by CCW | 11 January 2015 14:38
A scriptural text frequently used and emphasized by the Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse, one of my teachers and the teacher of many clergy and many students spanning many generations and scattered over several continents, it speaks directly to the confusions of contemporary culture within and without the Christian Church, itself confused and uncertain about itself. It will not surprise you, I suspect, that my response to the disturbing events of terrorism in France, on the one hand, and the ethical debacle concerning the Dalhousie Dental School, on the other hand, is an echo of this text captured in one word, teaching.
Perhaps, repeatedly, as in teaching, teaching, teaching! But you will want to ask, teaching what? How can education make any real difference? You are right to ask. For if teaching is simply about getting ahead in the world, simply about success, simply about what serves consumer and economic culture, then it only contributes to the dis-ease that occasions all of the problems that we confront. Such teaching is little more than cultural conformity to the world; the very opposite of what Paul is talking about. “Be not conformed to the world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Not by blowing up people; not by misogynistic fantasies, but by teaching what belongs to the truth of Islam as opposed to the fanatics which defame and debase it and what belongs to the moral responsibilities of ethical communities. For that is what is at stake. It is not about particular groups or individuals who are offended but about offences against the ethical communities of our humanity itself.
This leads to a question too for the Christian Church. How to engage contemporary culture without simply accommodating its agendas? For that is where most Christian churches are, at least in the western democracies, and why they are dying if not dead. That is not to say that the business of the Church is simply to be oppositional and reactionary. No. At issue is how the Church engages the world in which it finds itself. That requires one simple yet difficult thing: knowing and caring about what the Christian Faith actually is and how it matters.
The problem is the general ignorance of the essentials of the Christian Faith. The emptiness of our churches is because there has been too much conformity to the culture such that the Church is simply irrelevant. Churches which reflect the culture have nothing to challenge the culture and are little more than the culture in drag. Scripture passages are relevant only to the extent that they express the aspirations of the culture. We hear lots about compassion and even charity, which is good, but very little about sacrifice and commitment. Anything in the Scriptures which challenge our world is dismissed as being the benighted folly of earlier ages. We lack the willingness to wrestle with the difficult passages and, make no mistake, there are difficult passages. But we need to embrace the challenge of trying to make sense of such things rather than just ignore them and simply cherry-pick the Scriptures to suck on what pleases us most. What pleases us most is, invariably, something pleasing about ourselves.
This runs counter to an inescapable feature of the Christian Faith. However much it shapes cultures (and it has), it is invariably always counter-culture. It can never be conformed to the world without ceasing to be itself. That is exactly the problem we face and have been facing for a long time in the endless projects to remake the Christian Faith, to re-image God, to re-image our created humanity, and to re-image the Church. Paradoxically, what is forgotten in these projects of active nihilism is that the teaching of the Christian Faith is always transformative. It is always about being changed.
And that is exactly the point of Epiphany. It begins with the wise ones, the magi-kings of Anatolia, coming to Bethlehem and presenting gifts to the child Christ. The gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh are not exactly practical gifts that conform to the world of baby showers! I suppose in lieu of diapers one might give money – gold – but I am sure that none of you have given frankincense or myrrh to any young mother and her child. These are gifts which teach. They teach us something about the one to whom the gifts are given. They belong to the manifestation of the essential divinity of Christ and his redemptive sacrifice for our humanity and world. Christ is identified as King and God and Sacrifice. They are “sacred gifts of mystic meaning.” Ignore that teaching at your peril.
Epiphany is about the teaching that engages the world but without being collapsed into the world. The magi-kings return to their own country another way. They return, as T.S. Eliot suggests, “no longer at ease.” Something has changed through what we have been given to see. We cannot remain the same in our little ghettoes of comfort and convenience, huddled in the gated communities of our minds, fearful of confronting a world which seems to have gone badly awry from what we have assumed it should be. Epiphany marks the break-out from Bethlehem, the making universal of all that is seen and heard, touched and known in that humble scene. Christianity is about the mission of making known unto the ends of the world what is proclaimed in Bethlehem. It is about the radical meaning of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity in Jesus Christ. Forget that and you have forgotten everything.
The Octave of the Epiphany presents[1] us with Mark’s account of The Baptism of Christ and provides propers for The Missionary Work of the Church Overseas. The first is an epiphany of the Trinity and in ways which open us out to the dynamic of the Christian Faith. It is always about transformation. At once an epiphany of the Trinity in the voice of the Father, the presence of the Son coming out of the waters, and the Holy Spirit coming down like a dove, the Baptism of Christ is also a complete transformation of the baptism of John. John the Baptist was in the wilderness “preach[ing] the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”. Christ, in the orthodox theological understanding of things, is without sin. He is, in fact, the forgiveness of sins himself through his death and resurrection. Even John knows that there is something else going on in the baptism of Jesus at his hands in the river Jordan.
For Mark, the baptism marks (pardon the pun) the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. An epiphany of the mystery of God as Trinity, it has also been a controversial passage because it has seemed to some to suggest that Jesus only at this point becomes the “beloved son,” a kind of title bestowed and not the revelation of his essential divinity. In other words, this scene marks the adoption of Jesus by God to be God’s agent and messenger. Not the same thing as being “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God,” as we say in the Creed. Adoptionism is one of the early heresies that contribute to the hard but necessary task of figuring out just what the Christian Faith really is. It is an incomplete view of the reality of Jesus as Saviour, an incomplete view of the dynamic of redemption. It separates the divinity and the humanity of Christ and denies the unity of God and Man in Jesus.
The Missionary Work of the Church Overseas focuses on the lesson from Romans about the purpose of the Scriptures in the making known of the revelation of God and the passage from Matthew about the sending of the disciples “to go forth and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you all the days, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” Powerful words which, again, emphasize the necessity of teaching.
Teaching what? Teaching what God has revealed to us. It comes as no surprise then that the Gospel for The First Sunday after the Epiphany, which invariably falls within The Octave of the Epiphany, should be explicitly about teaching. It is the story of the boy Jesus being found in the Temple in Jerusalem with the doctors of the Law “both hearing them, and asking them questions” and astounding them with “his understanding and answers.” It is the only story of the boyhood of Christ.
And, of course, and in ways that are very much like the confusions of our contemporary culture, a thousand conspiracy stories come rushing in to fill the gaps about Christ’s boyhood in Nazareth. All of them are later than the Gospels; all of them offer a point-of-view about Christ that is incompatible with the overall view of the New Testament. The tone and feel and point of emphasis are altogether different. In general, Christ is presented in these apocryphal writings as some sort of wunderkind; theologically, it is known as docetism which denies the reality of Christ’s humanity. He only seems to be human. His humanity is only a stage-act, a kind of appearance. Why? Because the union of God and Man in Christ is seen to be impossible, the gap between matter and spirit is unbridgeable. Gnostic dualism never quite goes away.
So this scene is quite special. It marks an important feature of the Epiphany about the essential divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ. He is in the place of teaching both as teacher and as student, the divine teacher and the human student, we might say. It marks as well another transition in the story of Christ: his entry into adulthood, into the fullness of his redemptive mission. It begins with teaching!
The teaching is about the transforming of our minds not to be conformed to the comforts, conveniences and confusions of our world and day but to take hold of the ideas which ennoble and dignify. To do so requires the one thing especially absent in the degraded forms of Christianity in our Churches, namely, sacrifice. It means embracing the transformative reality of redemptive suffering through which we participate in the life of God.
For that is the deep teaching that is constantly before us in the liturgy and which belongs to the Anglican witness to Catholic Christianity. It is, I think, wonderfully captured in Paul’s words about the necessity of teaching.
Fr. David Curry
The First Sunday after the Epiphany
January 11th, 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/01/11/sermon-for-the-first-sunday-after-the-epiphany-6/
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