Category: Sermons

“Above all, take the shield of faith”.

The scriptural images before us today have a wonderful cogency and power; they at once disquiet us, I suspect, as well as comfort us. We may indeed be inclined to prefer the gospel story of the healing of the son of a nobleman, not a poor man, we note, but one who is presumably well off; that alone, of course, might give us cause to pause. Yet, it is the story about something which is done by Jesus for us and so it suits the predilection of this age of entitlement to suppose that God should heal us and provide for us whatever we think we want. After all, ‘He owes us’, we might secretly think. We are happy to be on the receiving end, takers all and givers none. Of course, the gospel story itself will allow none of that kind of nonsense.

The challenge of the gospel is the wonderful openness to the grace of God by the nobleman who “believed the word which Jesus had spoken unto him”. He did not insist that Jesus make a house call. Jesus’ word was enough. That is the wonder and the effect of the grace of Christ at work in human lives. It illustrates what it means to “be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might” that St. Paul talks about in his Letter to the Ephesians, the strength and the might to work with what is conveyed to us by the Word of God. We are not just passive receivers, the couch potatoes of spiritual blessings, as it were; no, we are called to be actively engaged with what the Word of God opens out to us.

If comforted by the gospel, at first glance, then, I am sure we are equally made uncomfortable about the images in the epistle reading from Ephesians. The images are, in their sustained rigour, unmistakably military. They suggest an aggressiveness, even a kind of bellicosity that surely makes us pause, if not shudder uncomfortably.

“Put on the armour of God,” Paul tells us and he continues to tell us through the language of image and metaphor that we contend “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against the spiritual wickedness in high places”. Strong stuff. I wonder if we can hear it even in the approach to Remembrance Day and at a time when we confront the forms of active nihilism even here in Canada which arise out of our communities and ghettoes of passive nihilism, out of our spiritual emptiness; the nothingness of evil which breeds a destructive nothingness.

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“The wedding is ready, but they who were bidden were not worthy”

“I had not thought,” says Dante to Virgil, “that death had undone so many.” A passage and a scene from Dante’s great work, The Divine Comedy, he has pictured himself as contemplating the hordes of lost souls in the Vestibule of Hell as they run to and fro following this or that fad or fancy, souls who willed and then unwilled their will unable to commit to anything; unworthy even of Hell, it seems. It serves, perhaps, as a kind of metaphor for the age of distraction.

T.S. Eliot quotes that same line in his great poem about the ambiguities of modernity, The Wasteland. “I had not thought death had undone so many”, it is said, but in the context of contemplating “a crowd flow[ing] over London Bridge.” His comment is about the living as dead, the walking dead, as it were, in the “unreal city” of the modern world.

There is something wrong and not quite right with us. Yet precisely in the gloom and grey of November, we are awakened to the end of our humanity in the glorious vision of the Communion of Saints, “a multitude that no man could number.” Such is the meaning of All Saints. We have an end with God and with one another, as a community united in and through the diversities of human personality, a community united in prayer and praise of God. But when we neglect that vision, we find ourselves very much in the company of the walking dead, “cast into outer darkness,” as our Gospel puts it so frighteningly this morning, where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” and all because of our indifference and our hostility and our unreadiness; in short, our lack of commitment.

The contrasts between the communion of saints and grim realities of outer darkness could not be greater.

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“And the wall of the city had twelve foundations,
and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb”

The feast of St. Simon and St. Jude completes the annual parade of Apostolic Saints and brings us to the festival of All Saints, the celebration of the Apostolic city and fellowship in the Communion of All Saints.

All that really can be said about St. Simon and St. Jude has to do with their apostleship. They simply belong to the company of “twelve poor men, by Christ anointed,” as a hymn puts it. What more needs to be said than that?

They have, to be sure, lent their names to certain features of human life as patron saints, symbols, we might say, of some aspect or other of the virtues of Christ individually considered. St. Simon is the patron saint of zealots; St. Jude, more curiously, is the patron saint of lost causes, something with which I have more than a passing acquaintance. The zealous passion for a perfect political and social and spiritual righteousness often complements the despair at lost causes that often accompanies such worthy and necessary aspirations. Ultimately, such zeal brings us to the true righteousness of Christ, realized in the city of heavenly Jerusalem. What we have here is only “the unreal city” as T.S. Eliot memorably puts it, a lost cause.

“Zeal for thine house hath even consumed me,” the psalmist says. Yet through the myriad of lost causes, the deeper yearning for peace and righteousness is glimpsed, the deeper yearning which belongs to a peace, “not as the world giveth,” but as Christ gives.

The readings concentrate our attention on the Apostolic Foundation of the Church and the end of our humanity. Apostolic Foundation and Apostolic Fellowship are two realities which we are badly in need of recovering and reclaiming. Without them our parishes, our communities, our institutions either become the mental ghettoes of passive nihilism, empty, angry and in despair, or the activist sects and cells of active nihilism trumpeting one of a myriad of the social and political agendas of the day at the expense of the spiritual vision of redeemed humanity which is ours to proclaim. We are too much with ourselves because we are not with God.

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“Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord; / Lord, hear my voice”
(Psalm 130.1)

The psalmist’s cry echoes the cry of Jonah from the belly of the great fish, a cry, he suggests, that is from “the belly of Sheol,” the term for the Jewish underworld. Jonah is as far from God as he can be. And yet, not unlike Christ on the cross in his cry of dereliction, he cries out to God. In the case of Jonah, he cries out to the God from whom he has tried to get as far away from as possible. The biblical, theological, and psychological point is that you can’t.

As another psalm (Psalm 139) reminds us, “O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me:/ thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts from afar” (vs.1). It goes on to ask “whither shall I go then from thy spirit?/ or whither shall I flee from thy presence?/ If I climb up into heaven, thou art there:/ if I go down to hell, thou art there also” (vs. 6,7). God would not be God if we thought we could escape his presence and his truth.

The story of Jonah is partly told to make this point about God and about God as the universal God and not just the God of a particular people, a tribal god as it were. The Book of Jonah is actually a profound satire upon the folly of that kind of thinking. A most unusual book of Hebrew prophecy, to be sure, it yet offers an important spiritual insight into the nature of God, not altogether unlike The Book of Ruth with her insight that “your people shall be my people, your God my God” for God is for all people. They may have been written about the same time in the third century BC.

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“That ye may know”

Jesus wants us to know that he is the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins connects us to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The forgiveness of sins is about the death and resurrection of Jesus in us.

St. Matthew’s story of the paralytic abbreviates St. Mark’s account. St. Mark’s fuller story reads like a burial-scene. The paralytic is helpless as the dead, he is carried out like the dead by his four bearers; a hole is opened for him, as for the dead, he is lowered into it, as unto his grave. But falling, he does not fall into clay, he falls before the feet of the Son of God, who says to him, first, “thy sins are forgiven thee” and then “arise and walk” (Austin Farrer).

With Matthew, too, we are brought dead in our sins into the presence of Christ. We are brought by faith and Jesus, seeing the faith of those who brought him, says, “Son be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee”.

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“Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you”

A most compelling and touching scene, at once a story of friendship and forgiveness, of healing and restoration, it illustrates what St. Paul is saying in the Epistle. Here is the kindness of friends towards one another. Here in Christ’s words of forgiveness towards the man sick of the palsy is the tender-heartedness of Jesus.

And yet there is something else here too, something of a more sombre and disturbing nature. There is as well in this Gospel scene “the vanity of minds,” “the darkening of the understanding,” “the hardness of hearts,” “ the corruption of souls”; in short, all the other things that the Epistle mentions – the evil in the heart which resents and opposes the good that might be done to others.

The soul is the battlefield between good and evil. And we all stand convicted or better yet, in the imagery of the Gospel, we are all paralyzed, unable to move, palsied limbs reflecting a deeper paralysis of the soul which we see in the resistance and opposition of the scribes to Christ’s words of forgiveness to the one who was paralyzed. They say nothing but “Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?”

Christ addresses that obduracy of the mind, that stubbornness of the soul, which remains closed to the possibilities of God’s grace at work in people’s lives, the kind of grace which is already evident in the action of those who brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus.

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“Let me go to the field, and glean among the ears of grain after him
in whose sight I shall find favour.”

My thanks to Fr. Peter Harris and to St. Peter’s Cathedral for the privilege of being here and speaking to you this evening. I hope that this can be the beginning of an annual Choral Evensong in the Fall sponsored by the Prayer Book Society of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. There is something wonderfully calming, beautiful and intentional about Evensong. It is, dare I say, one of the glories of our Anglican witness to the Catholic Faith. I am most grateful for the wonderful musical offering of your choir. Actually, I think that all I have to say has been sung already in that lovely motet by Giovanni Croce. Gaudate et Exultate! “Rejoice ye and be exulatant,” uplifted, regardless of the hardships of life, even the hardships of persecution! Wonderful.

We seem to be very much in the company of grieving widows and sorrowing mothers! And yet we glean in the fields of Boaz to discover divine truth and human dignity. Perhaps, that is the real mission of the Prayer Book Society in times of uncertainty, of loss and sorrow. Perhaps, in so doing, we shall discover those “wholesome medicines of doctrine” delivered to us by such figures as St. Luke.

Naomi has lost her husband Elimelech and her two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, who were also the husbands of her two daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, the latter after whom The Book of Ruth is named. Such situations, though sad, are hardly unique. You only need to think about your own families and your own communities to recall similar sadnesses, sorrows and losses. And yet, as Paul suggests in our second lesson from his Letter to the Philippians, such commonplaces of sadness and sorrow, the things that have happened, can be the cause of joy and rejoicing. Somehow such circumstances can be the occasions in which Christ can be honoured and glorified. In another words, Scripture gives us ways to face the hard and sad things of human life.

Probably written sometime after the Babylonian exile, The Book of Ruth with its timeless and reflective mood is notionally set in the time of the Judges. In the Christian Bible, it is found immediately after The Book of Judges. In a way, it is a kind of critical commentary on The Book of Judges, offering a completely contrasting account of Jewish identity and mission. The Book of Judges, like many of the early books of the Hebrew Scriptures, is written from a kind of exclusionary viewpoint with the emphasis upon Israel as the Chosen People separate and apart from the nations round about. It is a point of view that has a long pedigree. Over and against that stands another perspective which emphasizes the role and mission of Israel as “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” as Isaiah puts it and which the Nunc Dimittis from Luke’s Gospel repeats in our evening liturgy, the idea that what has been proclaimed to Israel is for all people, something universal in principle. These tensions define Jewish history and thought, oscillating between the one and the other, and in the Christian understanding resolved in Christ.

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“He had answered them well”

The context is controversy. It almost always is when it is a matter of spiritual truth. Truth which unites frequently divides. Yet a deeper unity may sometimes be only found through the divisions of our hearts, when our hearts are broken and opened to view. For then, and only then, perhaps, we discover what it is that we believe, what it is that we stand for, if anything at all. Sometimes it takes controversy.

But what does it mean to stand for something? Is it simply a matter of assertion, a matter of self-definition which demands recognition upon no other basis than our subjective desires and opinions? Is the truth just what we make it? Or do we stand for something objective and received, truth that defines us even in our untruth?Sometimes we learn through controversy. Sometimes through controversy something of the truth of God is at once communicated and received. What is to be looked for is some deeper understanding of truth, “tam antiquo, tam novo”, “truth so ancient and so new,” as Augustine puts it. Jesus is engaged in religious disputation. “Which is the first commandment of all?” he is asked by a member of the literary caste, the scribes, the writers of words which are like pictures into which we may step if we choose. We shall never be the same for truth always confronts and convicts us. This scribe, about whom Jesus will ultimately say, “thou art not far from the Kingdom of God” perceived that “[Jesus] had answered them well” and so is led to ask the overwhelming question, “which is the first commandment of all?” He is, we might say, compelled by the truth itself in the context of controversy and even intellectual animosity where power seems more at issue than truth. But “Jesus had answered them well”. And he continues to do so in his magisterial “Summary of the Law”. The greatest commandment is the love of God and the love of neighbour, no “commandment greater than these”. Powerful stuff. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,” as our liturgy notes. And yet, profoundly provocative and controversial. Why? Because of its clarity. It cuts through all the clutter and confusion of history and experience. It crystallizes the whole of the Jewish Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament. It is a kind of distillation of its teachings, almost, we might say, a kind of Old Testament Creed, and certainly one which challenges many perspectives about that remarkable collection of books and stories and poems. Is it really all about love? How can law be love? Because the Law is nothing more than the expression of God’s will and truth for our humanity and, if it convicts us of our own shortcomings, as it most surely does, then it does so only to recall us to truth. Such is repentance and prayer.

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“And one turned back … giving him thanks”

In returning and giving thanks, we are made whole. This text signals the profoundly spiritual nature of thanksgiving. In a way, today’s Gospel is the quintessential gospel of thanksgiving. At Harvest Thanksgiving, though, we usually read the lesson from Isaiah about the word of God in creation and the Gospel from St. John about Jesus as “the Bread of Life” (BCP, p. 620/1). This Gospel story from St. Luke we usually hear on The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity (BCP, p. 240), but that Sunday happened to be The Feast of St. Matthew this year. Yet this Gospel is also the appointed Gospel reading for Thanksgiving Day (BCP, p. 308). It embraces and shapes all our thinking about thanksgiving. We need to ponder its essential meaning.

Pumpkins and prepositions. Both abound in the culture of the Maritimes, often in interesting ways, but I fear we probably take more notice of the pumpkins than we do of prepositions. Pumpkins, especially given the parade of pumpkins and the pumpkin regatta in the Pisiquid puddle, are part of our thanksgiving celebrations here in Windsor. But prepositions! You’ve got to be kidding. Grammar on a Sunday?! Yes. Why? Because we can’t make any sense of the concept of thanksgiving without giving serious consideration to prepositions, particularly three prepositions. Which prepositions? They are ‘for’, ‘to’, and ‘with’.

But what are prepositions? Prepositions are those little words which carry such a weight of meaning and are so hard to master when learning a new language. They position nouns and verbs in relation to one another to indicate meaning and purpose.

Thanksgiving is a profoundly spiritual activity. It is the freest thing that we can do. Like learning and religion, it can’t be forced. It has to come freely from our hearts and minds. We can constantly remind our children to say ‘thank-you’, but real thanksgiving cannot be coerced. It belongs to the intellectual and spiritual freedom of our humanity. It is the counter to all and every aspect of the entitlement culture, to the assumption that we are owed whatever we want and think we deserve. Its significance is captured in the power of these prepositions.

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“Young man, I say unto thee, Arise”

Michaelmas daisies and burning bushes abound in the softness of autumn – even if the burning bush is one that has been hacked to pieces on the corner of the Parish’s property! Michaelmas daisies and burning bushes are, to my mind, strong and visible reminders of the primacy of spiritual and intellectual matters. No doubt, this week will inaugurate a great parade of pumpkins. I am a little less certain what things pumpkins remind us about matters spiritual and intellectual.

The Michaelmas daisies remind us of Michaelmas, the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels celebrated at the near end of September. The Angels are very much part of the larger spiritual company defined by the worship and love of the God who has revealed himself to us and in whose life “we live and move and have our being”. The burning bushes of autumn recall the essential moment and story of revelation: God makes himself known to Moses as “I AM WHO I AM” through a burning bush, which not only gets Moses’ attention, but is not consumed, not burned up. We stand on the holy ground of divine revelation. God reveals himself in his truth and majesty – “I AM WHO I AM” – but he does so through the things of nature. The natural world, too, is used as the vehicle of God’s revelation. In this lies the logic of the sacraments and our liturgy. It means that even pumpkins can remind us of the God who creates and redeems, whether or not paddling a pumpkin in the Pisiquid puddle on the Thanksgiving weekend.

God creates “out of nothing”, late Judaism and Christianity affirm, meaning that what is and what comes to be is not shaped and formed out of pre-existent matter but comes to be radically out of the mind and will of God. God after all is no-thing; not one thing among many things, but the cause and principle of all things. The revelation of God to Moses in the burning bush is the real starting point for the doctrine of creation. God is not a burning bush. He is not to be confused with anything in the created order. But, then, there is the Greek view that “nothing comes from nothing”. It belongs to Christianity to unite these two opposed concepts.

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