Christ Church

“O woman, great is thy faith”

The encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman is an arresting and compelling scene and yet, equally, a most disquieting and disturbing one. She “asks, knocks, and seeks,” we might say, but what does it take to receive? It means, it seems, at the very least, a remarkable kind of perseverance and depth of soul. It reveals nothing less than the power and the truth of faith.

The woman comes to Jesus with a request for the healing of her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil.” There are a number of healing stories in the Gospels but rather few about the healing of the mind or the soul. Like this story, they are about demonic influence and possession. This is not to be mocked or derided but appreciated in its power and truth. And what is that power and truth? The power and truth of what opposes the power and truth of God and the image of that power and truth in us. The point is that we can be overtaken in our very selves in various ways. This story touches upon ancient wisdom and human psychology.

What is equally remarkable is that she is a Canaanite woman, meaning one who is outside the households and tribes of Israel. The marvel of the story is that she who is from outside of Israel is in truth “an Israelite indeed,” meaning one who truly strives with God, emphasis on the word ‘with’, not ‘against’. Her question to Jesus is not for herself but for her daughter. She is, and this is key to the story, quite determined in her quest. She has a hold of a truth in Jesus which she will not relinquish. At least on one level this is a story about perseverance, about holding on in the face of adversity, about trust and faith.

What is so disturbing, and yet so profound is how she is answered in her request. First, there is no response – “he answered her not a word”- there is only silence. Secondly, there is rejection – “send her away, for she crieth after us”, say the disciples. Thirdly, there is refusal – “I am not sent”, says Jesus, “but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And fourthly, there is repudiation – “It is not right to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” What could be more devastating, more disparaging, more discouraging than that?

Only at this point of utter humiliation as it must seem, when we are speechless with shock at the harshness of it all, is there the beginnings of the complete turn-around of grace that leads to the ultimate exaltation – “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” It is not simply about a kind of stubborn willfulness on her part. She gets what she seeks only because of her insight into the truth of Christ. How do we know that? Only through the struggle. That is perhaps the real lesson for us. The struggle matters. The struggle is nothing less than the struggle of faith. She who is from outside of Israel symbolizes the very truth and meaning of Israel. It means striving with God.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

At first glance it reads like a debating challenge, a war of words. And in one sense it is, yet not as a contest for what most persuades but rather as a testament to what is most true. That is what is at issue in the temptations of Christ.

They are our temptations. Matthew and Luke, though ordering them differently, present three temptations which encompass the meaning and nature of all temptation. Yet they all come down to one thing really: the denial of God, on the one hand, and a picture of the truth of our humanity as found in Christ, the word and son of the Father, on the other hand. All temptations are about turning to what are partial, incomplete, and distorted forms of the truth.

The three categories of temptation vary only in the degree to which God is denied. The three temptations can be understood as the temptation to distrust, the temptation to presumption, and the temptation to defiance and denial explicitly. All the temptations common to our humanity are comprehended in these three and all belong to the Lenten project of setting our loves in order over and against the forms of the disarray of our affections and thoughts. But what is the point of this whole matter of temptation? To highlight for us and to compel us to the realization of what properly belongs to the truth of our humanity and to the redemption of our humanity in the one who overcomes the tendencies in us to lose sight of the truth of our being which is only found in the truth and goodness of God.

“If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” The first temptation is to distrust because it suggests that God will not provide for us, therefore we must shift for ourselves by way of whatever means, even unlawful and unnatural means, such as turning stones into bread, which is to say, subverting the order of things in creation to our own immediate ends. The temptation is to distrust God’s power and goodness. It is the false fear that God will not provide. The Old Testament form of this is the temptation in the wilderness (recalled in the Venite), “the temptation of Meribah” – the hungry temptation – when the people of Israel murmured against God’s provision for them in the wilderness, the provision of manna, the proverbial ‘bread from heaven.’

Read the rest of this entry »

Fr. David Curry delivered this homily at King’s College Chapel, Thursday, March 6th, 2025.

“Charity never faileth”

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains…

With such a summary of natural philosophy – measuring the heights of mountains, fathoming the depths of seas, of ethical and political philosophy – the measuring and fathoming “of states, and kings,” of metaphysics or natural theology – “walking with a staffe to heav’n and tracing fountains,” the causes of things, Herbert begins his poem, The Agonie. Then by way of complete contrast to such a summa of philosophical thought, he immediately adds an important ‘but.’ But what? “But there are,” he says, “two vast, spacious things,/ the which to measure it doth more behove”, things that are more significant and more necessary for us to ponder, “yet few there are that sound them.” And what are those “two vast, spacious things?” They are “Sinne and Love.”

We meet just after Ash Wednesday to commemorate this evening, Thomas Aquinas, Doctor and Poet, as the Prayer Book calendar puts it, and the martyrs St. Perpetua and her Companions. Aquinas is one of the great theologians of the western church, one who, I think it is fair to say, has taken much care to sound out, meaning to inquire into and make known, sin and love in his theological writings and commentaries. But what might such a 13th century giant of medieval thought have to do with Anglican thinking and devotion? Rather a lot and as testimony to our essential catholicism. It would be hard to make sense of Richard Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity or John Pearson’s On the Creed, to name but two of many, without an understanding and appreciation of the works of Thomas Aquinas. It was Pearson who, as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford just after the English Civil War, argued for using Thomas’ Summa Theologiae for teaching systematic theology to those entering the church rather than the Sentences of Peter Lombard.

The structure and images of Herbert’s poem are profoundly Thomistic. The poem references the philosophical sciences as derived from Aristotle and as taken up by Thomas: in short, physics, ethics, and metaphysics. Like Thomas, he argues for the necessity of another science, what Thomas calls sacra doctrina, namely, what is revealed through the Scriptures. As Herbert suggests, Scripture teaches most clearly about what we most need to know, sin and love.

Read the rest of this entry »

Return to me with all your heart … return to the Lord, your God

The words of the prophet Joel reverberate throughout the Ash Wednesday liturgy. “Turn thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned,” we pray. They are framed as well by recalling the dust of our creation. “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” Dust and ashes: the dust of the ground of our created being and the ashes of repentance. Yet both the dust and the ashes are profoundly about our turning and being turned.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. It is in every way a season of renewal, a renewal of our hearts and minds in the things of God. It is about our turning back to God from whom we have turned away. Yet that turning is itself the motion of God’s love in us returning us to the truth and dignity of our humanity found, as it only can be found, in God. It is all about the turning, or the “turning again,” as T.S.Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday puts it.

The poem begins in an almost mantra-like fashion. “Because I do not hope to turn again,” It begins, it seems, with a sense of hopelessness and despair. He quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 29, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” with its sense of separation and abandonment, of “myself almost despising,” yet as one who “looking upon himself and cursing his fate” still hopes, “wishing me like to one more rich in hope,/ Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, /Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope.” Eliot changes but one word, art for gift, “Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” It is a nod perhaps to where his poetic meditation ultimately leads. In the sixth and last section of the poem, the mantra turns to “although I do not hope to turn” and ends with a prayer. “Suffer me not to be separated and let my prayer come unto thee.” Hope, over and against even the denials of hope, ultimately cries out in prayer, a longing for a sense of unity and wholeness.

Between the beginning, which seems to eclipse any possibilities of continuing, and the ending, which at the very least opens out the possibilities of renewal, there is a kind of meditation. The poem is a meditation upon the ambiguities, the hesitancies, and yes, even the denials of desire, but as interspersed with the countering cries of the heart in the language of prayer. There are the cries for mercy, for forgiveness, for salvation, for “our peace in His will,” quoting Dante. The poem captures something of the disquieting unsettledness of our contemporary culture and our restless hearts.

Read the rest of this entry »

“If I have not charity, I am nothing”

Such strong and yet compelling words. They shape the great Collect for today. Love is simply everything and without it we are simply nothing. What? How can that be? It is an extraordinary statement yet it goes to the very heart of the Christian Faith. Without love, we are nothing. But what is love?

It is an ancient and modern question, perhaps considered more deeply by the ancients than the moderns, but then you would expect me to say that, wouldn’t you? Plato treats the question in his famous dialogue, The Symposium. It belongs, I think, at least alongside or in a kind of reciprocal engagement with Paul’s great hymn to love in today’s Epistle. That would be a symposium par excellence! But what is the love that Paul celebrates? It is nothing less than the love of God, the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves. This is not an add on but the underlying truth of all our loves, of all love and desire. All love and desire is for the good but our seeking is only one part of the equation. For our seeking is something given by God. God moves our souls to seek what our souls most desire which is nothing less than God. God is love.

But you will protest in contemporary fashion: Isn’t love, love? Love is love? But that is to say nothing, a tautology. Love of what, in what way, and for what end?, we have to ask. Love is not static but dynamic. It is the desire or the eros of our souls, though the word Paul uses is not eros but agape, a love that signals more the unity of the human community, the love that is fellowship. The preceding chapter ends with the words: “I will show you a still more excellent way,” having exhaustively gone through an analysis of the human community by way of analogy with the unity of the parts of the body yet as belonging to something more. For “now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” All our human attempts at justice and right, about a unity of diversities, to put contemporary social justice and identitarian concerns in the most positive light, is ultimately and only found in God.

Divine charity perfects human charity; it is its true end and meaning. The true desire of our souls for the unity that unites all differences is accomplished and concluded in the divine fellowship. That unity of differences is not quite the same thing as “diversities,” which Andrewes points out is just “a heap of things,” indefinite and indeterminant. But love cannot be indifferent to the realities of our lives and the lives of those around us. Love indifferent is imperfect love. What is love if it doesn’t care?

Read the rest of this entry »

“The good ground are they which in an honest and good heart having heard the word keep it and bring forth fruit with patience”

Sexagesima Sunday recalls us to our origins and to our end. It signals our identity in God’s will and purpose for our humanity. We are recalled, yet again as last week, to creation but more explicitly this week to the dust, to the ground of our lives. We are in a profound sense “of the earth, earthy,” for such is Adam and we are all in Adam, literally, “of the ground,” adhamah. And yet, we have a heavenly vocation, namely, to be the dust transformed or as our gospel parable puts it, to be “the good ground.” It is a metaphor for ”an honest and good heart” which “having heard the word keep it and bring forth fruit with patience.” The echoes of Genesis are all too evident. The teaching is explicit; the seed is the word of God. We are the ground but what kind of ground?

Sexagesima Sunday brings out the deeper dynamic and meaning of the doctrine of Creation. As created beings we have a relation to the dust of the ground. Dust here is an image for the most basic elements of the material world, the dust out of which God has made and fashioned everything else. Long before the metaphors of ‘quarks and antiquarks’, as it were, there was dust, the dust of the ground of God’s own making. Our humanity too is understood to be made in God’s image but also “formed of dust from the ground,” the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. Thus the idea of our selves as created beings requires the realization of our special relation to the Creator, to God. So there are two things, our relation to the dust of the ground, and our relation to God; both belong inescapably to the idea of creation.

We are the dust into which God has breathed his Spirit. Will we turn to the dust or to God who raises us up from the dust? Only if we nurture the life-giving and spirit-forming Word that has been sown in the dust and ground of our souls can we be raised up. The ‘ground of our being’ is not simply the dust of the earth. More profoundly, it is the Word and Will of God as sown in the ground of God’s creation, in us as human beings.

Today’s gospel presents us with the parable of the Sower and the Seed. To put it bluntly, we are dirt. That is not an insult. It is a salutary reminder. It is a call and a challenge because it asks us, ‘What kind of dirt? What kind of ground will we be? The good ground or the bad?’

On these “gesima” Sundays, the emphasis is on human activity, or to put it more precisely, on the activity of the virtues of the soul which belong to the truth and purpose of our humanity as spiritual and intellectual creatures. They belong to the ways in which human activity is taken up into God’s greater activity and perfected. The “gesima” Sundays place us on the ground, in the land. Such too is the meaning of our Parish. We are here and not elsewhere. This land, this place, this community, is the place where God’s Word has been sown. What kind of ground will we be? The question is both for each of us individually and corporately.

Read the rest of this entry »

“My soul cleaveth to the dust: O quicken thou me, according to thy word”

Septuagesima Sunday marks a new beginning. We begin at the beginning, even with dust and dirt, as it were, the ground of creation, quite literally, we might say. Thus at Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, we begin reading today from The Book of Genesis and the Prologue of John’s Gospel. The conjunction of these readings is quite profound because these beginnings recall us to our end; in short, to the radical meaning of our life in Christ. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” He is “the Word made flesh” who “dwelt among us,” that in him we might “behold his glory, the glory of the only-begotten of the Father.” But only in accord with his will and in what he makes known to us, namely, “grace upon grace.” John tells us that “no one has ever seen God,” yet “the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known,” literally, “exegeted him.” It means to interpret, to make known, or to lead out into an understanding. It is the only time in the Scriptures that the word exegesis is used about the life of God himself. Beginnings and endings in a radical sense are set before us. All this belongs to an ancient tradition conveying ancient wisdom, namely, a profound reflection upon the mystery of Creation within the Revelation of God as Trinity.

We begin with Genesis only to find ourselves in the midst of the vineyard of creation in today’s gospel from Matthew. It recalls Genesis and the purpose of creation. Genesis is at once a difficult and a necessary starting point. It is difficult because of the contemporary tendency to view the Book of Genesis in one of two ways, both of which are false. The first way is to attempt to read Genesis as a kind of scientific treatise, which it isn’t – this is the folly of creationism: at once pseudoscience and pseudo religion. The second way is to read Genesis as a haphazard collection of fables and myths, which it isn’t: a form of historicism or positivism, equally pseudoscience in terms of the human sciences and pseudo religion, too.

The Book of Genesis does not propose a human discovery of God. It begins emphatically with God. “In the beginning, God.” There is the proclamation of God as the absolute beginning after which everything else is secondary, after which everything else is derivative, after which everything else is a product. And while something of the ‘Mind of the Maker,’ to use a famous phrase by Dorothy L. Sayers, is made known in what he makes, the Creator is not simply equated with what he makes. He is known as beyond and in control. It is his creation. The distinction between the Creator and the created is absolutely crucial and necessary for the understanding that John presents in the Prologue to his Gospel about Jesus as the exegesis of God by his being incarnate in human flesh. He makes God known as Trinity.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Whatsoever ye do, in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus”

Epiphany runs out this year in the themes of mercy and judgment as belonging to the radical meaning of Christ’s Epiphany. He is the Judge of all humanity and the Lord of all Mercy. Today’s Epistle from Colossians complements and illustrates the Gospel by highlighting the qualities of Christ that we are meant to embody and express in our lives despite the limitations of the world and ourselves. Epiphany is not and cannot be a flight from or a negation of the world; the overarching theme is God’s will and purpose for our humanity regardless of the circumstances of our lives. This is the significance of the images of wheat and tares, weeds, we might say.

Wheat and tares grow together in the field of the world. Wheat and weeds are there together, both the good and the bad. But who can be sure which is which? What is weed and what is wheat? To ask this question recognizes the limitations of our judgments. “Let them both grow together until harvest,” says the sower. God is the gardener and God is the judge. Not you and not me. That is itself a great mercy.

This doesn’t simply mean suspending our judgment in the abdication of our responsibilities. We have the obligation and the ability to discern right from wrong and, by God’s grace, to act accordingly. We are bidden to be God’s good wheat in the world of wheat and tares. That requires a check upon our judgmentalism both about ourselves and one another. Forbearing one another and forgiving one another is the counter to our judgmentalism. As we all know that is not always easy and increasingly so in our rather disturbed and disturbing world of folly and division, of uncertainty and fear, of vanity and nonsense, of wars and destruction; the list goes on as do the various ways of trying to make sense of our current dystopias, some more insightful and helpful than others. The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, for instance, suggests that we are only just now coming out of a kind of 75 year old fantasy, the post-World War II world of relative peace and prosperity that seemed to promise endless material progress and limitless personal freedoms. No longer.

Our judgmentalism is our presumption to know what we cannot and do not know about others and even about ourselves. We would put ourselves in the place of God as judge, having forgotten the lessons of Epiphany. We would presume to have a total and absolute view when, in fact, our viewpoint is altogether restricted and limited. We see, at best, “through a glass darkly,” as Paul will say. To know this is to be aware of the limits of our knowing. Yet this is the beginning of wisdom. It frees us from the tyranny of ourselves.

Read the rest of this entry »

“When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his son, made of a woman,
made under the law”

Candlemas is the mid-winter festival of light and life at once looking back to Christ’s nativity and looking ahead to his Passion and Death. Intriguingly, it is both a feast of Christ and of Mary, combining two ancient precedents. For the Eastern Church it was a feast of Christ, “the Presentation of Christ in the Temple,” first noted in Etheria’s Peregrinatio to Jerusalem in the late 4th century. For the Western Church, it became a feast of Mary, “the Purification of Mary.” John Cosin, a 17th century Bishop of Durham, combined both titles in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother Prayer Book of the Anglican Churches. All of this belongs, we might say, to the light of history. By the mid-fifth century, lighted candles were introduced to the festival, hence, the more convenient moniker, Candlemas.

You have, no doubt, begun to notice the lengthening of days. Candlemas, too, is associated with the astronomical tradition of cross-quarter days, days which fall more or less midway between the days which mark the four quarters of the year; in this case, Christmas, December 25th, and the Annunciation, March 25th. Candlemas falls roughly between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox (March 20th this year; Easter being the Sunday after the first full moon post-equinox). All this belongs, we might say, to the light of nature, make what you will of rodents such as groundhogs and their shadows!

But as Luke makes clear, the story of the purification and presentation belongs to the light of law and prophecy. “when the days of her purification, according to the law of Moses, were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord; (as it is written in the law of the Lord, every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord).” Thus two customs of the Law meet in this story: Mary’s purification seven days after giving birth, and the presentation to the Lord forty days after his birth. in the wonderful paradox of the Lord being presented to the Lord! All belonging to the light of the Law, we might say. But then with Simeon and Anna, we see the light of prophecy at once fulfilled in Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis, in his startling and prophetic words about the child Christ and Mary his mother, and in the wonderful words of Anna the prophetess. All this belongs, we might say, to the light of prophecy.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Overcome evil with good”

It is a strong statement about the power and nature of the good and a strong indictment of a form of false or incomplete justice that belongs to revenge. Revenge is about our wanting to get back at someone who has wronged or hurt us as we think or imagine. But if we are honest with ourselves it means recognizing that we do not simply want to get back, to do just as it has been done to us. No. What we really want is to annihilate or humiliate the other; to “nuke them till they glow,” as I recall some dyed in the wool theological liberals at Harvard saying at the time of the Iranians taking American hostages. Justice as getting ahead not getting even.

Paul suggests that is not the way to go. It is our way but not God’s way, quoting first, Deuteronomy on vengeance, and, then, Proverbs, about feeding and giving drink to your enemy. But what exactly is meant in saying that in so doing “thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head?” How is that good and just. It sounds more than a wee bit vindictive. But is it? Might it not rather suggest the conviction of conscience in countering evil with good and thus awakening that sense of the greater power of the good in the other, the enemy? It transcends the false and limited forms of human justice. The injunction at the beginning of the Epistle reading from Romans to “be not wise in [our] own conceits,” our own thinking, is complemented by the concluding injunction to “be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Such injunctions are far more than the chorus of empty platitudes that dominate our contemporary culture. Be kind, be nice, be good, be happy – all true but what do they mean? What does it mean to say to your children that you just want them to be happy without giving them any idea of what happiness is? That is to leave them alone and empty in themselves as if happiness is merely subjective. Aristotle, who uses the word eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness in his Nicomachean Ethics, means by it something far removed from our modern assumptions. It is a life of virtue lived in accord with reason; something substantial and more than simply something emotional and personal. As such the great traditions of ethical philosophy or theology provide us with something more and greater that shape and inform our lives in what is ultimately good even in the face of “our infirmities, and in all our dangers and necessities,” as the Collect wisely says. The good is the mercy of God who speaks to the truth of our desires and gathers us to himself, seeking our good and our wholeness; ultimately the healing of soul and body.

Read the rest of this entry »