be not so full of cares and worries. “Rejoice in the Lord,” Paul says. And, then, speaking to a culture of excess, he says, “let your moderation be known unto all men.” Moderation. And what is the antidote to our frantic frenetic busyness? Prayer. “Prayer and supplication with thanksgiving,” he says. And prayer in its most basic sense is all about asking. And asking is all about questions. And Advent is all about the questions; questions that catapult us into the presence of the one who comes. They are intrinsic to the watching and waiting. They are our watching and waiting. Advent is the season of questions.

What is our watching and waiting? It is our watching and waiting expectantly, our watching and waiting in hope, our looking and longing for something more and better, for some greater good, for blessedness. Advent is, in every way, the season of hope.

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“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the Churches”

Two figures dominate the spiritual landscape of Advent. They are John the Baptist and Mary, the Mother of our Lord. Together they illuminate something of the meaning of Advent for us. The one points to Christ; the other carries the hope of the world in her womb. Nothing can come to birth in us unless their complementary yet contrasting attitudes to Christ are realised in our lives.

John the Baptist calls us to repentance. He calls us to a fundamental change of outlook, a new orientation, a constant metanoia, which is nothing less than a radical transformation of attitude requiring renunciation and repudiation; in short, a resolute ‘no’ to the world.  Mary calls us to a willing acceptance of the one who comes. “Be it unto me according to thy Word.” Her ‘yes’ to God embodies the very nature of faith itself.

The Word made flesh comes to birth through her because that Word now fully defines her being. It marks an ever deepening understanding of the Mystery to which she so completely gives herself. It is borne out of her faithful hearing, her constant attentiveness to the Word and Son of God.

These two figures recall us to the profounder principles of our spiritual identity. They challenge us about our engagement with the world, to be sure, but without being taken captive by either the rhetoric of an idealised future or the rhetoric of an idealised past. They recall us to God in the motions of his love towards us. Let him who has an ear “hear what the Spirit says to the Churches.” In a way, as Augustine remarks somewhere, “the Scriptures are like letters from home,” perhaps, even emails, we might say; they remind us of who we are essentially and spiritually.

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“Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see.”

Two figures dominate the spiritual landscape of Advent. They are John the Baptist and Mary, the Mother of our Lord. Together they illuminate something of the meaning of Advent for us. The one points to Christ; the other carries the hope of the world in her womb. Nothing can come to birth in us unless their complementary yet contrasting attitudes to Christ are realised in our lives.

&John the Baptist calls us to repentance. His cry is the mantra of Advent: “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He calls us to a fundamental change of outlook, a new orientation, a constant metanoia, which is nothing less than a radical transformation of attitude requiring renunciation and repudiation; in short, a resolute ‘no’ to the world.  Mary calls us to a willing acceptance of the one who comes. “Be it unto me according to thy Word.” Her ‘yes’ to God embodies the very nature of faith itself.

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The Psalms of David are the Prayer Book and Hymnal of both Jews and Christians alike. Classified in the Jewish understanding as one of the Writings, as distinct from the Law and the Prophets, the Psalms embrace a wide range of poetic forms of expression. The Psalter serves as a way of praying the Scriptures.

Among the many treatises of Augustine, one of the most charming and instructive devotionally is his Enarrations or Expositions on the Book of Psalms. For the English reader, it was only translated in the 19^th century as part of the project of recovering the Patristic heritage of the Church, an interest both in England and on the continent. E.B. Pusey, one of the outstanding figures of the Oxford Movement, provided in December of 1857 an advertisement for the translation into English of Augustine’s work on the Psalms. As he remarks,

St. Augustin was so impressed with the sense of the depth of Holy Scripture, that when it seems to him, on the surface, plainest, then he is the more assured of its hidden depth. True to this belief, St. Augustin pressed out word by word of Holy Scripture, and that, always in dependence on the inward teaching of God the Holy Ghost who wrote it, until he had extracted some fullness of meaning from it. More also, perhaps, than any other work of St. Augustin, this commentary abounds in those condensed statements of doctrinal and practical truth which are so instructive, because at once so comprehensive and so accurate.

This doctrinal and practical sensibility about the Psalms means, of course, that they are read in the light of a certain theology of Revelation. They are not read as a mine of historical information and they are not read ‘critically’ as that term has become to be used by the schools of biblical and historical criticism, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are read with a certain insight into the nature of Scriptural Revelation. In Augustine’s case, they are read entirely from a Christian perspective as bearing constant testimony to Jesus as the fulfilling of the Law.

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“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.”

There is an ancient advent tradition about preaching on the Four Last Things: Death and Judgment, Hell and Heaven. The doctrine of the Last Things is called Eschatology. It is a part of the creedal understanding of the Christian Faith. At first glance, it may seem a rather dark and gloomy set of concepts; things that perhaps we would rather not think about at all.

The theme of judgment certainly appears in this Sunday’s gospel and certainly there is a disturbing aspect to it. “Signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars;” Jesus says, “and upon earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.” Such words are apocalyptic, cosmic and cataclysmic and such words are a feature of the advent of Christ. “Then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.” This is, we might say, Luke’s Apocalypse. Yet what is at issue is not simply the idea of the end times or the idea of a cosmic judgment but our attitude and approach to judgment.

The strong message of this Sunday in Advent is that we can look upon these things with hope because of what is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures. Apocalypse means the unveiling of what lies hidden; in short, revelation. The very last book of the New Testament is the Book of the Revelation – the Apocalypse- of St. John the Divine. And far from being a book of predictions about when the end times will come, an interest which has fascinated people down throughout the ages and led to no end of prophecies about days and dates which, of course, as Jesus says, “no one can know,” we are offered an imaginative and brilliant way of thinking things from the perspective of eternity. In a way, that is what is being opened out to view.

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“Their sound went out into all the earth,
and their words unto the end of the world.”

Andrew is the Advent saint. Sometimes his feast day anticipates Advent and at other times, it falls within the first week of Advent, as it does this year. In either case, he begins the cycle of the Church’s commemoration of the Saints throughout the course of the year. And, as always, there is something rich and significant about beginnings.

Andrew is recognized as the patron saint of Scotland and, therefore, of New Scotland, Nova Scotia, as well. Scotland, not to mention Nova Scotia, is a long ways from the land of the New Testament, a long ways from the setting of the story of the calling of the brothers Simon Peter and Andrew, and the brothers Zebedee, James and John, a long ways from the sea of Galilee. It reminds us of the missionary impulse of the Christian faith. Which is not to say that Andrew ever laid eyes on either!

Yet, the spiritual point is clear. Those who follow Jesus become the ones who proclaim Jesus and make him known even “unto the ends of the world.” For much of the first millennium or more, Scotland must often to have seemed to be the very end of the world. Perhaps, too, the same might be said of Nova Scotia. And yet, the word has gone forth on the wings of the saints and carried forward by their witness to Jesus Christ. Critical to that witness, as the readings on this feast day reminds us, is the Scripture. The Feast of Andrew belongs to that pageant of Word and Song which is part and parcel of the Advent of Christ.

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“This man came to Jesus by night”

It is a most intriguing scene. Nicodemus, a learned Pharisee, “a teacher of Israel,” comes to Jesus by night. He is perplexed about who Jesus is. He calls him “Rabbi,” and says that Jesus is “a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him.” There is something compelling about Jesus, about what he does and what he says. And yet, there is something mysterious and perplexing.

At this point in John’s Gospel, there has been really only “the first of the signs which Jesus did,” namely, the miracle at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, the turning of the water into wine. That story is followed by John’s account of the cleansing of the temple which we also heard this morning from Matthew’s Gospel. In John’s Gospel, the story of the cleansing of the temple leads to a discourse about the temple, about its “being destroyed and raised in three days,” meaning, as John says, “the temple of his body,” a reference to the death and resurrection of Christ. John tells us that “many believed in his name when they saw the signs which he did.” It is in that context that Nicodemus then comes to him by night.

The dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus is all about the light in the darkness, the light of God’s truth and the darkness of human hearts. The light, as John makes clear, is judgment, too. “The light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” Yet in the darkness Jesus confronts Nicodemus with the idea of being “born anew,” being born from above, being born upwards into the light of God coming towards us in Jesus. What he is talking about are “heavenly things.” They belong to the challenge of Revelation. Spiritual and heavenly things are made known to us in the pageant of God’s Word and Son. The light of God comes down to lift us up into the light of divine understanding.

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