by CCW | 1 May 2016 17:28
The readings for The Feast of St. Philip and St. James complement wonderfully the themes of Eastertide especially in the last three Sundays after Easter and particularly on this Sunday known as Rogation Sunday. The fundamental orientation of the Son to the Father is ever so strongly and rather provocatively expressed in the Gospel reading. “No man cometh unto the Father but by me,” Jesus says, pointing out to Philip, too, that “he that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.” And yet, Jesus also says, “believe me, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me; or else believe me for the very works’ sake.”
The things which Jesus does are the works which reveal that “I am”, as he says, “the way, the truth and the life”. And how are we to participate in that? Through prayer, the very theme and meaning of Rogation. Prayer is fundamentally asking. “If ye ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” All prayer is about nothing less and nothing more than asking the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. All prayer gathers us into the fundamental orientation of the Son, “because I go unto my Father.” Here again, and providentially, we have the recurring Easter refrain, “because I go to the Father.” Everything is rooted and grounded in the life of God, the holy and blessed Trinity.
And yet, this is bound to trouble and disturb us. Are there not other ways to God, the ways that belong to the other religions of the world, for example? No doubt, the other great religions have much to offer in the way of wisdom and truth, and wonderfully and profoundly so, it seems to me. Each of them, whether it is Judaism or Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism and so on, have important and distinctive insights. So, too, does Christianity. The point is to be able to respect the integrity of each religion and not reduce them all to some common political, social or psychological idea, subjecting them, in other words, to some feature or other that contemporary secular culture finds amenable with itself; in short, accommodations to the ‘secular’ culture of our day. The point for Christians is not to deny and diminish the claim that Christ is “the way, the truth and the life,” but to connect other insights to that idea and to realize that there can and must be a respectful dialogue among the religions of the world only in and through what belongs to each.
The centrality and the uniqueness of Christ is an essential doctrine of the Christian Faith and one which is highlighted in the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion in Article XVIII. The only anathema is disbelief in Christ‘s uniqueness. Only through the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ can Christians engage the religions of the world and the forms of contemporary culture.
If this were not challenging enough, there is another complexity to the richness of this morning’s celebration which perhaps needs addressing. Just as The Collect for St. Philip and St. James alludes to the Gospel and pertains specifically to the figure of Philip, presented in dialogue with Jesus, so, too, there is a second collect for this Feast which centers on the figure of James. That collect draws upon the imagery of the epistle reading, again from St. James, from which we read, interestingly enough, on the Fourth and the Fifth Sundays after Easter. But the Collect and the rather curious explanation that precedes it, allude to another factor that relates again to the uniqueness of Christ. About the Apostles and other New Testament figures, we don’t really know a whole lot about them in an historical and biographical sense. But the Gospels mention James, the brother of the Lord as he is described. What exactly does that mean?
To be honest, no-one knows or can know for certain historically whether Mary had other children, whether Jesus has brothers and sisters biologically speaking, if you will. But doctrinally, the point at issue has to do not with Jesus as being merely an ordinary Jew of his day, but as the Lord and Saviour of mankind through the particularities of that culture. The tradition of the Church in reflecting on the uniqueness of Christ insists on the perpetual virginity of Mary because of the uniqueness of Christ as the only-begotten of the Father, divinely speaking, and the only son of Mary, humanly speaking. Jesus cannot be just another guy. He is like us in all aspects save sin; this is the biblical and theological view. Mary cannot be just another gal either; she is the chosen vessel, pure and prepared by God, a view which has theological and biblical support in terms of her relationship to Jesus as mother and his relationship to us as Saviour.
Mary’s role in the economy of salvation is to be the theotokos, the God-bearer, the pure and perfect human source of Christ’s pure and true humanity without which he is not Saviour, both hers and ours. While one can speak of the customs of earlier times, one cannot prove from such customs that Jesus actually had brothers and/or sisters from Mary, his mother. There is equally the custom of the extended family of relations, cousins and kinsman, spoken of as brethren. This point of view is captured in the second Collect that pertains to James, associating James with the epistle of James, and suggesting that he along with Jude are “kinsmen of the Lord.” It is scrupulously honest with respect to the Scriptures and to the historical understanding while being firmly principled with respect to doctrine. This is exactly the constant challenge: how to hold the biblical and the historical together in balance within the primacy of doctrine which arises out of them.
Such things go to the heart of the apostolic faith and to the witness of the Church to Christ in the world where we are placed. They challenge us precisely about our theological commitments, awakening us to our communion with God and his saints. “Two of thine apostles/we remember now” as one of our hymns puts it. Today we are reminded of our being with St. Philip and St. James in the community of prayer which is our communion with God the blessed Trinity through Jesus who says “Ye believe in God, believe also in me”.
Fr. David Curry
SS. Philip & James/Rogation Sunday 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/05/01/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-philip-and-st-james-rogation-sunday/
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