Category: Sermons

“How can these things be?”

The mystery of God reveals the mystery of our humanity; the one envelopes the other. Trinity and Incarnation are intimately connected and inseparable. They go together. “Thou hast but two rare cabinets, full of treasure,” as the poet George Herbert puts it, “The Trinitie, and Incarnation”. He highlights what is emphasized in the Athanasian Creed, namely the connection and interplay between these two essential doctrines revealed to us. He goes on to say, “Thou hast unlockt them both,/ And made them jewels to betroth/ the work of thy creation,/ Unto thyself in everlasting pleasure.” This is a commentary on the Lesson from Revelation indicating how the fullness of the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation embrace, contain, and restore the whole of creation and especially our humanity. Our task is to make the effort to enter into  what is revealed and made known to us; the mysteries of grace perfecting nature not destroying our nature. Nowhere is that more concentrated than in the Athanasian Creed, itself a creedal reflection on God and our humanity born out of the witness of the Scriptures.

“Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” John tells us in his Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Scriptures. Earlier this week on Tuesday after Pentecost, in the Gospel from John 10, Jesus identifies himself as “the door of the sheep,” one of the so-called ‘I am’ sayings about the essential divinity of Christ revealed through his humanity. The lesson from Revelation is a lovely summary of the whole pageant of revelation, with the books of the Old Testament symbolized in “the four and twenty elders” referring to the writers, and the New Testament, especially the four Gospels, symbolized by “the four living creatures.” The whole vision is not just about what is seen, but rather, through the telling image of the door, it is what we enter into and in which we participate. And what is that? The life of prayer and praise as the signalling the whole purpose of creation and our humanity.

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“He that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him,
and will manifest myself to him.”

Pentecost offers a glittering array of contrasting images that gather us into unity with God and with the whole of our humanity. There is wind and fire, and the many and different tongues where one thing proclaimed and understood, namely “the wonderful works of God.” There are the red hangings and vestments of Pentecost in the tradition of the Church on a day commonly called Whitsunday, ‘white Sunday’, symbolic of Baptism and new life. And what is that new life? It is the coming down or descent of the Holy Spirit to give birth to the Apostolic Church and Faith in which we have our  beginning and end; in short, our life in the abiding love of God.

One of the classical Anglican divines, Lancelot Andrewes, identifies the theological meaning and significance of Pentecost. He astutely observes that “the Holy Ghost is the Alpha and Omega of all our solemnities. In His coming down all the feasts begin; at His annunciation, when He descended on the Blessed Virgin, whereby the Son of God did take our nature, the nature of man. And in the Holy Ghost’s coming they end, even in His descending this day upon the sons of men, whereby they actually become “partakers,” θειας ψυσεως, “of His nature, the nature of God” (Andrewes, Whitsunday, 1610).

Pentecost is festum charitatis, the feast of love. “And He Whose feast [this] is, the Holy Ghost, is love itself, the essential love and love-knot of the two Persons of the Godhead, Father and Son. The same, the love-knot between God and man, yet more specially between Christ and His Church.” Word and Spirit. Faith properly refers to Christ the Word, whereas love is properly associated with the Spirit, who is also named the Comforter who brings faith to birth and strengthens and increases that faith in us. Comfort belongs to love. “If you love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus tells us in the Gospel, that in the giving of the Comforter “he may abide in you forever.” A beginning and an ending.

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“God has gone up with a merry noise,/The Lord with the sound of the trumpet”

The creedal mysteries of the Ascension and the Session of Christ are clearly and unambiguously set before us today, the Sunday after the Ascension. We celebrate the Ascension and the Session of Jesus Christ to “[sit] on the right hand of the Father”. Often overlooked and passed over, these two doctrines provide a necessary corrective to the religion of sentiment and emotion, on the one hand, and the religion of morality and self-righteousness, on the other hand. We are reminded in the strongest possible way that the meaning of our lives is found in the comings and goings of God, not God in our comings and goings. There is all the difference in the world between those two perspectives: the one would make God subject to us; the other would place us with God in the revelation of his truth and love.

“The end of all things is at hand,” says Peter. That “ending of all things” is celebrated in the Ascension and the Sessionof Christ. It is an ending in the sense of mission accomplished, an ending that recalls Christ’s last word from John’s Passion: “It is finished”. Human redemption accomplished or ended is achieved through the sacrifice of Christ and in the gathering of all things into unity in God through that sacrifice.  From there we await a new beginning through the Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit to keep us in the love and knowledge of what has been done by Christ Jesus for us and which ever and always remains to be more fully realised in us. The Son goes to the Father having accomplished “the will of him who sent him.” He returns to glory and enters into glory. What does it signify for us? Simply the meaning of our lives in prayer and praise; our lives in faith, hope, and charity.

If the Resurrection is the fullest possible vindication of the true nature of our human individuality, soul and body, as it were, then the Ascension is the fullest possible vindication of the spiritual nature of all reality. This has enormous consequences for how we look upon every aspect of our lives. The Session of Christ signifies that all things – all forms of natural and human endeavour, all forms of social and political life, whether it be the family, the state, our schools, or our churches – ultimately have their ground in God and participate in one way or another in the work of redemption. In other words, they find their correction and their perfection, their fulfillment and meaning, in the homecoming of the Son to the Father. All authority and order belongs to God; all is gathered back to God.

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“And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up,
and a cloud received him out of their sight”

It is called the sursum corda – “Lift up your hearts.” It signals an essential feature of the liturgy. It is about the lifting up of our hearts in Christ. It is prayer: our seeking from God what God seeks for us. The Feast of the Ascension, so often overlooked and under appreciated, is the culmination of the Resurrection and its meaning for us in our lives of prayer and service. Luke, in Acts, gives us a profound image of the ‘event’, as it were, of the Ascension which complements Mark’s equally explicit account of his being “received up into heaven.”

Throughout Eastertide, as we have seen, Jesus has been preparing us for his twofold departure  from us, first, in his Passion and Death and, second, in his Resurrection and Ascension. These motions, we have suggested, signal the gathering of all things into unity in God from whom all things come; in short, the redemption and restoration of creation and of our humanity. It is not something static but shows the dynamic of God towards us and the direction of the motions of our hearts and minds towards God. The images of hearing and seeing are instructive about the classical faculties of human character. Both Luke and Mark call attention to what is spoken and heard and to what is seen and behold. Hearing and seeing are the two most spiritual and intellectual of the human senses that open us out to what is known and grasped in thought; essentially, we are spiritual creatures defined by the faculties of knowing and willing or loving.

“A cloud received him out of their sight,” Luke tells us in Acts. That cloud is the shekinah of God, an image of the overarching cloud of God’s glory that embraces the whole of creation within itself. It, too, is an image of the radical gathering of all things to God, namely the idea of the whole of creation as embraced in the dynamic of the life of God as Trinity. It is not about a flight from the world as if it were something evil in its materiality and being. Heaven, after all, is not a place, but rather, to use a Jewish expression, the place of all places, in short, God.

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“Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of heaven?”

Nothing better reinforces the Rogation idea of the interrelationship of our humanity, the created order, and God than these readings for The Fruits of the Earth and the Labours of Men. They ground us in the logic of creation – good in each of its parts and very good in its unity as a whole. As the Gospel suggests, our relation to God’s creation provides a key analogy or metaphor for our spiritual lives. The kingdom of heaven is likened to “a grain of mustard seed” which when sown and grown “becomes greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great branches; so that the birds of the air may lodge under the shadow of it.”

This offers a different way of thinking about our relation to nature than what belongs to the Darwinian world of endless competition. It emphasizes instead a sense of co-operation and interdependence and one that mirrors the life of God as Trinity. Creation, in the Jewish and Christian understanding, insists on our connection to everything in the created order and our being made in the image of God. “In the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” The pronoun “him” refers to Adam – meaning our humanity generically speaking; the pronoun “them” to the fundamental distinction between male and female that belongs to the reality of our humanity within the distinctive order of all things created. Creation is really about a relation to the Creator through a world where each thing has a distinctive quality and is good in itself and good for us in the forms of its distinctive being. Creation in this sense is providential care for what is created and in its relation with every other thing in creation. Genesis teaches that God has “given every herb bearing seed” to Adam, our humanity, for food, for our good within the goodness of creation as a whole.

This analogy belongs to many such parables with which, as Mark puts it, Jesus “spake the word unto them, as they were able to hear it.” Through the visible things of creation we learn to think about the invisible things of God. It is a powerful way of thinking known as kataphatic theology which argues for a positive relationship between God and the world; thinking through images, through parables and likenesses.

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“I will therefore that men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands”

Rogation Monday provides an extended commentary on the nature of prayer. The Eucharistic readings are complemented by the Office readings from Deuteronomy 7. 6-13 this morning and from Matthew 6. 5-18; and then in the evening from Deuteronomy 8 and Matthew 6.19-end; in short, a theology of the land as grounded in prayer, particularly the Lord’s Prayer which is given in both its Matthaean and Lucan forms.

The reading from Deuteronomy this morning emphasizes the theme of holiness through prayer in terms of God’s love for his people; in short, God’s mercy and goodness as distinct from our deserving. Paul in 1st Timothy expands on that sensibility in exhorting us to pray “for all” by way of “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks”, particularly “for kings and all that are in authority”; the condition for leading “a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” In the Christian understanding, that is explicitly grounded in Christ. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus; who gave himself a ransom for all.” Prayer shares in that work of divine mediation. We are gathered to God in prayer which is nothing less than God’s gathering us to himself and to our life in him and with him. His work in us and our work in him.

This understanding impells the sense of the universality of prayer, “praying everywhere, lifting up holy hands”. Praying everywhere and for all. Luke gives us the shorter form of the Lord’s Prayer taught to us by Jesus not on the basis of “if you pray” but “when you pray” before going on to emphasize the necessity of prayer as importunity. Prayer makes demands of us towards the good of others in spite of what is convenient and easy for us. Thus prayer is more than our personal interest and goodwill; it is rather about the larger sense of God moving in us. “Ask, and it shall be given you” – Rogation reminds us about the essential aspect of prayer ias asking; “seek, and ye shall find” – desire  assumes a good that is to be sought and known; “knock, and it shall be opened unto you” – a reference to the theme of importunity and the necessity of asking and persevering in asking and seeking, not unlike the Canaanite woman or the blind man, Bartimaeus, on the roadside outside Jericho. Prayer is our life in and with God through seeking his will and purpose for the whole of our humanity in all of its diverse circumstances and needs. The very act of prayer as asking is equally about our learning what to pray for and in what kinds of ways.

That sense of prayer as learning is seen in the evening lesson from Deuteronomy and in the remaining verses of Matthew 6, the continuation of The Sermon on the Mount. In other words, we are taught about prayer as belonging to God’s will through Moses and the Law and then from Jesus himself in Matthew, once again, complementing the eucharistic Gospel from Luke. All of this extends to the Collect, Lesson and Gospel for the Fruits of the Earth and the Labours of Men provided for Rogationtide that recall us to our humanity as made in the image of God and placed in the world to act in the image of God’s domination or lordship of all creation. Our labours are understood in terms of the parable of the mustard seed. How much is made out of something so little and for the good of the whole created order! Prayer is our work, our work in and with God through Christ Jesus the mediator and the redeemer of the whole of creation. In the lifting up of hands and the lifting up of our hearts, all things are gathered to God by God and by God in us by prayer. Rogation and Ascension reveal the radical nature of prayer.

Fr. David Curry
Rogation Monday, 2026

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“The Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed
that I came out from God”

Rogation Sunday highlights the radical nature of prayer. It does so by way of attention to the threefold relationship of humanity, nature, and God. The word, rogation, derives from the Latin, rogo, rogare. It simply means to ask. Prayer in its most basic sense is about asking. To ask is like the desire to know. Wanting to know is really about asking to learn. It assumes, first, that we don’t know all and everything, and, second, that there are things to be learned, knowledge to be gained and appreciated, as it were, in short, loved. To ask for anything assumes that we lack something which we think is good and right to have. Our wanting acknowledges our lack.

But in asking there is the spiritual insight and acknowledgement that all and every good belongs to God, and that all knowledge and wisdom comes from God. Prayer in this sense is the honest awareness that nothing that we have or enjoy is simply of our own making and doing. It belongs to our relationship with God and with one another. Rogationtide brings out how our relationship with God and with one another is grounded – pardon the pun – in the land where we are placed. Rogationtide in the Christian understanding offers a theology of the land and of the meaning of human labour and life in prayer and in situ.

The Easter mystery of the Resurrection is not about a flight from nature into some vague and indeterminate fantasy of human imagination. It is the most radical affirmation of creation and of human individuality. It is found in the gathering of all things back to God from whom all things come. It signals the freedom of our lives as spiritual beings in the very places where we live. Where we live is where God is to be praised and honoured. What Rogation Sunday celebrates is the redemption of all things to God, especially, the things of the land, of nature. Here is a corrective to Earth Day, to all of the environmental concerns of our global world. How? By reminding us of our connection to creation and to the redemption of the world and our humanity, we are to be not just “hearers” but “doers of the word,” learning how to “think those things that be good” and to “perform the same,” as the Collect puts it, albeit only by God’s “holy inspiration” and “merciful guiding.”

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“The Spirit of truth … will guide you into all truth”

The paradox of the last three Sundays of Easter is captured in the recurring refrain, “because I go to my Father.” Jesus prepares the disciples for his going away which is the condition of his being with us in his body, the Church. It is all part of the “farewell discourse” of Jesus in John’s Gospel.

The Gospel engages the world. That is not the same thing as being collapsed into the world or being conformed to the world. Nor is it about making accommodations to the world with respect to the agendas and issues of our day. There have always been such tendencies and temptations. They can be, perhaps, the occasion for the discovery or recovery of the deeper truths of the Gospel. “The Spirit of truth,” it is said in today’s gospel, “will guide you into all truth.”

But what is that truth? Is it simply something which we happen to agree upon today only to change our minds tomorrow? Is the truth simply our acquiescence to the loudest voices drumming their mantras of social and political correctness into our heads? Is truth simply the will of those in power? Is it simply our feelings and opinions? “The Spirit of truth,” as we shall hear at Pentecost, “shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you.” Somehow truth is found in the divine relations between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; in short, in the divine life opened to view through the Resurrection and Passion of Jesus Christ and which has its culmination in the Ascension. All truth and wisdom belong to God.

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“Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me;
or else believe me for the very works’ sake.”

The centrality and the uniqueness of Christ is an essential doctrine of the Christian Faith. For Anglicans, this is captured in Article XVIII of the Thirty-nine Articles; the only anathema in all of the articles concerns the denial of the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ. It is only through the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ that Christians can and must engage the religions of the world as well as the forms of contemporary culture. And sometimes the pattern of the Sanctorale, especially of the Apostles of the Christian Church, coincide with the themes of the season and illustrate certain features of the Apostolic Faith and teaching.

The Feast of St. Philip and St. James is one of three apostolic pairings in the cycle of the Church Year and falls within Eastertide. The other pairing is found in the late Fall with the joint feast of St. Simon and St. Jude which completes the cycle of the twelve apostles and usher us into the omni gatherum feast and festival of All Saints. At the end of June there is another pairing though of a somewhat different provenance in The Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul. The readings for all these feasts in the Offices is instructive about the Scriptural witness to their lives, sometimes simply through the mention of their names.  The readings for Philip and James canvass a number of important texts about their witness, particularly the witness of Philip. But note that the Epistle and Gospel for their feast complement the Eastertide readings from the Gospel of John and on the next two Sundays, the Epistle of James. The Gospel reading is the beginning of Jesus’s farewell discourse that illustrates the radical meaning of Christ’s going from us in going to the Father and what that means for his abiding in us and us in him. The Epistle reading from James exhorts us to seek the wisdom of God and not to waver in our faith and understanding. James also will emphasize the importance of the works of faith.

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“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy … joy [that] no one taketh from you”

The Gospel readings for the next three Sundays encompass almost all of Chapter 16 of John’s Gospel. The central part of Jesus’s “farewell discourse” (Ch. 14-17) ends with his high priestly prayer in Chapter 17, which carried us into Good Friday and Easter. Look in your Prayer Books for a moment and note how Chapter 16 is read on these Sundays.

Today on The Third Sunday after Easter we read from verses 16 to 22 of that chapter. Next Sunday, The Fourth Sunday after Easter, we read from verses 5 to 15 and on The Fifth Sunday after Easter, Rogation Sunday, we read from verses 23 to 33, the very end of the Chapter. In brief, we go from the middle to the beginning and then to the end of the Chapter. The only verses not read on these Sundays are verses 1-4, though they will be read on The Sunday after Ascension Day. In a way, they signal the entire project of Eastertide and Ascensiontide. “These things have I told you,” Jesus says, “that, when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them” (vs. 4).

We begin today in media res, in the midst of things, at least the midst of Chapter 16. Jesus is preparing the disciples and us for the meaning of his going from us in terms of Death, Resurrection, and Ascension which are, paradoxically, the very conditions of his being with us. His words preceding that movement now serve to teach us what it means in terms of our abiding in him and he in us. His going to the Father is ultimately the homecoming of the Son and the exultation of our humanity. Such is the Ascension and our joy.

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