Year: 2012

“My words shall not pass away”

What strong and disturbing words do we read and hear in Luke’s apocalyptic warnings. “There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring” (Luke 21. 25-33). Nothing really new about that, of course, “same old, same old,” we might even say, other than being far more eloquent than, perhaps, either the news or the weather!

And yet, it must surely give us pause, “men’s hearts failing them for fear,”  anxious and worried on account of “looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.” There is a profoundly cosmic quality to these Scriptural warning notes which signal the Advent theme of judgment at once coming to us and ever present.

But exactly how, to use Cranmer’s words in his marvellous collect for Advent II, do such disturbing warnings about judgment provide us with “patience and comfort of thy holy Word”, let alone “hope”? And yet that is precisely Jesus’ claim here. “My words shall not pass away.”

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all religions of the Word. They are all logo-centric, we might say. Even though the meaning of Logos or Word is different for each, they are all nonetheless quite explicit about the primacy of the Word of God as revealed to our humanity. They are all revealed religions as distinct from the various nature religions and the religions of the political that surround them and out of which they emerge in one way or another. And they are all religions which place a high value on that Word of God as mediated to us through written texts, through Scripture, whether the Scriptures are the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, comprising the Torah or Law, the Prophets and the Writings for Jews, or the Arabic Qu’ran for Muslims, the recitation of Allah’s will by the Angel Gabriel (Jibril) to Mohammed, or the Scriptures for Christians which embrace the Old Testament (largely written in Hebrew) and the New Testament written in Greek. Scripture is simply that which is written.

“Whatsoever things were written aforetime,” St. Paul states, “were written for our learning.” (more…)

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“We have found the Messiah (which is being interpreted, the Christ)”

These are the words of Andrew as recorded in John’s Gospel in the story read, at least in Canada since 1959, on The Sunday Next Before Advent. Andrew is the one of the two which heard John speak about Jesus and so followed Jesus. But even more than that Andrew brings others to the discipleship of Christ. “He brought him to Jesus.”

Can anything greater or better be said of any of us than that? It turns of course on the insight and knowledge of who Christ is. John in his Gospel feels obliged to explain the idea of the finding of the Messiah. The term, he senses, needs to be interpreted or explained. That tells us this means he is speaking beyond the context of the Jewish community. For the Jews, a term like Messiah is at once well-known and greatly anticipated, certainly a term needing no interpretation. John connects the idea of a promised Messiah with the concept of the Anointed One, the Christ.

From the perspective of John’s Gospel, Andrew initiates a chain-reaction; the beginning of the missionary life of the Church which is about nothing less than bringing souls to Jesus. In the life of the Church, the Feast of St. Andrew is always either just before or immediately after The First Sunday in Advent. His celebration or observance has just that double sense of a beginning and an end, of a making known and a following of Jesus Christ. In other words, it captures the twofold aspect of Christian mission and discipleship. Souls are brought to Christ so as to follow Christ. “Follow me,” Jesus says to the two brothers, Simon Peter and Andrew, in Matthew’s Gospel reading tonight, “And I will make you fishers of men.”

(more…)

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“Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost”

What?! Where did that come from? That wasn’t from today’s Gospel on this day distinguished with double prepositions, The Sunday Next Before Advent. And yet, for centuries upon centuries, the Gospel story of the miraculous feeding of the multitude in the wilderness (John 6.5-14) was read on this day. It was only in the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer that there was a change to reading instead from the first chapter of John’s Gospel (John 1.35-45) that you heard this morning.

“Come and see,” Jesus says to the disciples of John and to us in today’s Gospel. Ultimately, it is an invitation to the banquet of divine love opened out to us through the pageant of God’s Word. Advent signals the coming of God’s word to us. But throughout the year we have been struggling to live in and from that Word in our lives. The task of the Church is simply to proclaim the Word of God faithfully and sacramentally. Today marks a kind of gathering or summing up of the past year of grace even as it catapults us into a new year; it is a time of endings and beginnings. We might say with the poet, T.S. Eliot, that “in my beginning is my end” (The Four Quartets, ‘East Coker’).

Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, something which the architecture of Christ Church constantly reminds us. Look up! Lift up your heads! See the beams that support the building. They are shaped in the form of the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, the Alpha and the Omega. We are embraced in the pageant of God’s Word through the liturgy of the Church and in the very structure of the building. “The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,” as another poet, George Herbert, puts it and here, indeed, the wood of the Church resounds with the name of Christ. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of all our lives.

What does this mean for us? (more…)

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