Category: Sermons

“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

It was behind closed doors, literally and figuratively, that Jesus made known to us his resurrection. But it is not only behind closed doors that the things of God are made known to us. Through the incarnation and manifestation of Jesus Christ, through his passion and death, through his resurrection and ascension, through the sending of the Holy Spirit, “a door was opened in heaven” and we behold the glory of God in the fullness of his revelation. God makes himself known to us.

Trinity Sunday sets before us the vision of God which is the end of man. “The end of man is endless Godhead endlessly possessed” (Austin Farrer). Trinity Sunday, we might say, is the great Te Deum Laudamus of the Church. We proclaim God as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We proclaim what we have been given to behold through the fullness of the scriptural witness to God’s revelation. It is what we have been given to proclaim and in which we are privileged to participate.

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“The Spirit helps us in our weakness”

“The Spirit helps us in our weakness,” St. Paul tells us, strengthening us in our prayers and in our thinking, strengthening us in heart and mind. Such is the meaning of the Holy Spirit as the Comforter, the strengthener, we might say. Isaiah, too, signals this twofold aspect of the Spirit’s strengthening work. The so-called sevenfold gifts of the Spirit speak to the spiritual reality of our humanity in terms of our reason and our will.

In 1662, at the time of the Restoration after the bitter English civil war which saw bishops and the Prayer Book outlawed for fifteen years, the Prayer Book was restored with a few small but important changes. Provision was made for a service for Adult Baptism, “For Those of Riper Years,” as it is quaintly expressed. There was also an addition made to the liturgy for The Ordination of Priests. It was the Bishop of Durham’s, John Cosin’s, translation of a medieval hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus. “Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,/ And lighten with celestial fire./ Thou the anointing Spirit art,/ Who dost thy seven-fold gifts impart…” What are those gifts? The gifts of the Spirit are taken from Isaiah in our lesson this evening: “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord,” to which the Greek translation, known as the Septuagint, had added a seventh gift, piety or devotion. The concept of the seven gifts of the Spirit belong to the spirituality of the life of the Church. The seven-fold gifts have to do with ourselves as spiritual and intellectual beings, tasked with thinking and doing, knowing and loving, we might say. And all by the inspiration of God the Holy Ghost who keeps us in the communion of God himself.

This is the great wonder and mystery of Pentecost. We do not need to be defined by the world or by our self-preoccupations and actions but by the God whose love and grace are poured out upon the Church in the wonder of Pentecost. We are to know and feel that love and spirit even in the midst of a broken and troubled world where we are too much with the world and too much with ourselves.

Paul’s profound words are familiar from the Prayer Book Burial Office as one of the lessons often read at funerals. They recall us to “the grandeur of God” to put it in the words of the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the face of “the bent world” of sin and folly, of destruction and death, we are reminded of our life in the Spirit and of ourselves as spiritual creatures called to love and learn and to love and serve. Nothing, Paul emphasizes, can “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Such is the meaning of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We are strengthened in the love of God in Christ Jesus, strengthened to pray “Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire/ and lighten with celestial fire.”

“The Spirit helps us in our weakness”

Fr. David Curry
Choral Evensong, Pentecost
June 8^th, 2014

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“He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance.”

The Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples gathered in the upper room gives birth to the Christian Church. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of life. Just consider the rich wisdom of the Scriptures about the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit moves over the waters and brings into life the creation which has been spoken into being. The Holy Spirit breathes “the breath of life” into “the adam” – our humanity formed from the dust – “and so man became a living creature.”

The Holy Spirit bestows the seven-fold gifts of spiritual understanding upon Israel and Israel becomes the prophetic mission signaling God’s will and purpose for the whole world. The Holy Spirit revives the calcified bones and atrophied limbs of a wilderness people who are dead to the Word of God and so Israel is recalled to her mission and life.

The Holy Spirit overshadows the womb of Mary “according to thy Word” and Christ the Eternal Son of the Father is made incarnate, quickened to life and brought to birth, “conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary,” as professed in the Creeds. In all these things, the Holy Spirit descends, “comes down,” and there is life and order and truth. And nowhere more profoundly than on this day, Pentecost.

What is Pentecost? Nothing less than the celebration of the Descent of the Holy Spirit to become the Spirit of the Church, the Spirit of redeeming and sanctifying life, the Spirit of grace and renewal, the Spirit which gives life and meaning to the Sacraments, and, particularly on this day, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism and the Sacrament of Holy Communion. The Descent of the Holy Spirit in these tangible yet elusive images of wind and fire brings clarity to all the motions of God’s descending grace. It signals our life in the Spirit, our life with God in Word and Spirit.

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“He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance.”

The Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples gathered in the upper room gives birth to the Christian Church. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of life. Just consider the rich wisdom of the Scriptures about the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit moves over the waters and brings into life the creation which has been spoken into being. The Holy Spirit breathes “the breath of life” into “the adam” – our humanity formed from the dust – “and so man became a living creature.”

(more…)

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“Let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus,
the Author and Finisher of our faith” (Heb. 12.1,2)

These are words from The Epistle to the Hebrews which might be called the Epistle of the Ascension so conversant is it with the idea of the Ascension. Why the Ascension? Why the Session? Because the Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection, the fullness of its meaning. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is not to the world; it is to the world in God. Everything is gathered into the primacy of the spiritual relationship of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, the Ascension signifies the fuller meaning of prayer and paradise. Ultimately, the Session – Christ’s sitting at the right hand of the Father – signifies the Providential rule of God over the world. In some sense, these creedal doctrines remind us of the fundamental orientation, understanding, and perspective of the Christian faith.

They speak to the ethical dilemmas of our day. Mark Carney, now the Governor of the Bank of England warns that “capitalism is doomed if ethics vanish,” noting the breakdown of the social contract (Guardian, May 27^th, 2014). Archbishop Desmond Tutu has condemned the Alberta Tar Sands project claiming that the connection between carbon emissions and climate change is obvious and catastrophic. Environmental assertions trump economic claims, it seems, yet this suggests, perhaps, a false dichotomy between the environment and the economic. There are the questions about science and technology and about the ethical and the spiritual that turn on how we understand our humanity and our world.

“The world is too much with late and soon,” the romantic poet Wordsworth notes, “getting and spending we lay waste our powers,/ nothing in nature is ours.” The consequence of knowledge as power which results in seeing the universe as a machine has become the even greater disease of technocratic culture which in turn affects our hearts. “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon;” the domination of nature through thoughtless knowledge leaves us dead and empty. And it affects our visions of paradise. Camille Paglia, commenting on Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, the anthem of the hippie counter-culture, points out the contradictions on display at Woodstock festival, “where the music was pitifully dependent on capitalist technology, and where the noble experiment in pure democracy was sometimes indistinguishable from squalid regression to the primal horde.” We have a way of turning paradise into far worse than a parking lot.

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I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.

It is one of the profoundest statements in the Gospel. It captures in a phrase the whole of religion. It suggests something about God in himself and something about God for us. The mission of the Son – his going out and his returning to the Father – belongs to his essential identity. Everything finds its place within the relation of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Ghost. Everything finds its place in the life of God. That life is opened to view in the mission of the Son. We have only to enter it so as to live it. Such is the grace of God.

Here is the blessing. The blessing is to know that you are a child of God. The children of God know that there are hardships and sufferings, for they are not to be ignored, but even more they know the victory of Christ – “I have overcome the world,” the world within our hearts and the world around us.

The challenge of this “overcoming” is that we have to live it. We find the truth of ourselves in Christ. But we have to be incorporated into him so as to grow up into that life. We have to continue in the way of grace through prayer and praise, through the ordered life of worship and discipleship in the Church, through the growing up into a spiritual understanding of what the Gospel of the Resurrection proclaims.

The good news is that the realities of sin and death are overcome by the greater and truer reality of God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ. We have only to live it.

And there is the rub. Will we? Do we? And how and in what way? By the only way that there is. The way that Christ has given us in his body, the Church, the way of grace and glory in prayer and praise, in service and sacrifice. This is the way that belongs to the overcoming of the world – the overcoming of all the things in us and outside of us that threaten our souls, our very being, the very truth of ourselves as spiritual creatures who have an end and purpose with God.

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“[He] slew mighty kings … Sihon king of the Amorites … and Og the king of Bashan: / for his mercy endureth for ever”

Psalm 136 has the wonderful recurring refrain for each of its twenty-six verses: “for his mercy endureth for ever.” We “give thanks unto the Lord, for he is gracious:/ for his mercy endureth for ever.” He is “God of all gods”, “Lord of all lords” “who only doeth great wonders”, “who by his excellent wisdom made the heavens” and “laid out the earth above the waters” and all that is in them. The whole of creation arises from the enduring mercy of God, a theme which is especially important on Rogation Sunday in Eastertide. But the psalm then turns to the theme of redemption, to the story of salvation.

We are bidden to give thanks to the God “who smote Egypt in their first-born” who “overthrew Pharoah and his host in the Red Sea” and all because “his mercy endureth for ever.” And while we may easily rejoice in Israel’s deliverance from Egyptian tyranny, it might just give us a moment’s pause that it comes at such a price. We may easily rejoice, too, in the God “who led his people through the wilderness” and provided for them but, then, what exactly are we to make of the God “who smote great kings” even “mighty kings” like “Sihon, king of the Amorites” “and Og the king of Bashan” and all because “his mercy endureth for ever.” This is mercy?

Mercy here seems rather selective and rather vengeful and violent. Yet the psalm recalls the deep and profound and difficult lessons by which Israel learns about the truth and the majesty of God and, ultimately, about the divine mercy which underlies the whole of creation and redemption. The Scriptures challenge our presuppositions and sentimentalism. These are stories about tough love!

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“Of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth”

Boko Haram, the Islamic fundamentalist group that has taken hundreds of Nigerian girls captive, thinks that western education is sin or forbidden, haram; that is, at least, a rough translation of their name. It strikes me as a remarkable betrayal of Islam’s important contributions to western culture and education of which Islam is an inescapable part.

Despair and fear go together. Anger and resentment are fellow-travelers. The despair and fear in our world reveals a profoundly spiritual malaise. It is the betrayal of the ideals and principles of western education and not just by Boko Haram. The global world is a western world and yet that world is unclear and confused about the fundamental principles that define it. The result is either passive nihilism, a retreat into the gated communities of our minds, eyes shut to what we refuse to see, or active nihilism which takes a variety of forms ranging from the violence of groups like Boko Haram or the deconstruction and dismantling of our institutional life under the guise of re-imaging everything from God to human life. Both are based upon a rejection of the reason of God which results in the tyranny of our wills. There is really only the will to power in the rejection of truth. Such is nihilism. Yet the truth of God is the strong message of this day in the season of the Resurrection, eloquently expressed in Epistle and Gospel alike.

The Gospel of the Resurrection is especially about the overcoming of our fearfulness and our despair. The message of the angel to the women, coming early to the tomb and finding it empty, was “be not afraid.” Jesus counters the despair of the disciples huddled behind closed doors in fear; Jesus runs out after us on the road to Emmaus where we are in flight from Jerusalem in fear.

His presence is the counter to our fears, the fear of death and the fear of the empty nothingness of life. He shows us his hands and his side. He makes visible his victory over our death and the ways of death that we have chosen in our will to nothingness. The meaning of death has been changed and we have only to will what we have been given to see in the witness of the Resurrection. We can only do that by the same means as it been accomplished – by grace.

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