Day: November 18, 2012

“You will be enriched in every way for great generosity”

The theme of rejoicing continues in our Evening Prayer readings. The first lesson is taken from The First Book of Maccabees, a book from the Apocrypha, too, complementing this morning’s reading from Ecclesiasticus, but belonging instead to the genre of historical writings. It is largely a war story about dark and difficult times for the Jewish people under the Hellenistic rulers that came after Alexander the Great’s conquest of the world. This passage is a song of rejoicing at a moment of peace and relative prosperity as the result of the leadership of Simon Maccabeus. There is peace and conversation, security and order, a climate of lawfulness and worship. “He made the sanctuary glorious, and added to the vessels of the sanctuary.”

There is a sense in which the contemplative worship of God is simply everything. For the time of the Maccabeans, what was at issue was Israel’s worship of God over and against “the abomination of desolation,” a statue of Antiochus Epiphanes, claiming to be Zeus set up in the holy Temple itself; in short, a sacrilege and idolatry. Idolatry always confuses the things of this world with the Lord and Creator of all things. It can take many forms.

Our second lesson from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians is really a powerful fund-raising letter! Perhaps the greatest appeal for funds in the Scriptures! Here Paul is exhorting the Corinthians to keep up their good reputation for being generous to others in need. He is exhorting them to give more, to be generous in providing relief for the Church in Jerusalem. A Christian appeal for funds, his argument is grounded in “the surpassing grace of God in [them],” a grace which belongs to the infinite and “inexpressible gift” who is Christ Jesus. That is and must be the basis of Christian charity whether in times of peace and prosperity or in times of scarcity and struggle. We live in the body of Christ. We live for the body of Christ with one another. We act out of the generous love of God which has been given to us in Christ Jesus. There is a joy which lies at the heart of the Christian understanding of things.

What is that joy? It is the joy of redemption that springs from the Covenant of the Most High and from the compassion of God in Jesus Christ. The divine generosity compels us to be generous, too. “Give and it shall be given unto you,” far more than what we can ever imagine, let alone deserve.

“You will be enriched in every way for great generosity”

Fr. David Curry
Choral Evensong
November 18^th, 2012
Trinity XXIV

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“Remember the covenant of the Most High”

The Christian year runs out in wisdom and repentance. Both are the occasions of joy, joy tinged no doubt with sorrow, and yet a joy that is greater because of the knowledge of sorrow and pain, of sin and folly.

Ecclesiasticus or The Book of the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach belongs to the Apocrypha, to a collection of books written between the time of the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, and the explicitly Christian Scriptures, the New Testament. In many of your bibles – at home and in the market place – you will not find these books. There is a story to that, to be sure. For some protestant Christians these books are anathema – forbidden and denied a voice in the life of the church. So why are you hearing from one of these books this morning?

Because of an ancient understanding that is part and parcel of a clearly defined Anglican approach to the Scriptures. Let me repeat that. A clearly defined Anglican understanding of the Scriptures. We read these books as having a special but distinct place within the overall approach to the understanding of the Christian Faith. Article Six of The Thirty-nine Articles – one of the major expressions of doctrinal authority for Anglicans (along with The Book of Common Prayer and The Ordinal, meaning the liturgy for the ordination of priests, deacons and bishops) – states clearly, unambiguously, and in a wonderfully Anglican way, minimally,  that is to say, saying only as much as needs to be said and not a jot more, that “following Ierome,” meaning Jerome, the great translator of the Hebrew and the Greek Bibles into Latin, thus shaping the culture of medieval and early modern Europe more than anyone else, these books are to be read “for example of life and instruction of manners: but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”

They are not independent sources of doctrine, that is to say, the basis for the essentials of the Faith, and, yet, they clearly relate to the living out of our Faith and to the deepening of our knowledge and understanding of what the Faith is which Christians profess and believe. Indeed, without the books of the Apocrypha we would be hard pressed to be able to give a coherent account of a number of things which Jesus says and be able to understand almost nothing of the context in which he says them. Here are books which contribute precisely to the context, explicitly named in Luke’s Gospel, of the parable of the lost sheep and the lost coin, themselves the prelude to the greatest parable of human redemption imaginable, the parable of the so-called prodigal son. The context is the animosity of the Pharisees and the Scribes who murmured against Jesus saying, “this man receiveth sinners and eateth with them.”

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“If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole”

It is a poignant scene, actually a scene within a scene. What she said “within herself” is heartfelt: “if I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.” Perhaps such thoughts may touch our hearts as well. But is that all? Just a little touch? It sounds suspiciously superstitious, as if there is some sort of mystical healing property to “the hem of his garment.”

Clearly Jesus wants something more for us than just a touch. He wants us to enter into his knowing love for us. Only then will we be whole. The woman both knows and doesn’t know this. To put it another way, she doesn’t know that she knows.

Jesus wants her to know. He wants us to know. God will not keep his back to us. He has turned himself to us. Such is the nature of Incarnate Love. “Jesus turned him about and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole.” These are wonderful words. They are saving words. They are said to her face-to-face. She wanted to be whole. But to be whole is to enter into his knowing love for us. It can only happen because Jesus turns to us. Advent, so soon upon us, is about God’s turning towards us and speaking to us face-to-face.

It will not do to steal a cure from him unawares, to be healed by him without him knowing it. Such is an incomplete awareness about the one from whom we seek wholeness. Jesus turns and looks at her, face-to-face. More than her secret, surreptitious touch of him, there is his turning to her, his looking upon her and his speaking to her. Such is salvation – her wholeness and ours. It is found in his looking upon her and her looking upon him, by our being knowingly in his knowing love for us.

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