Category: Sermons

“All the people hung on his words.”

It is a Palm Sunday word, a text from the second lesson at Evening Prayer, and yet one which expresses so much of the meaning of this special day and week. In a way, Luke’s comment captures the intensity of Holy Week – but only if we hang on the words of Christ.

That is where it all hangs, as it were. Holy Week, in the essential catholic understanding of classical Anglicanism, is about the fullness of the Passion of Christ. Hanging on his words is about paying attention to the accounts of his Passion as presented by all four Evangelists. Nothing expresses so concisely and completely the essence of reformed Catholicism.

Nowhere is it more concisely and completely expressed than in the pattern of Scriptural readings for Holy Week in The Book of Common Prayer. That is the challenge of this week: to enter into the Passion of Christ in all of its fullness. And so today, we have The Passion according to St. Matthew. On Monday in Holy Week, we begin the reading of The Passion according to St. Mark which we complete on Tuesday. On Wednesday, we read The Beginning of the Passion according to St. Luke, which is continued and completed on Maundy Thursday. On Good Friday, we read The Passion according to St. John. And, in and through it all, are the various liturgies that complement and reinforce the deep Scriptural logic of the reading of the Passions: Tenebrae and the Liturgies of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days, that concentrate the meaning of the Passion so powerfully and so wonderfully.

The intensity of Holy Week is nothing less than the intensity of the Passion as seen through the lenses of all four Gospels. No other Church provides such a fullness.

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“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us”

We are like the mother of Zebedee’s children in today’s gospel. We want what is best not always knowing what that is. “Ye know not what ye ask,” Jesus says ever so gently and yet ever so devastatingly. There can be no greater commentary on the nature of human desire than this. What will it take for us to learn?  Nothing less, it seems, than our constant attention to the things of the Passion of Christ, to the things that are unfolded before us and which are explained to us, even more, the things with which we are involved, perhaps more intimately than we realize.

This Sunday is called Passion Sunday. It marks the beginning of deep Lent, a more intense focus on the nature of redemption. The word, ‘passion’, signifies our being acted upon. When we think of suffering we think about the hurtful and painful things which happen to us in body and soul. Yet we are active in this, as well. For example, we can worry ourselves sick; worrying is something which we do and rather well. Our acting upon our feelings can have disastrous consequences for us individually and collectively.

When we contemplate the bloody, sorry state of our world, we contemplate not the absence of God but the evil of our own doings. God is not the author of the horrible events that belong to the record of the day-to-day of our contemporary world, from torture to battles, from killings to shootings, from accidents to even the mysterious disappearance of airplanes. Troubling and horrifying events are about what we are capable of doing and what some actually do; they are also about accident and circumstance, the collision of events undertaken for different purposes. Yet, to blame God denies the freedom and responsibility which belongs to human dignity, something God-bestowed. The Passion of Christ allows us to see suffering in another light, namely, as belonging to our redemption, to our being at one with God, all the troubles and the sorrows of the world and our souls notwithstanding.

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This is the third of three Lenten meditations on the Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio.  The first is posted here and the second here.

“Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God”

“Then the sermons begin,” one critic of the Purgatorio has observed, commenting on an important and integral feature of the journey of ascent. One of the essential ways of pilgrimage is the way of illumination; one form of illumination is through learning and learning through instruction and discourse. It says, perhaps, more about our world and day than much about Dante’s that we are ambivalent, if not hostile to instruction and learning. Sermons, it seems, are much to be endured and little to be appreciated.

The upward journey of the soul through the cornices of the Purgatorio entails a number of discourses. They are didactic accounts and yet they are fully part of the imaginative ascent of the soul to God. They belong to the essential orthodoxy of Dante’s poetic vision and they relate to a number of critical and important Christian and philosophical and theological ideas. Along with the discourses, there are as well two dreams.

Dreams and discourses. Both contribute to the way of illumination, the path of learning. “Friend, go up higher” could be the refrain of the Purgatorio. The first dream happens in the transition from the terraces of Ante-Purgatory to the cornices of Purgatory proper. The second dream is “the dream of the siren” that appropriately marks the beginning of the purgation of “love excessive” on the last three cornices of Mount Purgatory, the purging of the deadly but lesser sins of avarice, gluttony, and lust.

The discourses deal with an interesting array of questions: questions about the super-expressive nature of the Good which when shared is increased not decreased; questions about love and free will as the explicit counter to all and any kind of material determinism – just one of the ways in which Dante speaks to every age; questions about the forms of bodies, of spiritual bodies; questions, too, about human individuality countering the Islamic Philosopher, Averroes, whose teaching about the “passive intellect” effectively denies the rational and immortal individual soul without which the whole journey is meaningless; but, above all, the discourses underscore the essential insight about amor, love, as the defining principle of the soul’s life and character.

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“Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat?”

For our food obsessed culture, this gospel story is either welcome relief or anxiety inducing. It just might get our minds set on our bellies, thinking of food and all manner of kinds of breads and cakes! Relax! This Sunday you get to have your cake and eat it too but only after the service.

In a way, that is the real point. It is a question of spiritual priorities. What defines us? Are you what you eat? Though sometimes attributed to the French gastronomer or connoisseur of food, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, it is literally a phrase from the 19^th century theologian Ludwig von Feuerbach, who influenced Marx, in his Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism, suggesting that our minds are affected by food and other aspects of the physical world. It was also the title of popular British TV dieting programme, “You-are-what-you-eat”. Food r’us, it seems! What eats and drinks today walks and talks tomorrow.

I want to suggest that this gospel story belongs to a theology of food that is really about our lives spiritually and sacramentally. As the great patristic preacher, St. John Chrysostom put it, “we do not preach so as to eat; we eat so as to preach.” We do not live for food; we need food to live for God and for one another. If we are part of a culture where “people treat food like religion,” as has been recently observed (Dr. Yoni Freedhof, National Post, Sat., March 29^th, 2014), then perhaps we need to think about the role of food in religion.

“Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit/ Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste/ Brought death into the world and all our woe,” begins Milton’s great poem, Paradise Lost. It all begins with food, it seems; that is to say, the story of human suffering and woe. The story of the Fall away from God is told in mythic form by way of eating what was forbidden, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We fall into a world where there is not only sweat and tears – working in the sweat of our brow and in the literal labour pains and tears of child-birth – but blood, sweat, and tears are the realities of human experience as the fall-out from “man’s first disobedience.” Yet food – bread – becomes an integral part of redemption. It belongs to the story of our return to God.

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This is the second of three Lenten meditations on the Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio.  The first is posted here, and the third here.

“Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb”

Blessed, indeed, is Mary, the fruit of whose womb is Jesus. Blessed, indeed, is Mary among women and blessed, indeed, among us all. The Feast of the Annunciation falls, more often than not, in the season of Lent yet properly belongs to the consideration of the Beatitudes. No one is more rightly named blessed among humans than her through whom all our blessings come. The Beatitudes are really about the quality of our life in Christ, our being defined by our end in him and our life with him. Mary in so many ways signifies the perfection of our humanity considered simply in itself; the real vocation and purpose of our humanity is seen in her.

The connection between the Beatitudes and the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dante’s Purgatorio is about the vision of our humanity in its purity and truth. Just as there is an appropriate Beatitude for each sin that is being purged in relation to the corresponding virtue that is bestowed, so, too, Mary, in Dante’s vision, appears as the exemplar of human virtue in relation to each of the seven deadly sins. Mary serves as the example of the virtue to be acquired over and against each of them and so there is a correspondence between Mary and the Beatitudes in Dante’s careful vision and understanding. She is always the first example of the necessary virtue to be acquired on each of the cornices of Mount Purgatory.

On the cornice of Pride, Mary is the outstanding exemplar of humility which stands in stark contrast to pride. The proud penitents contemplate, while bent double, the images of the Angel’s Ave to Mary and her response, Ecce ancilla Dei, Behold the handmaid of God (Dante substituting, for reasons of meter, Dei for Domini), and, assuming in a kind of ellipsis the rest of her response, her fiat mihi, “be it unto me according to thy word;” words which capture the very essence of humility. It is about our ‘yes’ to God, our being defined not by self-will but by God’s will working through and with our wills; all of which is wonderfully concentrated in the figure of Mary who represents the perfection of our humanity qua human. Only in her purity and perfection – as created by God – can God become man and effect our salvation.

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“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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