Month: January 2010

“My soul cleaveth to the dust:
O quicken thou me, according to thy word”
(Psalm 119, pt 4, vs 25)

Dust and dirt? Quite a change from the emphasis of the Epiphany season on the essential divinity of Christ, it might seem. To be sure, with Septuagesima Sunday we mark a new beginning. We begin at the beginning. And that means, beginning, too, with dust and dirt, with the ground of creation, quite literally.

At Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, we begin reading from The Book of Genesis. In so doing, we enter into an ancient tradition. The tradition conveys ancient wisdom, namely, a profound reflection upon the mystery of Creation within the Revelation of God as Trinity.

We begin with Genesis only to find ourselves in the midst of the vineyard of creation in today’s gospel. But we begin with Genesis. It is, at once, a difficult and a necessary starting point. It is difficult because of the contemporary tendency to view the Book of Genesis in one of two ways, both of which are false. The first way is to read Genesis as a kind of scientific treatise, which it isn’t (this is the folly of creationism: bad science and bad religion). The second way is to read Genesis as a haphazard collection of fables and myths, which it isn’t.

The Book of Genesis does not propose a discovery of God; it begins with God. “In the beginning, God.” There is the proclamation of God as the absolute beginning after which everything else is secondary, after which everything else is derivative, after which everything else is a product. And while something of the Mind of the Maker, to use a famous phrase, is made known in what he makes, the Creator is not simply equated with what he makes. He is known as beyond and in control. It is his creation. The distinction between the Creator and the created is absolutely crucial.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Speak the word only”

Before I begin, let me thank Fr. Harris for the kindness of his invitation to preach this morning here at St. Peter’s. I bring you greetings from Windsor, Nova Scotia, from Christ Church and, on behalf of the Headmaster, Mr. Joe Seagram, and our assistant Headmaster, Mr. Darcy Walsh, who is also here with us this morning, I bring you greetings from King’s-Edgehill School. It is wonderful, too, that Canon Tuck, an old boy of the School, is assisting with the liturgy this morning. All these wonderful Maritime connections!

Along with my colleague, Mr. Kevin Lakes, and our Junior Boys Basketball Team consisting of Christian, Zachary, Devon, Sam, Fernando, Ryan, Ben and Tom, we have been delighted to come and play on your island and now to be able to come and pray on your island, especially here in this wonderful and holy place.

Everything is “charged with the grandeur of God,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests. But, then, there is the misery, too, the misery of suffering and death in Haiti, for instance. The grandeur and the misery. The grandeur of God meets the misery of man in the Epiphany season; “signs and wonders” abound in that meeting.

(more…)

Print this entry

Teaching is Feeding: “Thou hast the words of eternal life”

The sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel is known as “the Bread of Life Discourse.” It concerns our Lord’s teaching about himself and about the means of our abiding in him. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him” (vs.56). “The words which I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (vs.63). The last sections of this chapter (vs.41ff), which we heard this morning, indicate how hard and yet how necessary the teachings of Christ are. As Amos puts it, “they abhor him who speaks the truth” (Amos 5.10).

God teaches us about himself and about our life in him. But these are hard teachings. The Jews murmur against Jesus because of the identity they perceive he makes between himself and God, “calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5.18). They murmur against him here “because he said, I am the bread of life which came down from heaven” (John 6.41). This conflicts with what they think they know about him. “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” (vs.42). Their sense of his earthly identity gets in the way of what he would teach them. What he would teach them is an heavenly knowledge conveyed through earthly signs. It is a kind of epiphany.

He recalls the point of the prophets, “they shall all be taught by God” (Is.54.13, Jer.31.33,34), and centers it upon himself, “everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me”(vs.45). They murmured because in saying “I am the bread which came down from heaven” (vs.41), he identifies himself with the Father as the one who is “from God” (vs.46). That is the meaning of his being the Son, the Son of God become the Son of man.

(more…)

Print this entry