Author: CCW

“To them which sat in the region and shadow of death, light is arisen”

We are those, too, who sit or have sat in “the region and the shadow of death”, having heard and seen and then, perhaps, have forgotten the light that has arisen upon us and is in our midst. The story of St. Patrick is the story of the conversion of Ireland, of a turning from “the region and shadow of death” and darkness to the light and glory of Christ. The paschal light lit upon Tara’s hill marks the transition from paganism to the beginnings of Christian culture. There is nothing about shillelaghs or shamrocks or snakes in Matthew’s Gospel, let alone about green beer; only something about sea-girt places such as Ireland and, I suppose, Nova Scotia, which while meaning New Scotland, has had its full measure of settlers whom are designated as Scots-Irish., not unlike St. Patrick himself born in Scotland in 387 AD.

More importantly, the Gospel appointed for the commemoration of a Missionary such as St. Patrick, speaks about the preaching of Jesus seen as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about light coming to those in places of darkness, about repentance, about discipleship, and about healing and salvation; in short, all the things that belong to the turning to God through God’s turning to us in the Gospel. It is very much a part of the meaning of Lent. It is all about the turning.

And the epistle, too, underscores the same theme. “The word of God grew and multiplied”, Acts tells us, meaning what, exactly? A new gospel, new things added to the essential proclamation of the faith? This is, unfortunately, a feature of our contemporary confusion, a kind of arrogance, really, which assumes that we know more and better than others before us about the nature of God and even about our humanity. Don’t we, though? Have there not been discoveries that challenge and overturn older ways of looking at things? Are we not always progressing?

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“Nevertheless, not what I will, but what thou wilt”

Christ’s words in Gethsemane are echoed in Leonard Cohen’s beautiful song of reflection, “If it be your will”. The challenge of our lives in faith is to find our truth in God’s truth but that means some serious thinking about the will of God for our humanity. The very rich, suggestive, and profound readings set before us on this The Second Sunday in Lent provide us with such an opportunity.

But first, let me thank your rector, the Revd Dr. Paul Friesen, and the Parish of St. Paul’s for the kindness and the privilege, the pleasure and the honour of preaching tonight and for hosting the Prayer Book Society of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. The work of the Society has been primarily about reclaiming our fundamental spiritual identity as Anglican Christians embodied in the Prayer Book tradition of theology and spirituality. It is especially an honour to be here at St. Paul’s, Halifax, because of the significant role St. Paul’s plays in the history and life of the Diocese and beyond. It was, to take one small but important example, the St. Paul’s Mite Society which contributed to the building and support of many of our rural parishes, particularly along the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia. That kind of outreach and commitment to the Gospel was altogether crucial for the life of the Church in the remoter parts of the province. Having served for a number of years in such parishes and churches assisted by the St. Paul’s Mite Society, this gives me an opportunity to say thank you.

The Scripture readings that are before us this evening and as well at the Eucharist speak wonderfully to our current distresses and anxieties. We live in a broken world. One of the recurring refrains of the Lenten season is that we are the community of the broken-hearted. To know that is the condition of our turning back to God. “A broken and a contrite heart thou wilt not despise”, as the Psalmist, perhaps David himself, puts it. “Rend your heart and not your garments”, the prophet Joel tells us, “and turn unto the Lord your God.” The season of Lent reminds us of a basic biblical insight expressed in the Collect. “We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves”. But far from leading to a kind of paralysis and helplessness, it moves us to repentance which is about our turning to God and with great insistence. Nowhere is that great insistence seen more clearly than in the Eucharistic Gospel story of the “woman of Canaan” who engages so wonderfully and yet so disturbingly with Jesus, seeking mercy from him as Lord for her daughter who is “grievously vexed with a devil”.

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“Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David”

It is a most powerful Gospel story, the encounter between “a woman of Canaan”, as Matthew calls her, and Jesus whom she addresses as “Lord” and as “the Son of David”, terms of address that arise out of the story of Israel. Some of the most intense encounters with Jesus happen with those who are somehow outside of Israel and yet remind Israel of what actually belongs to her truth and life. One thinks of the Centurion about whom, Jesus says, “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel” or about the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob with whom he has an extended conversation about the living waters of eternal life and about worshiping “the Father in Spirit and Truth”. But this encounter is, I think, almost unparalleled in its troubling intensity.

She comes out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon crying out to Jesus “have mercy upon me”, but her concern is for her daughter, “grievously vexed with a devil.” This is of another order than the healing of the body though soul and body are intertwined and interdependent, we might say. It’s just that spiritual and mental disorders are deeper and darker, it seems. And as such, there is the suggestion of the diabolical, of our allowing ourselves to be taken over by other forces and so surrendering our freedom and dignity. We become captive to some disorder in ourselves. The problem is within us, however much we might like to blame others, society, or the environment, whatever. We can sense the distress of a mother dealing with a deeply troubled daughter. It is the stuff of our own times.

The encounter illumines the nature of faithful prayer and challenges our indifference to matters spiritual, the casual and lukewarm way in which we approach Church and religion, the easy and indulgent excuses that we make that keep us from the very things that contribute most to the good and the health of our souls. The woman is insistent on what she senses and knows about Jesus. But this, paradoxically, is her humility that grants her access to the mercy she seeks. What we have here is what we pray in our liturgy in The Prayer of Humble Access; a prayer shaped by this Gospel story and the story of the healing of the Centurion’s servant.

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“Turn unto the Lord your God”

The words of the Prophet Joel belong to the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday. Yet they have a powerful resonance throughout the whole of Lent and even more throughout the whole progress of the Christian life of Faith. In a way, it is all about the turning. This is an important spiritual principle which was well understood by one of the outstanding preachers and masters of the spiritual life in our own Anglican tradition, Lancelot Andrewes.

A celebrated preacher at the courts of Elizabeth and James in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, he stands not only with one foot in one century and the other in another but in the moments of transition between the medieval world and the early modern world and in ways that look back reflectively and profoundly upon the Fathers of the Patristic Period as well as ahead to the ambiguities and uncertainties that belong to our contemporary world. His sermons and his prayers are themselves an outstanding monument to the spiritual tradition which has come to be known as Anglicanism and which above all else connects that tradition to the essential Catholicism of the universal Church. It is, we might say, one of the counters to the fideism of our current situation by which I mean the narrow retreat into the ghettoes of our minds at the expense of the breadth and depth of the Catholic Faith in its truth and beauty.

Andrewes was a celebrated preacher in his day and his sermons and prayers have had a remarkable influence well beyond his time and place. While they are intense and demanding sermons, it seems to me worth considering the salient features of some of his Lenten Sermons precisely because they bring out a deep biblical wisdom understood creedally and doctrinally. They are indeed a redire ad principia, not just in terms of repentance which he especially refers to in these terms but because the whole of the Christian life is a turning back to God, a return to the principle, a point which appears in many of his sermons. Our endeavour will be simply to point out some of the themes of repentance that are presented and explored in some of the sermons which he preached in Lent.

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“One who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin”

The temptations which belong to the beginning of Lent connect to the end, to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. He who is pierced for us is tempted for us.

To be tempted and to be pierced are related words. The overcoming of temptation belongs equally to the overcoming of his being pierced, namely, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The cross and the resurrection are obliquely, yet strongly, present in the temptations of Christ. There is a resurrection into the presence of the living Word and Spirit of the Father, but only through the burning love of the crucified, a love which is already signaled in the temptations of Christ read on the First Sunday in Lent.

To be tempted is to be drawn to think and act in ways which we know to be wrong and false. This implies as well that we are drawn away from what we know to be right and true. Our reason is beguiled; our will is seduced. We are at once deceivers and deceived.

Temptations are received in the soul. It is there that they have their force of attraction, drawing us to what we know in some sense we should refuse. But there is always a choice, a crucial moment of decision, whether to give in or withstand. This is the counter to all of the forms of determinism in our culture and day. The problem is not that there are temptations – these there must be – but how we face them. Sin, after all, does not lie in the temptations themselves, but in our yielding to them, whether inwardly in our thoughts or outwardly in our deeds. Temptations actually belong to the path of our spiritual journey to God and with God. They are, we might even say, necessary to the perfecting of our wills, to the matter of setting love in order. They belong to our freedom in Christ.

The temptations of Christ are our temptations. His will to bear them belongs to the divine will to redeem. The temptations of Christ clarify the meaning of all and every temptation. There is no temptation which does not fall under one or other of the temptations of Christ. Our understanding is clarified and our wills are fortified by reflecting on the temptations of Christ. They sanctify our temptations. They are made part and parcel of the way of perfecting grace in us. By virtue of Christ’s temptations, we are inwardly strengthened in resisting, even as the force of the temptations themselves is abated, because we can see them in Christ for what they are and how they can be overcome.

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