Category: Sermons

“For God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.”

Humility is not only the counter to pride; it is the condition of our access to God’s grace, the necessary condition of our being raised up or exalted, albeit “in due time” and not without “hav[ing] suffered a while.” Grace is what truly and rightly defines and dignifies our humanity. The Epistle and Gospel for today speak profoundly to lessons which have ever to be learned and relearned, again and again, and certainly for us in our world and day.

Just recently, The Economist magazine included an insert from its sister magazine, Intelligent Life. The first article asked the question “What is the deadliest sin?” and provided a series of very thoughtful reflections by a number of notable writers and thinkers on envy, pride, ingratitude, greed, gluttony, sloth and lust. Not bad. Six out of the classical and traditional seven deadly sins! Though ingratitude is a serious problem it is not one of the seven deadly sins classically speaking. It is wrath that is the one sin that was curiously omitted. I say ‘curiously’ since wrath is such a dominant feature in the destructive nihilism of contemporary culture and so it seems odd that it should have been left out. There are no end of examples of wrath in our contemporary world, after all. But what is more remarkable is that the very idea and language of sin and of the seven deadly sins should be the subject of a sophisticated contemporary journal.

It suggests at the very least that the moral discourse about sin which is part and parcel of the Christian faith is very much needed in our present times and is there to be recovered and reclaimed. Pride, as the novelist Will Self points out, “is so much a part of every one of us that we can’t see how deadly it is – it inheres in our very self-consciousness, and has metastasized through the body politic.” That is a profoundly theological view. He goes on to argue that “pride is paramount” in the modern economy, in what he calls “the commoditisation of pride,” the sense that we think we deserve what we want “because we are worth it.” Even more, he shows how pride “is the three-personed god we have made of ourselves,” which he describes wonderfully as “the Big-I-Am; King Baby, Me-Me-Me,” what he calls “the true trinity of the modern psyche.” Utterly remarkable. The descriptive force of this is undeniable but what is the prescription? Humility.

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“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”

St. Peter and St. Paul are the twin pillars of the Christian Church. Outstanding figures in the New Testament, their ministry and life are rather more amply set before us than many other New Testament figures. They require our consideration.

Peter is traditionally seen as the presiding authority at the Council of Jerusalem which legitimates the apostolic mission of Paul who will become the Apostle to the Gentiles. The Book of the Acts of the Apostles provides the conciliar decision in the form of a letter, the first ecclesiastical decree we might say, directed to the missions among the non-Jewish or gentile communities. Its claim is that “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things.” A most remarkable and potent statement. It does not mean that what seems good to us is what is simply and absolutely good to the Holy Spirit; such has been the problem of many a church gathering, especially in our own confused and troubled times. But it does suggest the nature of our participation and engagement with God; particularly, our thinking upon what God has made known to us. And yet the specified “necessary things” must give us pause. They are to “abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity.” What does that have to do with us?

These are moral directives that speak to the both the Hebraic world in its adamant and strong prohibition against idolatry and to the Hellenistic world of the great variety of pagan cults; they also include matters of sexual immorality. Both idolatry and immorality deny the absolute truth of God. That truth, now manifest in the humanity of Jesus Christ, suggests a further moral imperative, namely, a new sense of moral freedom and responsibility, and, most importantly, a call to holiness of life. What underlies these “necessary things” is the recognition that God’s will revealed through the law and the prophets of Israel now has its realization in the Lord Jesus Christ. What is of interest is that both Peter and Paul are present at this Council. It is the only time in the Scriptures that we see them together.

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“Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind.”

Dreams and visions. It is hard to know what to make of such things. They might seem so subjective and impressionistic, so removed from what is actual and real, as we might assume. In one way, that is true, at least when we look at the form in which ideas are conveyed rather than the ideas themselves. But if we look instead at the ideas themselves then perhaps, just perhaps, even in our dogmatic and empirical attachments to material reality, we might discover wisdom and truth.

And wisdom and truth are what are at issue on The First Sunday after Trinity. Wisdom and truth guides and directs our judgments and our actions. The Eucharistic readings, the epistle from The First letter of John that “love is of God” and Luke’s Gospel about the parable of the rich man, Dives, and Lazarus, are all about living the vision that has been opened out to us. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” as we heard on Trinity Sunday.

The point of an open door is that you go through it. The vision is to be entered into and lived. Our failure to do so creates the “great gulf fixed” between the rich man in the torments of Hell and Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham. Hell, as always, is about our own choosing; signaled in the parable by stepping over and ignoring Lazarus “lying at his gate full of sores and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table”; only the dogs attend to Lazarus, it seems. It is quite a powerful image and one which conveys great wisdom as parables so often do.

Like dreams and visions, the parable opens us out to a larger understanding of reality. In ignoring Lazarus, the parable suggest, we are blind to the things of God which have been opened out to us. The door “opened in heaven” is about what is revealed and made known to us. We neglect such things at our peril. The further paradox is that in neglecting the things of God and heaven we wreak havoc on our lives with one another. We cut ourselves off from the only reality that there is. The dreams and visions are what are truly real.

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“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

We have just recited “The Creed of St. Athanasius, commonly so called”! Now that was quite a spiritual and intellectual work-out, wasn’t! Imagine doing that once every month as well as on this day, Trinity Sunday! I don’t imagine many places are using it even on this day. It challenges the anti-intellectualism of our church and culture. And yet, it provides us with a wonderful way to think the mystery of God, the mystery that we can only think and only be constantly thinking; the mystery that we can never ever exhaust. We need this marvelous parade of paradoxes to glimpse and behold the inexhaustible mystery of God.

The Creeds themselves, of which the Athanasian Creed is one, are wonderful distillations of the scriptural witness to the living reality of God revealed and therefore given to be thought. The Athanasian Creed, admittedly awkward for use liturgically and not exactly twitterable, nonetheless provides a wonderful way of thinking and reasoning upon the mystery of God. “Let us thus think of the Trinity,” it says (now that could be tweeted!), means think of the Trinity in this way, the way of affirmation and renunciation of images, positive and negative theology, that catapult us into the spiritual reality of God and in which we discover the deeper truth of our humanity. The mystery of the living reality of God is being opened unto us. Think God, love God and be with God in his being with us!

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.

We meet together in the glory of the revealed God, the glory of the Trinity. All our beginnings and all our endings have their place of meeting in the Trinity. It is, we may say, the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor.12.3). To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement. It is the burden of the Church’s proclamation.

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“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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