Year: 2009

“Thou art the man!”

Advent is the season of Revelation. It reminds us that Scripture, as the revealed Word of God, reveals something about our selves and something about God. “Thou art the man”, Nathan says. What does it mean? The story of David and Nathan suggests the interplay of two metaphors of understanding that belong to a theology of revelation. Scripture, we might say, is both a mirror and a window: a mirror in which we are allowed to see the truth of ourselves and a window through which we are privileged to glimpse something of the glory of God. A mirror and a window.

The story of David is not only one of the great narrative sequences in the Scriptures; it is also, as the poet and preacher John Donne suggests, the story of Everyman. “His Person includes all states, between a shepherd and a King”, a poet and a warrior, too, we might add, one who sings and one who acts. In a way, David epitomises the whole of Israel and by extension the whole of humanity. That is partly why the Davidic lineage of Jesus is so important in the New Testament. But David epitomises the whole of Israel and the whole of our humanity, not only in its truth but also in its untruth. “His sinne includes all sinne”, Donne remarks, “we need no other Example to discover to us the slippery wayes into sin, or the penitential wayes out of sin, than …. David”.

We do not have windows into one another’s souls, as that wise woman theologian, Queen Elizabeth the First, observed long ago. We hardly know ourselves. Those prerogatives belong to God and to God alone. “The Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart”, it is famously said. It is actually said about David. In the story of David we are given to see the heart of David which God sees and in it we are given to see something about ourselves. In the story of David we are given to see the mirror in which David confronts himself in his sinfulness and the window through which he sees God in his chastening mercy. The mirror which Nathan holds up is the parable which he tells the King, the parable which challenges and convicts. What has David done? Well, everything and more.

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“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly.”

The Sunday Next Before Advent brings us to the end of the ecclesiastical year and so to the beginning of yet another. It brings us to the end of the Trinity season in a kind of summing up of the whole pageant of grace and it brings us to the beginning of the Advent season when we begin again with the grace of God’s turning and coming to us.

There is something profound and wonderful in these moments of transition, something which suggests the true nature of the dynamic of faith. And yet there is a kind of ambiguity as well. Do we end the year on a note of weariness and exhaustion? Too many books, so little time? “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” after all, whether it be books in print or e-books. Are we frustrated and perplexed with the relentless sameness of yet another year, a year in which, once again, there seems to be no progress, no change from the endless and dismal stories of hardship and struggle? If anything, it might seem that there is more grief and trouble, more sadness and dismay. “Everybody knows, that’s the way it goes”, as Leonard Cohen’s song puts it rather cynically. It may seem that we have been “fed with the bread of tears” and have had “plenteousness of tears to drink” as the psalmist puts it (Ps. 80).

Do we end, as Ecclesiastes seems to suggest, simply with the sombre awareness of death and mortality, the feebleness of old age and the barrenness of winter? “That time of year,” as Shakespeare puts it, “when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” an image which evokes at once old age and ecclesiastical ruins; a pile of holy stones, a Tintern Abbey centuries before Wordsworth.

Do we end, then, weary and worn with the attempts to take the world by storm only to find that the mysteries of life continue to elude us? If so, then we end well, it seems to me. Because to confront the vanities of our pursuits and ambitions is to stand on the brink of a great wisdom, the wisdom of God which alone can redeem and heal our weary souls.

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“Come and see”

Scripture sounds the notes of an ending and a beginning on this day which is called, in a wonderful combination of prepositions, The Sunday Next before Advent. This day both concludes the course of the Son’s life in us, “the Lord our Righteousness” as we hear in the lesson from Jeremiah, and returns us to the beginning of the course he runs for us, “Behold the Lamb of God” as John the Baptist says about Jesus in the Gospel. The righteousness of Christ, the right ordering of our loves and our lives, is what we have sought in the long course of the Trinity season. The course he runs for us is the way of the cross, the way of sacrifice. We travel with him in that way in the pageant of faith from Advent to Trinity. We begin again even as we end in him.

Such times of transition signal occasions of renewal – a renewal of love, a re-awakening of the soul’s desire for holy things, a divine stirring up of our wills, as the Collect for today reminds us. We come to the Advent of Christ. Advent is the season of God’s revelation, the motion of God’s Word and Son towards us for the sake of our knowing. Our text sounds the measure of the season and beyond the season strikes the note of our soul’s salvation. “Come and see”.

In St. John’s Gospel, this is Jesus’ first statement. It comes in response to the disciples’ answer to his very first gospel utterance, a question which he puts to them and to us, “What seek ye?” They answer with a question that has a twofold significance: “Rabbi (which means Teacher), where are you staying?” Here is no question of idle curiosity, but one which is deep and profound. It speaks about the yearning of our hearts and the desiring of our minds. It speaks about the awakened desire of the soul for God. But how is the question twofold? By its address as well as its request.

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The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, delivered this sermon at King’s College, Halifax, on the Feast of Saint Edmund, 2008.

“Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of the sufferings of Christ”

November is the grey month of remembering. It embraces at once the great harvest festivals of All Saints and All Souls as well as the secular remembering of those who gave their lives in the service of their country in the great and defining wars of that most bloody of bloody centuries, the twentieth century. It ends with the spiritual summa of the parade of sanctifying grace on the Sunday Next Before Advent that equally brings us, in turn, to the renewed beginnings of Advent itself, the start of the progress of justifying grace, yet again. In between are a host of minor commemorations which provide a kind of meditative faux bourdon, the sweet middle at an interval of a fourth below the melody, a poignant resonance of individual spiritual lives illustrating in a personal way the grander themes of our spiritual remembering.

Edmund, King and Martyr, is one such November commemoration. Along with Hilda, the remarkably tough-minded Abbess of Whitby, two centuries before, whose commemoration was on Monday, November 17^th, Edmund contributes to an early English interlude in our November reflections on the pageant of glory and grace. Edmund was the King of East Anglia, martyred in 870 at the hands of the Danes, raiders whose incursions and visits to the England and other places wrought great terror in the hearts of all who met them. His life complements and illumines the spiritual scenery of the great epic poem of the English language, The Epic of Beowulf.

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