Year: 2016

“What went ye out for to see?”

He catches our attention. We are even drawn to him, attracted by something strange and yet compelling. “What went ye out for to see?” Jesus asks, highlighting the strange and yet compelling character of John the Baptist whose nativity we celebrate in the week of the summer solstice, the week of the longest day of nature’s year. His feast prepares us for our being with the one who comes to be with us everlastingly.

The figure of John the Baptist frames our summer sojourning; his nativity marks the beginning of summer, and his death, “The Beheading of John the Baptist”, coming at the end of August, marks the end of summer, at least in Maritime terms!

Birth and death. Summer and winter. This summer’s birth points us to the winter’s birth of Christ, whose greater nativity signals all the summer of our lives in the grace of God towards us. That is the point of John the Baptist. He points not to himself but to Christ. The Nativity of John the Baptist signals the preparations which God makes for his coming into our midst as the Incarnate Lord in the Nativity of Jesus Christ.

But beyond the reminder of God’s coming to us, there is the purpose of his coming in us – the motions of his grace taking shape in our lives. From that standpoint, the strange and compelling message of John the Baptist is constant and necessary; he points us to Christ, yes, but as well to Christ in us.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”

It is a powerful and a familiar image, I think, that speaks rather profoundly to our current distresses within and without the institutional church, distresses which are really about our collective blindness about what it means to be the church as much as anything else.

The confessing church is, I think, what we are called to be regardless of the circumstances of each and every age and culture. What undermines our confidence in the Faith, however, is the overwhelming desire to accommodate the faith and the church to the prevailing winds of the contemporary culture. This means to forget that we have a teaching and a way of thinking and being that can speak to our world and day but not if we are taken captive to the underlying assumptions belonging to its agendas. It is after all a post-Christian and post-secular age. The institutional church is, I fear, completely compromised. For Anglicans in Canada, it seems, going along with majority opinion in the secular culture on the questions of the day appears to be the main concern and probably so for most of you.

I am not much interested in mere morality. That can only lead to the kind of dogmatic judgmentalism and hypocrisy so clearly indicated in today’s Gospel. On all of the moral questions of our day, the greater question is about the doctrine of God as grounded in the doctrine of revelation. This is always the question to some extent. But the church is in ruins because the scriptures have been reduced to a heap of broken images. It is an image from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land.

The first section of his poem is entitled, The Burial of the Dead, which intentionally recalls the Order for the Burial of the Dead in the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer. So, too, today’s epistle reading is familiar as being one of the traditional readings in the Burial Office.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Above all, take the shield of faith”

Most of you came into the church through the main entrance as did their Honours, the Honourable J.J. Grant and her Honour, Mrs. Joan Grant. As you did you passed under an inscription just above the doors. “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God,” it reads. I wonder how many of you noticed it. But don’t worry. You are in good company. Hundreds and hundreds of parishioners over more than a hundred years haven’t noticed either!

A most curious phrase it comes from that most philosophical of all the books of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes. It speaks metaphorically and poetically about the spiritual purpose of the holy places, places which are to be entered upon intentionally, paying attention to where we are and what we are doing, especially here this morning. I wonder if the men of the 112^th took notice of it as they came here for Divine Service in the winter, spring and early summer of 1916, wondering if it was simply code for more marching, but perhaps wondering, too, about the war over there.

A tablet erected by the congregation of Christ Church commemorates those of the parish who gave their lives in the Great War. Placed on the other side of the font from where the Colours of the 112^th rest, it also commemorates “the placing in this Church of the Colours of the 112^th Battalion C.E.F whose Officers and Men were faithful attendants at the services of the Church previous to their Departure for overseas in Defense of the Empire, July 1916”. Today we celebrate that commemoration of the laying up of the Colours of the 112^th Battalion. You are sitting where the Officers and Men of the 112^th sat a hundred years ago in the months leading up to their embarkation to England and to the theatres of war on the continent of Europe.

The hymn which we sang was written by Mrs. Annie L. Pratt who also designed and executed the Colours. The hymn was composed from a poem which she wrote in 1915. The hymn captures something of the hopes and fears that defined the war generations both of the First World War and the Second. It draws upon the language of the scriptures about God’s providential care, “a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night”, images from the Exodus journey in the wilderness of the people of Israel. There are as well scriptural references to strength and wisdom, to justice and light, to life and peace. Throughout the hymn and in the story of the 112^th Battalion, there is the sense of being caught up into something momentous and all-defining. It was the war that changed all wars, the war that shattered civilisation. It had a profound impact upon rural and small town Nova Scotia.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Rejoice with me”

“There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance”, Jesus says in a series of three famous parables that comprise the 15^th Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke. The parables appear in response to the criticism of the Pharisees and Scribes – 1^st century Jewish religious authorities, as it were – who criticize Jesus for the company he keeps, the company of tax-collectors and sinners. Jesus response is to tell three parables two of which are before us in this morning’s Gospel: the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin.

The parables are all about repentance and joy, about being lost and found. They illustrate the deep love of God which seeks our restoration to wholeness in the community of spirit, the ekklesia of God, the Church universal. The return of the lost is the occasion of the greatest joy, a joy both in heaven and in earth. Redemption occasions a greater joy than the joy of creation itself, it seems. It is a powerful moral and intellectual idea.

What is so powerful is that there is something more precious and more important about our humanity and our individuality than just our wayward and sinful actions. Good news indeed! For if we are defined simply by our thoughts, words and deeds that we are utterly condemned. Our hearts condemn us but God we have learned in these early days of the Trinity season is greater than our hearts. Such is the divine mercy.

(more…)

Print this entry