Category: Sermons

“My word shall not return to me empty but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it”

There is nothing more profoundly spiritual than the activity of giving thanks. It is not just a matter of good manners. It is the recognition of something other than ourselves. It recognizes that we are not complete in and of ourselves. Others have labored and we have entered into their labour and even into the enjoyment of the fruits of their labour. Yet human labour depends upon the order and the intelligible character of a natural world which we did not make, a natural world, too, it must be said, which cannot account for itself; hence creation which implies a relation to a Creator.

Thankfulness, in the spiritual sense of this rich and vital word, is a check upon the arrogance and the presumption of all of us, atheists and believers alike. That we can make a mess of the great truths of religion, not to mention the natural world and our lives, is part of the religious story, albeit in the different forms belonging to the integrity of each of the world’s great religions. Atheism is a form of denial of the truth about the phenomenal and intelligible world in which we find ourselves. Sin, for believers, is similarly a denial; a denial of the truth with which we identify rather than reject. We confront this truth continually and constantly in the liturgy where we are called to confess, knowing precisely our shortcomings and failings, our follies and foolishnesses, individually and collectively.

We meet in the autumnal beauty of October in the time of the gathering of the harvest of nature’s year. In our cultural moment of anger, fear, and uncertainty, we nonetheless find ourselves surrounded with the bounty of creation and the fruits of human labour. We meet in the Church. Here things of the spirit and things of nature intersect, reminding us of the spiritual nature of all reality. It acknowledges the great truth that we are part of the created order and, even more, that creation finds its voice of praise through us, in part through our work itself, honouring the order and truth of creation without which there can be no harvest, but, even more, through the liturgy itself.

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“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”

God commands us to love him. And so we must, for his command does not issue from any lack or insufficiency on his part. God does not need our love. His command proceeds instead from his very being. He is active Love, everlasting love, as we are constantly reminded in the recurring refrain of the Trinity season: “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” Thus God’s command to love him equally extends to his command to love others and ourselves for his sake, for this is the perfecting of his divine image in us. It is really all about grace as what defines and perfects our lives. The Gospel illustrates what is said in the Epistle about “the grace of God which is given [us] by Jesus Christ; the grace that enriches [us] in all utterance, and in all knowledge,” and that confirms us unto the end, our end or being in Christ.

“The end of the matter, all has been heard,” Ecclesiastes concludes. It is the most philosophical book of the Hebrew Scriptures. Having surveyed all the forms of human endeavour under the sun and found them wanting, for “all is vanity” or empty, the Preacher finishes with the words, “Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.” It became the title of Richard Allestree’s famous treatise, The Whole Duty of Man (1684), which along with William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), profoundly influenced Christian life and witness in the 18th century, praised by such different personalities as Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, and John Wesley. Fear means awe and wonder; in short, love for what is greater than all else. As Jesus says, “there is none other commandment greater than these.”The whole duty of the Christian appears in this command to love. “For when the love of God precedes, the love of neighbour follows” (Augustine). Love of God and love of neighbour sum up the whole of the Old Law and, in Christ, they become both the fulfillment of the Law and the very heartbeat of Christian life. God’s life in Christ “shall confirm you [keep your steadfast] unto the end,” say St. Paul. That divine life is the “grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil” and the reason for “pure hearts and minds to follow thee the only God,” as the  Collect says.

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Michaelmas Daisies Dancing with Angels

Michaelmas daisies in their varied hues dance along our maritime roadsides in the soft September air. They are asters, a Greek word meaning star, and are called ‘michaelmas daisies’, because their appearance coincides with the great Fall festival of St. Michael and All Angels on September 29th. They recall us to the larger dimensions of creation and of the traditions of intellectual and spiritual life which are part of the life of academic institutions and our churches as places of contemplation, learning and service.

Angels are a strong reminder to us of our spiritual and intellectual nature. They, too, are creatures but purely intelligible beings, spiritual beings, in other words, though often beautifully depicted in art. As Diotima teaches Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, spirits are intermediary between god and humans. She notes that “they interpret and carry messages from humans to gods and from gods to humans”. This ancient Greek view complements the angelic messengers in the scriptural traditions and belongs to the idea of good news that is shared and in which we participate. Evangelist means, literally, a good angel, a good messenger; hence, gospel or good news that is made known.

Angels are an inescapable feature of the scriptural and spiritual landscape of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic worlds. The ideas or forms of Plato have become the ideas or thoughts of God and have entered into the spiritual imaginary of the theological cultures of reflection and to a branch of theology known as angelology. They belong to our thinking about creation, spiritually and intellectually, and to ourselves as spiritual creatures, albeit not angels, because we are unmistakingly embodied beings. Angels are the great  ‘celestial no-see ums’, as Fr. Robert Crouse was fond of observing. The artistic traditions picture and imagine the angels in various ways but in truth they can only be thought.When we think and pray, itself a form of thinking in a Godward direction, we are in the company of angels.

The most important things in life are the things which we cannot see but are known intellectually or spiritually. Such are the angels who contribute to our thinking about the intellectual principles that belong to the created order and to our lives in thought and prayer and to the primacy of the ethical, our thinking about good and evil.

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“Friend, go up higher”

It is, I think, an intriguing text. It’s not about ambition or pretension, or for that matter despair. It’s about the hope of transformation. Better to be called up than to be put down. It conveys the sense that we are called to something more, that we have an end beyond what we know is before us but fear to face, namely, the grave and gate of death. But it requires humility, a kind of honesty about our humanity and about ourselves in the sight of God.

The operative words are “friend” and “go up higher”. We are made friends of Jesus by being called up higher but only through his death and resurrection. That is the heart of baptism. We are identified with Jesus in his free-willing identity and sacrifice for us. But humility is the necessary condition of receiving God’s grace. It is not about putting ourselves down so much as not puffing up ourselves and claiming status over others. Humility in this sense is honesty in contrast to both presumption and despair.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 29 captures something of the power of love ultimately expressed in Christ’s “sweet love remember’d.”  Consider the poetic force of his sonnet that lifts us up to heaven’s gate and that speaks of the love that overpowers ourselves even when we are in disgrace and despair.

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
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,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

All love belongs to God and thus this sonnet can, I think, be understood in more ways than simply the romantic, the erotic, or the sentimental. Plato understood that love or eros belongs to something heavenly and divine, namely, the love of the Good itself which gathers up all of the forms of love, incomplete and partial, into what is perfect and eternal. That way of thinking has its highest expression in Christ Jesus. All love belongs to God.

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Fr. David Curry delivered this sermon at the King’s College Chapel on 23 September 2001, shortly after 9/11.

“And he arose and followed him”

The call of Matthew from “the receipt of custom” – what a wonderful phrase! – seems rather disturbing and disquieting. It is so abrupt and apparently arbitrary. Jesus says “follow me” and “he arose and followed him.” At best, it suggests a crisis to which there seems to be but one response.

We are, of course, greatly disturbed and, no doubt, disquieted about other things than the seemingly arbitrary actions of a Jewish tax-collector over two millennia ago. The events in New York and Washington and elsewhere are deeply disturbing (9/11). Suddenly we realise that the Global Village means that terrorism isn’t just “over there” in some far off remote corner of the world. Suddenly it is very close at hand. There is a crisis, only we may not be quite so sure about the response. Indeed, that may very well be what disturbs and disquiets us most in the aftermath of these terrible acts of terrorism. What kind of response will there be?

Now it is not my place nor my business to offer advice on matters of foreign policy and international affairs whether brilliant or banal, whether wise or foolish. But here is a crisis which should recall us to the spiritual principles which underlie our moral, social, political, and economic lives and which alone enable a respectable dialogue with other spiritual traditions that are different from our own. To recall such things, perhaps in the face of their having been forgotten or denied, is surely the business of the Church. Even an obscure publican who became an Apostle and Evangelist may actually be able to help our thinking.

And if so, then the Global Village will in some sense have become more truly global in the discovery of how the communities of the past belong to our present rather than being cavalierly rejected, ignored or destroyed. “Innovation replaces tradition” after all, is the slogan of globalisation. The position of the defining economists of globalisation, Joseph Schumpeter and Andy Grove, is summed up this way: “the present – or perhaps the future – replaces the past. Nothing matters so much as what will come next, and what will come next can only arrive if what is here now gets overturned.” The super fast-track into the cyber future means that there is no here; it is always sliding into a past which is forever being overturned. “Daddy, are we there yet?” takes on a whole new horror of meaning.

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“When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

Jesus meets us as mourners several times in the Scriptures. In every encounter something happens that speaks to human suffering and to human dignity. As today’s Gospel story illustrates, there is something uniquely human in the very act of burying the dead. It means that we are more though not less than our bodies and our experiences; a counter to the various reductionisms of ourselves whether it be to genes or hormones, to culture or history, to cosmic or climate forces real or imagined, to class or economics, to social constructs or political agendas; in short, the problems of the ‘natural sciences’ as transposed and magnified in the ‘human sciences’.

These are all things that happen to us, to be sure, but are we reduced to such things? Or does the pathos, the pathétic, of life in its self-affectivity mean that we are more than these reductive externalities? Suffering has its fullest and deepest expression in death and mourning; in short, in the forms of our self-awareness as living beings. Thus these encounters highlight the gathering of all human suffering into the compassion of Christ, and thus to the redemption and restoration of the dignity of our humanity through suffering.

Jesus encounters a funeral procession on their way to a burial. A young man has died and is being carried out of the city of Nain. He is “the only son of his mother, and she was a widow,” as Luke poignantly tells us. We feel her loss, as we commonly say, in an effort to comfort both the grieving and ourselves. But what does that really mean?

I have pondered that question in the realization that there is something profoundly and uniquely human about the burying of the dead precisely at the time in our culture when there is a very real danger of losing this sensibility, and thus losing what it means to be human. Reflecting on this requires looking into what Shakespeare calls “the dark backward and abyss of time” (Tempest). historically and in literature itself, one of the greatest witnesses to human culture and so to human suffering and dignity.

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“God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”

Today’s Epistle from Galatians complements Holy Cross Day which is tomorrow, September 14th. The Major Feast days in the Church Calendar are known as “Red Letter Days” because in the manuscript tradition they were highlighted in red, rubro in Latin, from which we also get the idea of rubrics or directions in the Prayer Book. Ironically they are printed in the Prayer Book Calendar in bold black letters! The Major Holy Days highlight important moments in the life of Christ and the Apostles and others named in the New Testament Scriptures.

There are also a number of Minor Feast days or “Black Letter Days” that commemorate events or people in the history of the Church. Holy Cross is a Minor feast day, associated with an historic event, the so-called “discovery of the Cross” of Christ’s crucifixion by the Empress Helena in the fourth century, originally commemorated on May 3rd as The Invention of the Holy Cross, meaning discovery, and then as The Exaltation of the Holy Cross on September 14th in the basilica in Jerusalem. Both feasts were known in Saxon times as Roodmas-day; Rood means cross in Old English. Both feasts were restored in the calendar of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother-prayer book of what has come to be known as the Anglican Communion.

These titles belong to Holy Cross Day, September 14th. It also serves as a marker for an ancient sensibility about the natural seasons of the year in relation to the Sanctorale, the cycle of Saints’ days within the structure of the Church Year. The Autumn Ember Days occur on the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after Holy Cross Day. In the Canadian BCP, a Collect for Holy Cross Day (BCP, p. 321) is appointed along with a permissive rubric about using the Epistle and Gospel of Passion Sunday. A nice provision, it underscores the interrelationship of justification, sanctification, and glorification through the centrality of the Cross. All these considerations speak to the theological significance of the Cross in the life of the Christian Church as today’s Epistle indicates. Along with the awareness of the patterns of the seasons of nature, the Ember Days highlight the ordained ministry of the Church, directing that the Pentecost Ember Day propers about the divers Orders in the Church be always used first in the other Ember seasons.

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“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger”

Ten lepers, standing afar off on the outskirts of a certain unnamed village in the lands of Samaria and Galilee, cry out to Jesus for mercy. All ten were healed. Yet one turned back, Luke tells us, “glorifying God, giving him thanks,” and, indeed, in an extravagant manner, crying “with a loud voice and falling down on his face at his feet.” As Luke simply says, “he was a Samaritan.”

Jesus calls attention to the paradox of the one and the many. Ten were healed. But “where are the nine? There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.” The Samaritan here as in last Sunday’s Gospel in the parable of the Good Samaritan is the stranger, the other, yet the one who shows us what it means to be human. In both cases, the Samaritan, the stranger, the other, really symbolizes what belongs to the truth of our common humanity, and in two ways: first, our being healed and restored by divine compassion in the care of one another, (such is “music at midnight” as we considered last week), and, secondly, in turning back, giving glory and thanks to God in whom all our good and the good of one another is found.

Giving thanks for healing and care and giving glory to God go together. The act of receiving and giving reveals the nature of salvation. If the “certain lawyer” learns in spite of himself who is the neighbour in the parable, so here in today’s Gospel, we learn that the love of God and the love of neighbour not only belong together as the fulfilling of the law in love, but as the very meaning of our being made whole and restored; in short, salvation. Jesus says directly to the stranger, “Arise, go thy way, thy faith hath made thee whole.” He is not simply healed of the contagion of leprosy, a bodily condition, which separates him from the human community, he is made whole or saved in terms of his whole person, his essential humanity. The terms are synonymous: Salvation is our wholeness both in body and soul as restored to the community of God in faith, hope, and love.

In returning and giving thanks we are made whole. Yet returning and giving thanks to God in Christ was not actually commanded by Jesus. All he said to the ten was “Go, and show yourselves unto the priests.” This references the customs and practices of Israel in the Jewish religion. Implicit in his directive is that they could only show themselves to the priests of Israel if they were no longer outcasts and defiled by their contagion of leprosy; in short, only if they were healed. In Luke’s wonderful economy of expression, “it came to pass, that as they went, they were healed.” All ten were healed.

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“Love is the fulfilling of the law”

John Drury’s masterful literary biography of the poet and priest, George Herbert (1593-1631) is entitled Music at Midnight (2013). The title is taken from an anecdote in Izaak Walton’s The Life of Mr. George Herbert, written in 1670. It has the ring of truth to it about Herbert’s character, drawn from his own account of what happened to him one evening on his way from Bemerton to an evening of music making with friends in the cathedral city of Salisbury. As he journeyed, “he saw a poor man with a poorer horse that was fallen under his load.” Both were in distress and in need of help “which Mr. Herbert perceiving, put off his canonical coat, and helped the poor man to unload, and after to load his horse. The poor man blessed him for it, and he blessed the poor man;” and then, in very telling phrase, “and so was like the good Samaritan, that he gave him money to refresh both himself and his horse, and told him, that if he loved himself, he would be merciful to his beast.”

The whole event acts out the story of the Good Samaritan. But the anecdote goes on to report what happened when Herbert reached the house of his friends, dirty and in disarray, unlike his usual trim and clean self. He told them what had happened and was told by one that “he had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment.” Herbert’s answer was that the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight, and that the omission of it” would have troubled “his conscience, whensoever he would pass by that place.” Walton quotes Herbert as saying, “For if I be bound to pray for all that be in distress, I am sure that I am bound, so far as it is in my power, to practise what I pray for … and I would not willingly pass one day of my life without comforting a sad soul, or showing mercy: and I praise God for the occasion. And now let’s tune our instruments.”

“To practise what I pray for.” Prayer is “a kind of tune which all things hear and fear,, Prayer (I). It illustrates the reciprocity and interplay of all things human and divine, natural and holy, domestic and exotic, concluding through a parade of images and metaphors that prayer is “something understood.” All in all, the anecdote and his poems encapsulate poignantly the radical understanding of the Parable of the Good Samaritan before us this Sunday in the midpoint of the Trinity season. It is all captured most wonderfully in the opening words of the last poem of The Temple, Love (III). “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guiltie of dust and sinne,” for that is our human condition. Yet “quick-ey’d Love” always draws nearer to us, “sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any thing.”

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Fr. David Curry preached this homily to the St. John Vianney branch of the Societas Sanctae Crucis (SSC, Society of the Holy Cross) on 30 July, Feast of St John Vianney transferred, and updated 21 August 2026.

“How readest thou?”

We commemorate St. John Marie Vianney, patron saint of parish priests, of all priests, of all confessors, and of every healing ministry, and of our branch of the SSC. Born in 1786, he survived the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Ordained in 1815, he served as a curate for three years and then for forty-one years as the Parish Priest in Ars, celebrated as the Curé d’Ars. A most pious, devout, and faithful priest, he was not particularly distinguished by any intellectual gifts, had very little formal learning, and struggled with Latin, yet, as Simone Weil observes, his attention to the struggle to learn translated into his remarkable gifts of insight into the human heart and to the holiness of his witness in the rather spiritually barren climate of mid-nineteenth century France. An example for all priests, to be sure, but not in terms of things of outward show and spectacle but rather to the inward conversion of the soul united to God in love; he had a deep devotion to Mary and to Christ and his cross.

The Gospel reading from Luke (Lk. 12.35-40) highlights the theme of our watching and waiting upon the coming of the master, a fitting image for St. John Vianney seeking Christ in people’s souls, at once serving Christ and being served by him, and so entering into his blessedness, the blessedness to which our humanity is called. “The glory of God,” as Irenaeus puts it, “is man alive,” a living human being grounded “in the vision of God.” But what is that living human life? It is primarily ethical and spiritual but which always runs the risk of being reduced to the material and practical, and thus betraying or compromising the more radical nature of human redemption; namely its transformative qualities of being made more lovely in God’s eyes and thus becoming not less nor more than human or other than human but more Christ-like in our attention to Christ. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds,” as Paul puts it. This signals the true purpose and dignity of our humanity; not its being denatured or dehumanized but its perfection and end in God.

In the Evening Offices, we have been reading from Luke. Earlier this week we had a reading from Luke 10. 25-42. A remarkable passage, it illustrates profoundly the essential ethical teaching of the Christian Faith expressed in two interconnected stories, the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the scene of Martha and Mary with Jesus in Bethany. That story bookends the radical beginning of the Parable of the Good Samaritan captured in Jesus’ questions in response to the certain lawyer’s question which is intended to be subversive and sophistical. “Master, What must I do to inherit eternal life?,” he asks, but with the intent to trip him up. What Jesus does is wonderfully Socratic, for his questions in turn actually draw out of the certain lawyer ethical truth in spite of himself. “What is written in the Law? Jesus asks him, and then adds, “How readest thou?” The lawyer is moved rightly, despite his intention, to quote Deuteronomy and Leviticus on the inseparable nature of the love of God and the love of neighbour, the Jewish Shema and the Christian Summary of the Law.

Jesus commends him: “Thou hast answered right; this do, and thou shalt live,” underscoring, it seems to me, the connection between reading or thinking and doing. “But he,” as Luke puts it, “willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?” The question is dismissive and cynical, undermining the ethical principle which he had just acknowledged. But the question launches the parable of the so-called good Samaritan, which articulates beautifully and compellingly the essential ethical teaching of the Christian Church and Faith.

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