Category: Sermons

“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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“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”

The mystery of motherhood belongs, paradoxically, it might seem, to the mystery of the Son’s going to the Father. It belongs to the mystery of the Resurrection. The Resurrection is radical new birth and radical new life. The Resurrection goes to the root of all life itself. That root is the reciprocal love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. We are brought to birth in this new life out of the tombs of our sorrows, out of the prisons of our souls, out of the graves of our wills still wrapped in “a cloak of maliciousness,” the spirit of ill-will that is so deadly to our souls and our communities.

The idea of new birth and new life is a mothering image, an image about giving birth. Sorrow and pain give place to joy. We have only to live that joy which is not about our arbitrary moods and feelings but a joy which is beyond the fluctuations and changes of this world, a “joy [that] no man taketh from you”. Why? Because it has to do with our being opened out to the divine life of God himself. This is the great meaning of the Resurrection. The Risen Christ is in our midst in the power of his Spirit. He lives in us and we in him. Such is the burden of our liturgical life which extends outwardly to give shape to our lives socially, politically, morally, and so on.

Jesus would teach us about that radical new life of the Spirit which he has inaugurated and established through his Death and Resurrection. We can only be nurtured in what we have received; in what has been given to us. We can only give as mothers give – sacrificially and selflessly – through what God has given and established in us. What we have received from God has to be nurtured in us by God. The love of mothers falls short, after all, of the completeness of God’s love for us. Our loves find their perfection and their fullness only in the love of God revealed to us in Christ Jesus.

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“The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”

The dominant icon in the little Chapel at King’s-Edgehill School in Windsor is the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. The dominant icon at Christ Church is the image of Christ Crucified. Together they belong to the spiritual landscape that shapes our Anglican and Christian identity here in Windsor.

They go together. The further paradox is that they both belong to the teaching of the Resurrection. In other words we only think the Crucifixion through the doctrine of the Resurrection and the image of Christ the Good Shepherd, too, is a Resurrection image. It belongs to the radical meaning of the Resurrection, something which we know about primarily through the eyes of John.

John’s  Gospel shapes our thinking about the Resurrection throughout  the whole of the Easter Season and right through to Trinity Sunday. We learn to think the radical meaning of the Resurrection through the eyes of John.

“The good shepherd,” Jesus says, “giveth his life for the sheep.” It is impossible to think about the idea of the good shepherd apart from the reality of Christ’s sacrifice. That is critical to the idea of care which the image conveys but it is care in a far deeper and profounder sense than the forms of care in our contemporary therapeutic culture. This care is about suffering and death which have to be gone through and not simply bandaging and medicating with drugs. Christ dies and rises. Death and Resurrection underlie the more radical care of Christ for us.

The teaching of the Resurrection is largely conveyed to us through the eyes of John. He shows us the dialectic of sorrow and joy and the transition from disappointment to wonder. We may cling to our pains and sorrows, our bitterness and our resentments. We are rather good at doing that and in a way we live in a culture which encourages our complaints rather than the idea of passing through them. We refuse the radical care of Christ the Good Shepherd. That more radical care has to with how the Resurrection opens us out to the love of God.

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“For they were afraid”

It is known as the short ending to The Gospel according to St. Mark. Why? Because some of the earliest texts of St. Mark’s Gospel end at verse eight of the sixteenth chapter rather than with the accounts of the Resurrection that take us to verse twenty. To be sure, the canonical Gospel, the gospel that is authoritative for orthodox Christians, includes those additional twelve verses. The shorter ending does not mean that Mark does not believe in the Doctrine of the Resurrection or that the additional verses are somehow unrelated and disconnected to the rest of his Gospel and unfaithful to it. Quite the contrary.

And yet, what are we to make of that shorter ending? From a literary point of view, I think it is a powerful and poignant ending, and serves to make the doctrinal point about the Resurrection even more strongly. After all, it is only in the light of the Resurrection that the story of Jesus makes any sense. The Resurrection has captured the imaginations of the Gospel writers, such as St. Mark, and compelled them to see things in a new light without which the Gospels could never have been written.

The additional verses serve as an epilogue and as a further point of confirmation, whether as added by Mark or by someone else later on is entirely uncertain and unknowable, and, I must add, quite irrelevant to our understanding of the Christian Faith.

But some speculation is called for. (more…)

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“Mary stood without”

We are all like Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb of Jesus, I suppose. Whatever and whomever we love, we want to hold onto; in short, to possess. Too much of our love for one another is really only for ourselves. Our love is not really for them; it is for ourselves. It is always ourselves – our self-love – which gets in the way of the deeper lessons of love. We have, like the disciples a hard time letting go.

Love is not love when it is possession. Christ has not given himself for us so that we might possess him. If anything it is the other way around. We belong to him. He does not belong to us. And yet, our belonging to Christ is no possessive love, for the love by which we are his is self-less love. It sets us in motion. And it makes us more not less than ourselves. When individuals and churches become obsessed with questions about personal salvation, then they are in danger of wanting to possess Christ and to keep him to themselves, against all others.

But that is not what Christ wants for us. He does not want us to possess him but to enter into the freedom of his love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. He who cannot be contained by the grave of death can hardly be contained by us.

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“Jesus came and stood in the midst”

“The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early,” we heard last Sunday. “The same day at evening, being the first day of the week,” we hear today. Time is magically stopped and we are mystically present at that day, the day that never, never ends. The Day of Resurrection is just like that. In the spirituality of the ancient Eucharistic lectionary, which is at the heart of the Common Prayer tradition, we see through the eyes of John and especially, the doctrine of the Resurrection.

The Resurrection is not something which we celebrate in a moment, even for a day or for a season. It runs through the whole of the year and indeed through the whole of our lives in Faith. The Octave Day places us in that endless day of Easter to show us the Resurrection in motion. It shows us something of the meaning of the Resurrection for us and in us. The symbolism of being “on the same day,” the day of Easter, becomes the meaning of our Sunday worship. It is always a celebration of the Resurrection. We are always in the presence of the Risen Christ and never more so than in the Easter Season when the Resurrection is our principal consideration. The only question is whether we are alive or dead to his presence?

“Jesus came and stood in the midst.” He was “in the midst” on Good Friday, too, crucified between two thieves! How different and yet how similar. Christ is in our midst if only we would have the eyes to see him in Word and Sacrament, in liturgy and song, and in lives of service and sacrifice, in lives of love lived for God and one another. For Christ is in our midst. It is the Church’s proclamation.

But on this day, the day of Resurrection extended for all eternity, as it were, Christ is in our midst behind closed doors. The disciples were behind closed doors in the Upper Room. They were there in fear and great anxiety. The world of their hopes and expectations had been shattered. Then “Jesus came and stood in the midst” of them and suddenly all that was shattered begins to come together again into something new. His presence changes everything. The nature of that change is the Resurrection in us.

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