by CCW | 11 May 2009 10:46
The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon at St. George’s Round Church[1], Halifax, for Choral Evensong, Easter IV[2].
First, allow me to thank your Rector, Fr. Westhaver for the privilege of being here this evening, and secondly, allow me to compliment the choir for such a wonderful musical offering of the “Five Mystical Songs[3]” of Ralph Vaughan Williams based on the poems of George Herbert.
Given the fears, worries and uncertainties about swine flu and the media attention on King’s-Edgehill School, where I am the Chaplain and teach, it seemed to me that “Touch me not” might not be an appropriate text for the sermon! We will have to make due with “a certain beggar named Lazarus.”
“Lazarus, come out!” Jesus says, but that is to another Lazarus, an actual figure and a friend of Jesus in The Gospel of St. John and not the fictional figure of the parable which Jesus tells which we heard tonight from The Gospel of St. Luke. Lazarus, the friend of Jesus, had been dead four days and buried for three, “Lord, he stinketh,” Martha tells Jesus. It is the setting for Jesus words, “Lazarus, come out;” he is restored to life, a resuscitation anticipating Jesus’ own Resurrection and a sign of divine love. “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awake him,” Jesus says, and, lest there be any ambiguity about the phrase, he tells the disciples plainly, “Lazarus is dead.” He goes to awaken him, to bring life and healing, the renewal of fellowship and joy, but only out of the encounter with suffering and sorrow. “Jesus wept. So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’” Healing and resurrection flow out of the generosity and compassion of divine love.
But of course, no good deed goes unpunished. “Six days before the Passover,” John tells us, Jesus was in Bethany at the house of Martha and Mary and Lazarus. The scene at Bethany with Mary’s anointing the feet of Jesus prefigures the Passion. But others, learning that he was there, came not only to see Jesus, but “also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.” The consequence of the raising of Lazarus only adds to the animosity against Jesus, but Lazarus, too, becomes a target. “The chief priests planned to put Lazarus also to death, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus.” Animosities and resentments are par for the course, especially in the face of any kind of perceived good or benefit received by others.
What, you may ask, does any of this have to do with this evening’s readings? I know, I have just broken all the rules of homiletics, speaking about a passage of Scripture which you haven’t heard in the readings of the liturgy tonight and with which you may not be particularly familiar! My only defense is George Herbert.
Poetry, especially the metaphysical poetry of the early 17th century abounds in allusion and metaphor, conceit and learning, connection and contrast, a veritable garden of the unlikely “yoking together of heterogeneous things,” as the more prosaic world of the eighteenth century saw it, and as Dr. Samuel Johnson put it. And not without reason, though almost missing the reason of it, but, perhaps, I digress, though not as much as a Laurence Sterne or a T.S. Eliot! No. The point is more simple. Poetry and theology consort with images and allusions, of which Scripture itself is a most potent and primary source.
Herbert’s poetry captures the range of allusions and references to Scripture, to tradition, to the history of culture in terms of natural philosophy and reason, art and music, prayer and meditation, not to mention the domesticities of everyday life. Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Five Mystical Songs” offer, I think, a wonderful musical meditation upon the divine generosity that has so captivated and captured the soul of Anglicanism’s “sweet[est] singer of God’s praises.”
For Herbert, one could not mention one Lazarus without invoking the other Lazarus and seeing a measure of the complementarities between them both. It is not too much to say that we have lost that habit of mind.
Herbert’s poem Easter, from which the first two of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Five Mystical Songs” are taken, begins with the phrase “Rise heart; thy Lord is risen.” It captures the message of the epistle for Easter day “if ye be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above.” There is, like Dante in the Purgatorio, an awakening from the grave of poetry, music and life, “for you have died and your life is hid with Christ in God.” “Awake, my lute,” the poet says, and “struggle for thy part/ with all thy art,” for to sing God’s praises is no easy or casual matter. There is the struggle to live the new life that has been given. It comes with a cost that Herbert would not have us overlook. The cost is the Cross.
The tonal qualities of his poetry are like music itself and nowhere, perhaps, more poignantly and beautifully than in the image of the Cross as a musical instrument that tunes our lives to God. In an image worthy of Venantius Fortunatus’ Passiontide Hymns, Vexilla Regis and Pange Lingua, Herbert suggests that “the crosse taught all wood to resound his name/Who bore the same” and extends the metaphor to catch the hideous realities of the Crucifixion which somehow have become beauteous (to borrow a contrast from another poet, John Donne where “the picture of Christ crucified” is at once hideous and beauteous, a “beauteous form” that at least “assures a piteous mind.”) As Herbert puts it, “his stretched sinews taught all strings, what key/Is best to celebrate this most high day.” The image is intensely graphic and reminds us that the Resurrection does not eclipse the Crucifixion and the Death of Christ.
The tomb has become the womb of new life and we may find the grave a garden where we may gather flowers, like the old English Easter Carol, “Good Joseph had a Garden.” But in the second Mystical Song, “I got me flowers,” the flower image relates not only to Easter morning but to Palm Sunday as anticipating not only the Passion but also the Resurrection, where the love of God in Christ runs before us, even before the contradictions and follies of human wickedness that results in the Crucifixion of Christ. The image of a garden reminds us, too, of the cosmic dimension of Christ’s Resurrection, a theme which is taken up in the last Sunday of Eastertide, Rogation Sunday, a theme which has the profoundest import for our environmental fears and anxieties. The world is God’s world, as the Archbishop of Canterbury recently put in, and while that doesn’t mean that God will save us from the perversity of thinking that the natural world is just there for human exploitation and use, it does mean that from the religious perspectives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the world that is God’s world exists for higher purposes than just us. This also speaks to the vocation of our humanity.
“Sing his praise” always and, for Herbert, that involves the praise of the whole creation; “man,” he says, “is the world’s high Priest,” whose vocation is to voice creation’s praises of the Creator, for “Onely to Man thou hast made known thy ways./And put the penne alone into his hand,/And made him Secretarie of thy praise.” It is a vocation under God’s Providence that we have forgotten in our technocratic hubris whether we presume the power to exploit or presume the power to destroy. It is the same logic.
The centrality of the creedal mysteries of Death and Resurrection underlies the devotional poetry of Herbert. Doctrine shapes devotion. The third of the Mystical Songs by Vaughan Williams draws upon one of Herbert’s most celebrated poems, Love III. The doctrinal mysteries of the Christian Faith draw us into a sacred feast, O sacrum convivium, a feast that is at once eschatological – the heavenly banquet – and sacramental – the holy Communion. The poem captures the very essence of the Anglican form of Christian life and worship. It is about the interplay of the principles of justification and sanctification, the forms of our incorporation into the life of Christ, the forms, we might say, of our relation to Christ. Those principles are seen through the counterpoint of contrition, confession and satisfaction that belongs to the structure of the liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer.
The doctrinal themes of justification and sanctification are closely and intimately connected in Herbert’s understanding. Justification is the principle of what Christ has done for us, that which makes us right with God and which belongs to the picture of human perfection, a perfection achieved and realized in Christ but yet not fully in us. It points us to the saving work of Christ, the very things that we rehearse in the Creeds and that belong to the spiritual progress of the liturgical year from Advent to Trinity Sunday. But always those things are meant to live in us. Sanctification is the principle of Christ’s life in us. That theme, which is ever-present in the pageant of justification, is exemplified more fully in practical and moral ways throughout the Trinity Season, but, of course, always by way of recalling the moments of Christ’s work and teaching.
“Love bade me welcome … Love took my hand.” The poem is an invitation. “Love bade me welcome,” but immediately there is the self-conscious awareness of a problem on our part, a problem with ourselves. Our initial response to the invitation is to draw back, “guiltie of dust and sinne.” How, then, is this separation to be overcome? “Love took my hand.” The poem shows us the divine generosity and compassion that overcomes our guilt and makes us worthy to be there at the banquet of heavenly love but only through the pattern of contrition, confession and satisfaction.
There is Contrition: “my soul drew back,/ Guiltie of dust and sinne.” There is Confession: “I the unkinde, ungratefull?”un–“worthy to be here:”“Ah my deare/I cannot look on thee.” There is Satisfaction: that he “who made the eyes,” which our sins “have marr’d,” has “bor[n]e the blame” and makes us “worthy to be here.” The poem thus concludes: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:/So I did sit and eat.”
The fourth Mystical Song is Herbert’s poem, The Call, with its three triplets of “way, truth, and life,” “light, feast and strength,” and “joy, love and heart.” It, literally, calls us out of ourselves and into the life of Christ, like Lazarus being called out of the grave. The poem perfectly unites the themes of the previous songs before the concluding fifth song, Antiphon (1), which ends the whole sequence on the high note of the Church’s praise, “Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing/My God and King.” Prayer and praise are intimately connected and belong to the soul’s response to the generous love of God in Jesus Christ.
Divine generosity. What has been given to us is meant to live in us. And, at last, we come to the Scripture readings for today! Imagine a church, a congregation, being told not to give any more for the work of the Church because they had given more than enough in response to the commandment of the Lord! Just imagine! Human generosity responding to the generous love of God! But that is what we heard in the lesson from Exodus! It is meant to inspire us and encourage us to be generous people, acting out of the generous love of God. And if we don’t? Then we are like the nameless rich man in the parable of Dives and Lazarus. Our failure to respond to the generous love of God leads to our neglect of one another. That is to neglect Christ’s story. Herbert’s poems will not allow us to trivialize Christ’s story of which the Crucifixion is so central. “Shall I then sing, skipping, thy doleful story, /and side with thy triumphant glory?” he asks in The Thanksgiving. The original line read, “shall I then sing, neglecting thy sad story.” The rich man of the parable, in neglecting Lazarus, is guilty of neglecting God.
The rich man turns out to be the poor man; the poor man, the rich man, gathered into the bosom of Abraham, to use an Old Testament image. The lesson is that “if they hear not Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” You can’t get any deader than that. The parable is all part of the teaching of the Resurrection. Our lives of service are actually lives of prayer and praise when we are open to the love of God, open to Christ’s story.
The certain beggar named Lazarus signals the resurrection hope for us all, but the parable also calls us out of ourselves to service, a service grounded not in the vagaries of social projects and political policies, but in the generous love of God. Herbert’s poetry set to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ music is not some aesthetic indulgence for spring evening in May; it is a heavenly invitation to a whole way of life. “Rise heart; thy Lord is risen.” “Love bade me welcome,” “Come my joy, my love, my heart.” “Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing.” And sing with Lazarus. As the In Paradisum puts it, “May all the Choirs of Angels welcome thee; and with Lazarus once a beggar, may God grant thee rest eternal.” We are called out like the one Lazarus and lifted up like the other Lazarus to “sing his praise” always.
Fr. David Curry
St. George’s, Halifax, NS
Choral Evensong, Easter IV
May 10th, 2009
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/05/11/sermon-for-evensong-fourth-sunday-after-easter/
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