Month: June 2020

Rejoice with me

“The deepest impulse of the human soul is for that which is greater than herself,” the great 3rd century (AD) pagan philosopher, Plotinus observes. His statement looks back to the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and has its resonances in Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, and a host of others in the spiritual imaginary of the philosophical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It counters the narcissisms and obsessions with the self that are part of contemporary culture: ‘look at me looking at you looking at me,’ as it were. The point is that everything is not about you, about the sovereign self in its splendid isolation. You are not the centre.

What Plotinus highlights is intellectual humility signaled in the Epistle and illustrated in the Gospel. Humility is the condition of grace, our openness to what is greater than ourselves, the condition of being exalted in due time, “after that ye have suffered a while.”

Without this insight, we misunderstand the Gospel. The 15th chapter of Luke’s Gospel presents us with three parables, two of which we heard today: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and then there is the concluding parable of the prodigal or lost son. All three are about repentance, metanoia, a thinking after the things of God, the things that are greater than ourselves. The word metanoia is used several times here. It has very much to do with our being lost and found, being lost from God and the company of our humanity with God and then being found and restored to that company. The parables are told to convict the judgmentalism of “the Pharisees and Scribes” who murmur against Jesus because of the company he keeps with “the publicans and sinners.” Yet they are those who “drew near for to hear him.” They are seeking what is greater than themselves as opposed to the smug self-righteousness and conceit of the Pharisees and Scribes. What is a common complaint and failing of religion is now a defining feature of our culture in its obsessions with its “assurance of certain certainties” (T.S. Eliot, The Preludes IV) about self-identity which create endless division and enmity.

Metanoia or repentance is about our being turned back to what is greater than ourselves in which we find the deeper truth about ourselves. It is found in communion. The Church is not simply a human construct; it is, divinely speaking, an article of Faith, “the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,” as we profess in the Creed. The lost sheep and the lost coin are returned to the company of others. The most profound image for the Church is that of the body of Christ. Rejoice with me means to rejoice in “the blessed company of all faithful people” as our liturgy puts it (BCP, p.85), reminding us that salvation or being whole is not simply about the individual self but about our incorporation into the mystical body of Christ.

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What manner of child shall this be?

The birth and death of John the Baptist frame our summer sojournings. His nativity is celebrated just after the summer solstice; his death in late August, in the days of the closing down of summer, we might say, at least here in the Maritimes! Both celebrations are grounded in the witness of the Scriptures. Moreover, his nativity has a special cultural relevance for Canadians as marking the anniversary of the landing of John Cabot in Newfoundland in 1497 and carrying over into Dominion Day or Canada’s birthday celebrated on July 1st. He is the patron saint not only of Quebec but of Canada.

Such are some of the spiritual resonances of a very unusual and yet a most significant figure in the Christian understanding. What exactly do we celebrate in the nativity of John the Baptist? The Collect shows us: his “wonderful birth” which points to the greater wonder of Christ’s birth; his “preaching of repentance”; his “doctrine and holy life” concentrated on the themes of “constantly speak[ing] the truth, boldly rebuk[ing] vice, and patiently suffer[ing] for the truth’s sake”. It sums up eloquently and economically the whole of the scriptural story of John the Baptist.

Such themes belong to the life of the Christian Church and Faith. John the Baptist is the forerunner of Christ, vox clamantis in deserto, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, “prepare ye the way of the Lord.” whose unusual birth, itself a kind of miracle, points to the purpose of his very being. He is “the Prophet of the Highest” (Lk.1.76), a prophet and yet “more than a prophet,” as Jesus says (Mt. 11.9), pointing to John who is pointing us to Jesus. His ministry is summed up in the preaching of repentance. What is that except our turning back to God from whom we have turned away?

The feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist awakens us to the deep and true desire of our humanity for something beyond ourselves without which our lives are empty and meaningless. Plotinus, the great 3rd century pagan philosopher, observes that “the deepest impulse of the soul is for that which is greater than herself.” Such ancient wisdom looks back to the teachings of Plato and Aristotle yet resonates profoundly in the philosophical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It speaks to the dilemmas of our day wherein we are engrossed and wrapped up in ourselves, in our own sense of self and personal rights, privileges and sensual enjoyments. Such things betray this deeper wisdom and leave us in despair and sorrow.

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Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 2

Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God

You’re invited! To what? To the banquet of love. “Love bade me welcome,” as the poet, George Herbert, wonderfully says. “Come unto me, all that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you,” Jesus says. “Come and see,” he says to the disciples of John. “Come, for all things are now ready,” Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel parable. The whole of the Christian life is about the invitation to love. The kingdom of God is not about power and prestige; not some sort of patriarchy, even on ‘Father’s Day’. It is about the divine love which perfects and renews, refreshes and restores the broken loves of our broken lives. “Herein is love.”

And that love is powerfully made known to us. “Hereby we know love.” How? “Because he laid down his life for us.” And because he laid down his life for us, “we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” Thus we see the ever-present aspect of reciprocity and mutuality that belongs to the Christian Faith. Thus we see the paradoxical nature of sacrifice without which love is nothing. We are to act out of what has been shown to us and known by us in the story of Christ crucified, the book of love opened for us to read. Even more, as John again in his First Epistle tells us, we are to love not just “in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.” Something is required of us if love is to be real for us and in us.

Yet “my soul drew back” from Love’s invitation, as the narrative voice in Herbert’s poem says. Why? Why do we not respond to God’s invitation? Is it a failure to pay attention? To God? To the meaning of God in our lives? Such are our modern concerns. God, it seems, is irrelevant to us. Or is it the church which has become irrelevant both to God and to us?

In the current situation of Covid-19, the churches have been caught in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, it belongs to the Christian Faith to invite people to come and see, to come and be fed, to come and be refreshed by God’s Word and Sacrament; to be companions with God and with one another – companion literally means with bread, com panis. We are companions in the breaking of the bread; that is our blessedness. On the other hand, that has been refused by the civil and medical community as being dangerous because of the pandemic. And understandably so. How do we respond to the demands of the invitation which belongs to the Church’s essential proclamation? The last several months have been revealing on that score.

The churches have been effectively shut down both by the state and by the acquiescence of ecclesiastical authorities. It is not the first time that countries, communities, and churches have faced plagues and threats to human life. It may be the first time that the Church in the form of the churches has effectively been denied any real voice and any way of responding to such things pastorally and theologically. Never has the sacramental and pastoral ministry been so completely proscribed except in times of outright persecution. The ministry, being what it is, has, at times and in some places, endeavoured to find ways to honour the dictates of the state while also ministering to souls. Gone are the times when the clergy were often on the front-lines of care and in jeopardy of their own lives. Mercifully, there have been few fatalities of Covid-19 among the front-line health-care workers.

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Link to audio file of Matins & AnteCommunion for Trinity 1

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love

The great mantra for the Trinity season captures the divine self-relation which Trinity Sunday celebrates. That mantra is taken from today’s Epistle reading. The mantra, given as the opening Scriptural sentence for the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, is familiar. “God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God in him.” Since 1662, the Epistles and Gospels were taken from the King James Version of the Bible where abideth is translated as dwelleth, echoing perhaps the great Christmas Gospel in which we hear that “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” literally, “tented among us” which suggests something more transitory. “Abideth” suggests something more lasting which is most appropriate for the Trinity season which has very much to do with our abiding eternally in the love of God himself and in the interior realizations about the nature of that love.

In a way, the whole long Trinity Season is about the lessons of love taking root and abiding in us, growing in us, bearing fruit in us. So many of the images of the season, as we will see, are organic and agricultural. We are returned to the land, to the ground, as it were, and yet where we are is the ground where divine love is meant to be moving and living in us. Not because of any special quality in our wills and thoughts, but simply because of God’s love moving in us. God’s love is prior to our loves and without God’s love moving in us our loves are more than incomplete; they are, in fact, unlovely. That is the reason, I think, for this powerful Epistle reading from John that accompanies the equally powerful Gospel reading from St. Luke of the parable of Dives and Lazarus.

The argument and exhortation about God’s love in the Epistle is actually complemented by the Gospel story which highlights the problem of not loving God through our ignorance and indifference towards one another. In a way, it is all about paying attention, or not. “There was a certain rich man … and there was a certain beggar, named Lazarus.” The rich and the poor. These are the classic images of inequality which continue to bedevil our world and day and contribute to the current protests about racism and injustice. What could be more obscene than the grotesque wealth of the global transnational corporate elites, the wealth of a very few, who are virtually unaccountable to the political community? All white males, too, we might add. The parable is, to be sure, a critique of the privileged and the rich in relation to the poor and needy. But more profoundly, it calls attention to how we see one another and how we act or do not act towards one another.

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