by CCW | 6 May 2012 14:47
Today is the Fourth Sunday after Easter. It coincides with another important commemoration in Canadian Culture. Today is also the Sunday which recalls the Battle of the Atlantic.
The Battle of the Atlantic was a tremendous war effort in which Canadians played a most significant role. It was one of our defining moments. Against the darkness of storm and sea, against the threat of the unseen enemy – the German U-boats in their wolfpacks – there was the determination and the will to provide for our war-torn and embattled allies in Europe. The task was undertaken at a time when the outcome of the war was by no means certain.
In those dark and uncertain early years of the Second World War, the dangers that the convoys and their escorts faced in setting out from Halifax Harbour were very real; the prospects truly fearful. It was not only to face the wild and elemental sea – the North Atlantic in all its majestic fury and power – but also the terror of torpedoes, the sudden destruction and explosive power that sank ships and sailors, soldiers and supplies in far shorter order than the iceberg which sank the Titanic.
The Battle of the Atlantic was an enterprise of real courage undertaken in the face of great fearfulness. We do well to remember it. What enables peoples to face such fearful prospects? Why embark upon such fearful and fateful voyages? Because of the conviction that there are things worth dying for, things without which we cannot live. They are our rational and political freedoms. They belong to the spiritual dignity of our humanity, to who we are in the sight of God, the very things that Christ is at pains to teach us in these Eastertide Sundays.
Christ himself is the great teacher of the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the great triumph of God’s grace over human sin and sorrow, the great triumph over death and destruction in all its forms, both in the wars of the world and the wars that rage within each of us. It is the grace that has to be taught by the Word proclaimed and celebrated, and continually taught. Having brought us to birth in this new life, the Risen Christ would also nurture us in this new life.
He teaches us about that radical new life of the Spirit which he has inaugurated and established through his death and resurrection. We can only be nurtured in what we have received; in what has been given to us. We can only give sacrificially and selflessly through what God has given us. “Receive with meekness the implanted word,” St. James says. For what we have received from God has to be nurtured in us by God. If we have learned anything from Holy Week, it is that all the forms of human love fall short of the completeness of God’s love for us. It takes a certain quality of humility, of meekness, really, which is simply about our openness and willingness to learn. There is a challenge for our age. Our loves find their perfection and their fullness only in the love of God revealed in Christ Jesus.
Christ nurtures us in this new life through the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son. He is God’s Spirit given to be the life of the Church, the soul of the body. Here we are nurtured and sustained through the all-sufficient sacrifice of the Word and Son of the Father. We can only enter into this love through the forms in which it has been made known to us; that is to say, through the Revelation of God in the witness of the Scriptures to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We can only act upon what we receive.
We need to understand again the truth and the power of these images that are being revealed to us in these Eastertide Sundays, both for what they teach about the mystery of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost and for what they teach us about ourselves. Christ places us in his love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. The Church is the mother where that divine life has its beginning in us and where we are nurtured in its understanding. God creates the womb out of which we are born anew and enter into this understanding.
It belongs to the magical, mystical quality of the Easter season to set our lives upon a new and ever-renewing foundation of grace. “Grace is the foundation”, says one of the great nursing fathers of the spiritual tradition, “which alone can rule our unruly wills and illuminate our darkened minds” (Bonaventure, freely translated). Sin is that spirit of unruliness in us, our lawlessness, and sin is that spirit of darkness, too, our blindness to the things which Christ would have us know. God “alone,” as the Collect so wonderfully puts it, meaning only God, can “order [our] unruly wills and affections.”
In the great Gospel which orders all our thoughts on this day, Jesus teaches us about the radical meaning of his death and resurrection in his going from us. He teaches us about the coming of the Holy Spirit to keep us in the love of God. “Now I go my way to him that sent me, and none of you asketh me, Whither goest thou?” In his presence, we take his presence for granted. The question about where he is going really belongs to the question about who he is. He is going to the Father. That is the meaning of the life of the Son. His whole life is towards the Father. He places us in that motion of his love for the Father in the Holy Spirit. But it means the constant renewing of our understanding, the constant correcting or “reproving” of our minds. It is the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church. It is dynamic. There is nothing static about God.
We are placed upon a whole new foundation of understanding. The Holy Spirit convicts us of the atheisms of our sinfulness. The Holy Spirit reproves our consciences by recalling us to who we are in the truth of God. The Holy Spirit corrects our understanding about righteousness; it is found in God through Jesus Christ “because I go to the Father.” Everything is drawn into that primary relationship. Our unruly wills are set aright in Christ, in our being where he is. He is always towards and with the Father. The Holy Spirit convicts, corrects and confirms us in the understanding of the victory of Christ’s resurrection; he has overcome all that stands between us and God and so between one another.
We have only to live it. We live it in the Church, our mother, who gives us birth into the life of God and nurtures us in the understanding of the divine love which creates the womb and which creates the Church. Here we are constantly renewed, reproved and restored into the divine fellowship of the blessed Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Here we learn to receive anew “the implanted word [of God] with meekness.”
Fr. David Curry,
Easter 4, 2012
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2012/05/06/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-after-easter-3/
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