Category: Sermons

“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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“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

The idea of life as a journey is a common yet compelling metaphor. It signifies a sense of purpose and indicates a sense of direction. But not all journeys are the same. The differences lie in the conception of the end which conditions the means. Lent would remind us of the essential character of the Christian journey.

The journey is the pilgrimage of the soul to God and it is a pilgrimage with God. The end is union with God and God makes our way to him with us. We are apt to forget how remarkable this really is. There is our human desiring, on the one hand, our quest for God, the odyssey of the human soul, as it were, but there is, on the other hand, the divine desiring, that is to say, God’s will for us.

The journey is the way of sacrifice, to be sure, but it portends the greater accomplishment, the discovery of our part in the body of Christ. What has to be forsaken is our continual tendency to mistake the part for the whole or to deny everything else except our own self-will. Such are the disorders of sin which result in suffering and death. The journey does not deny the realities of sin and suffering but makes the way of pilgrimage through them. This is the marvel and the wonder of the Christian faith, the marvel and the wonder of redemptive love.

That is why the journey is the way of suffering. Our way to God passes through the ways of our rejection of God. Our way to God is the way of redemptive suffering in which the disorders of our souls – our disordered loves – are set in order. The disciplines of Lent are altogether about this. They don’t involve a flight from the world and the extinguishing of our desires so much as they intend “the setting of love in order”. They embrace the three essential characteristics of the Christian pilgrimage: the way of purgation; the way of illumination; and the way of union.

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“I am the vine, ye are the branches”

There is something rather disquieting and quite disturbing about The Feast of St. Matthias. He is, after all, the disciple chosen by lot and by prayer to take the place of the traitor Judas, as the Collect so directly puts it. It is impossible to consider St. Matthias without thinking about the kiss of Judas and our own betrayals. To contemplate Matthias is to confront the betrayals of our own hearts. That may be the real blessing for it opens us out to the grace of God which is greater than our hearts of betrayal. Out of Judas’ betrayal comes Matthias’ faithfulness.

To be fair, we only know about his being chosen. That is the burden of the lesson from Acts. About his ministry and personality, we know far less. But that is in keeping with the Scriptures as a whole. They don’t fulfill our Oprah and Dr. Phil type desires; slim pickings for the gossip rags ancient and modern. Instead, they offer theology.

The theology here is most instructive. It is the theology of substitution, the theology of atonement belonging to the logic of redemption. Matthias takes the place of Judas. Why does he have to be replaced? Judas betrayed Christ and out of remorse killed himself. Why not just carry on sans Judas? Because of a larger consideration. The number twelve. The twelve apostles look back to the twelve tribes of Israel and look ahead to the apostolic foundation of the Church. It is all about how we are part of something more and greater than ourselves, namely, the community of redeemed sinners.

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“You are not your own”

Scripture tests our patience. But more often than not, it is about our willingness to hear and not simply our lack of understanding.

Today’s lessons are a case in point. The lesson from Genesis is the story of the blessing of Jacob, a story of deceit really, because Jacob disguises himself as Esau and takes his place, thereby robbing his brother Esau of his birthright, the blessing of the first-born. Jacob uses cunning or guile to obtain what he wants. And yet, Jacob will become Israel by wrestling with an angel, wrestling with God, with whom there can be no deceit. There is, in short, a transformation which takes place. Jacob, the man of guile, becomes Israel, “in whom there is no guile”, as Jesus says about a later Israelite, Nathaniel.

In other words, there is hope for us all! There is the hope of change for the better in our lives, the hope of transformation, the hope for something more than the endless and dreary round of our same-old sins which, if not deadly, at least deaden us to the life-giving reality of God’s Word. In the case of Jacob, God is able to make something good out of the treachery and betrayals of our lives, even out of our own treachery and betrayal.

Genesis can be read as a set of stories about brothers: Cain and Abel, Abraham and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. Through the various spectacles of sibling rivalry, God forges a people for himself through whom his will for all peoples is proclaimed. But are we willing to listen and attend to these stories?

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“If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities”

Storms and sports seem to define our Canadian winter but let’s hope they don’t define our souls!

These three ‘gesima’ Sundays provide us with some important moral lessons that prepare us for the journey of Lent, the journey of the soul to God. They involve the transformation of the classical virtues of temperance, courage, prudence, and justice through the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. This Sunday, Sexagesima Sunday, shows us the virtues of courage and prudence as transformed into love by the love of God.

God’s love seeks the perfection of our humanity. The virtues are the activities of the soul which seek human perfection. But the classical virtues, if left to themselves, can become, as Augustine argues, splendid vices. They are activities for we are not essentially passive creatures defined by what we have or simply by what we receive through our experiences for, then, we are not free. The cardinal virtues teach us something about the character and nature of our souls and the activity of our souls. But the activity seems to be from our side, the side of human seeking, human knowing and doing, as if we could perfect ourselves, as if we could attain to God on the strength and wisdom of our own. Therein lies the problem.

Does that mean that the virtues should be extinguished in us? No. Because, once again, we are not essentially passive beings. There needs to be our engagement with what comes to us; it is not just about what comes from us. That is where the transformation of the virtues by grace comes into play; the virtues become forms of love, forms of our participation in God’s love. Transitional between Epiphany and Lent, these ‘gesima’ Sundays remind us of the love of God manifest in Jesus and indicate how that love is to live in us.

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