Category: Sermons

“See that you do not refuse him who is speaking”

What powerful and provocative readings! They serve as a kind of wake-up call to the serious nature of the Christian faith. They recall us to the frightening realities of human sin, to our emptiness and despair when we refuse the light and truth of God. That we can do so is testament, paradoxically, to the love of God. For love cannot be forced. At most we can be persuaded.

Moral and intellectual persuasion is the only means the Christian Church has at its disposal. We cannot rely on the patterns of social and political life, the habits and customs of a more-or-less comfortable past. We are thrown back upon the stark and serious realities of the Gospel message, a message that speaks at once of our darkness and despair and of its overcoming. Nowhere is that more starkly presented than on The Third Sunday in Lent.

The great Eucharistic Gospel for this day gives us a true picture of sin. We are “a house divided against ourselves” and, of course, we cannot stand. We reject the goodness of God; we call what is good, evil. We despair of the idea of the absolute without which our lives are empty and meaningless despite all our efforts. The emptiness possesses us and “the last state of that man is worse than the first.” We “were sometimes darkness,” Paul notes in the epistle reading, and exhorts us to “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness,” an exhortation which can have no meaning unless we are indeed capable of embracing such a fellowship, choosing darkness over light and forgetting, forgetting wilfully, that the light is always greater than the darkness. Yet that is the problem: our wilful forgetting, our choosing darkness rather than light.

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“Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation”

I like to think of the Gospel for The Third Sunday in Lent as the Gospel of despair. I don’t mean our despair that the winter will ever end and that spring will ever come! The Gospel of despair? Surely that is paradoxical. How can despair be good news?

We live in a world of divided kingdoms, a world of despair and desolation, and in many, many different ways. We don’t want to hear this and we certainly don’t want to think about it. Yet to do so is the one thing necessary. It requires in us something which we mightily resist – a contemplative approach to reality. It demands our paying attention to God.

At the heart of all of the social, economic, environmental and political uncertainties of our world and day is despair, a cynical and skeptical despair of God, of the idea of an infinite and perfect principle that is the cause and truth of all things. We despair of God. To realize this is the good news because it provides a way back to God. It is, we might say, the wisdom of the Scriptures. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” It is, most especially, the deep message of Lent, of Holy Week and Easter. Out of the depths of death and despair awaken hope and life through the triumph of love.

At issue is a question. What does it take for God to get our attention? Last week’s Gospel story of the Canaanite woman may have seemed to be about ‘how do we get God’s attention?’! In a way, that can become the occasion of despair. Not everyone has the strength of character and the depth of humility to hold onto a metaphysical concept and truth like that remarkable woman. We all want God, in one way or another – all our strivings and worries and affairs assume some infinite end and purpose, a yearning and a desire for some semblance of something we call good. And we want it in immediate and tangible ways. And we want it now. This is, I am afraid, all our folly. We expect the finite world of our finite desires to satisfy us infinitely. It can’t.

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“The people which sat in darkness have seen a great light”

There are, I suppose three great saints of the western imagination whose commemorations have become the occasions of popular secular celebrations. There is St. Nicholas, transmogrified into Santa Claus, whose spirit dominates the season of Christmas, for better or worse. There is St. Valentine, the patron saint of romance in the bleak mid-winter who keeps the florists, the chocalatiers, the lingerie makers, and Hallmark Cards in business and, then, there is St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland and green beer whose commemoration lightens Lent and makes March almost bearable, the herald of Spring and the promise of green amid the white of winter and the mud of March. Of the three, Patrick has the greater claim to being an historical figure, all legends and myths notwithstanding.

A figure of the late 4^th and mid 5^th centuries, he belongs to a remarkable moment in the story of Christianity, the story of Celtic Christianity. He is the bearer of the great light of Christ to the Irish, lighting the paschal fire on Tara’s hill to drive away the pagan darkness of the Druids. We forget how powerful conversion is, especially the conversion of entire peoples and lands to a whole new way of thinking and living. And yet, that is the crucial thing about the story of St. Patrick. We forget, too, that the story of Celtic Christianity is bigger than the Celtic peoples; it contributes to the shaping of Europe and beyond.

Thomas Cahill in his intriguing work, How the Irish Saved Civilisation, juxtaposes the image of a silver cauldron and a silver chalice to capture the transformation of a culture in its conversion to Christianity; the one, beautifully carved and deliberately broken, symbolic of the culture of pagan human sacrifice; the other beautifully engraved and whole, inscribed with the names of the apostolic fellowship. The one, dated a century or two before Christ, is known as the Gundestrop Cauldron and depicts animal and human sacrifice; the other, late seventh or early eighth century AD is known as the Ardagh Chalice and is symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice and our participation in his sacrifice sacramentally. There is, I suppose, all the difference between a cauldron and a chalice; in this case, the juxtaposition captures the transformation of a culture.

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“O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

You get what you want sometimes, it seems. Let’s hope that we really know what we want and that what we want is what is right and good and, ultimately, what God wants for us. But is that all that is required, namely, a certain clarity about our desires and wishes? No.  There is something more than mere clarity about the desires of our hearts, important as that is.

Lent seeks the clarification of our minds and the purification of our wills. Purgation and illumination are fundamental features of the classical understanding of Christian pilgrimage, the pilgrimage concentrated for us in the season of Lent, but which is really the pilgrimage of our souls to God. The third part of the classical understanding of Christian pilgrimage has to do with the perfection and unity of our wills with God. Purgation, illumination, and perfection or unity. These three classical aspects of pilgrimage are the Trinitarian principles of our journeying to God, in the sense that you can’t have one without the others. But there is a necessary prerequisite. It is humility, the note sounded in our liturgy in The Prayer of Humble Access, the note, too, signaled in today’s gospel.

The Prayer of Humble Access is familiar to you all, I am sure. At once poetic and theological, it speaks directly to the nature of our engagement with all things divine, especially with respect to the Sacrament of Holy Communion.

“We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord; Trusting in our own righteousness, But in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy So much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, Whose property is always to have mercy…”

We pray this as a necessary part of our preparation and approach to the Sacrament of the altar. The prayer echoes the Gospel for this day – the story of the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus so resolutely and yet so humbly.

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“One who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin”

To be tempted (root, πειραω) and to be pierced (root, πειρω) are related words. The temptations which belong to the beginning of Lent have a connection to the end of Lent in the crucifixion of Christ. He who is pierced for us is tempted for us. The overcoming of temptation belongs equally to the overcoming of his being pierced, in other words, to the triumph of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The cross and the resurrection are obliquely, yet strongly, present in the temptations of Christ. There is a resurrection into the presence of the living Word and Spirit of the Father, but only through “the burning love of the crucified,” to use Bonaventure’s phrase, a love which is already signaled in the temptations of Christ. To be tempted is to be drawn to what we know to be wrong and false. This implies as well that we are drawn away from what we know to be right and true. Our reason is beguiled; our will is seduced. We are at once deceivers and deceived.

Temptations are received in the soul. It is there that they have their force of attraction, drawing us to what we know in some sense we should refuse. But there is always a choice, a crucial moment of decision, whether to give in or withstand. The problem is not that there are temptations – these there must be – but how we face them. Sin, after all, does not lie in the temptations themselves, but in our yielding to them, whether inwardly in our thoughts or outwardly in our deeds. Temptations belong to the path of our spiritual journey to God and with God. They are, we might even say, necessary to the perfecting of our wills, to the matter of setting love in order.

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“Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve”

The story of the temptations of Christ read on the First Sunday in Lent follows upon the baptism of Christ. The baptism of Christ is an epiphany – a making known of his essential divine identity: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased”. What immediately follows is that Christ is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. The temptations belong to the pageant of the passion.

What are the temptations of Christ? They are our temptations brought to a certain kind of clarity in Jesus Christ. We are apt to have a negative view of temptation. But in truth, there is something altogether positive about the fact of temptations. They are a necessary feature of our humanity. Whether or not we are tempted is not at issue, but how we understand and respond to the temptations in our souls is altogether crucial. The story of the temptations of Christ is about two things: the naming of the three forms of temptation; and the threefold overcoming of temptation. The critical lesson for us is that temptation is properly named and only overcome by Christ and only by Christ in us.

The wilderness is the place of spiritual combat. It is also the place of spiritual refreshment and renewal. There is a struggle, a conflict. The conflict is within. It is the conflict of wills within us. We are divided against ourselves in every temptation. It is a question about our fundamental identity. What really defines us?

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