Category: Sermons

“But speak the word only”

What wonderful words! They challenge and convict all the atheisms of our world and day. They challenge and convict the unbelieving church which has forgotten or denied the meaning of the Epiphany season captured so wonderfully in this Gospel story. Epiphany is simply and entirely about the making known of the essential divinity of Jesus Christ through his humanity. I can’t put it more simply than that. The miracles teach us about the essential divinity of Christ and the meaning of Christ for the understanding of our humanity. They reveal God to us and show us, too, something about what God wants for us. “Speak the word only” is a powerful counter to all our confusions and denials about God. It counters the prevailing spirit of religiosity in our churches, what one might call, ‘Western Buddhism’, which is neither western nor Buddhist, I hasten to add.

This is the anti-intellectualism which thinks that there are simply many different names for God and that religion really comes down to clichés like “don’t sweat the small stuff and it’s all small stuff,” the idea that ideas don’t matter, and that God is not essentially the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in the Christian understanding but whatever terms you feel comfortable using. Our prayers and praises are merely addressed “to whom it may concern” or to the God of x and y of whatever our choosing. It is really all about us, all about ‘the you,’ the self. This is contrary to Buddhism’s fundamental insight that there is no you. You are an illusion; the self does not exist. It is also contrary to the Western world’s insight into the reality of the world, a world which is in principle intelligible because God is intelligible. In the orthodox Christian understanding, God reveals himself to us in Jesus Christ and that idea makes all the difference in the world about our thinking and our doing, our being and our actions.

We see this in today’s gospel. It is about the power of God’s Word which goes forth not only to create but to restore and heal. Here we have a double healing, a healing within Israel and a healing outside of Israel, a healing touch and a healing word, the word tangible and visible, we might say, the word audible and intelligible. Jesus heals the leper by “put[ting] forth his hand and touching him,” touching the untouchable, the leper, and then says, “I will, be thou clean.” Here is the Word and touch of Christ near and at hand. Then, there is the healing of the Centurion’s servant, a healing from afar, by the simple power of the Word spoken and passed on, as it were, down through the ranks of the Roman legion!

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“O woman, what is that to thee and to me? Mine hour has not yet come.”

Another snowstorm! Another sermon! Another Epiphany story! Something about God is made manifest in Jesus Christ. John tells us that “this beginning of signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested forth his glory and his disciples believed on him.” It captures in a way the purpose of the Epiphany season. Something about the truth and glory of God is made manifest and known through the humanity of Jesus and we are being challenged about how we respond. What is made manifest about the glory of Christ?

A miracle? To be sure, the Epiphany season is the season of miracles that show us two things: first, the power of God which cannot be constrained to the physical world simply; and, secondly, the truth and perfection of our humanity which God seeks for us. “This beginning of signs,” as John puts it,  is especially significant because it shows us something of the deeper purpose of God’s will for our humanity; something more beyond the truth and wonder of the healing miracles that point to restoration and wholeness. Here water is turned into wine signifying a greater good, our social joys, we might say.

Yet beyond miracles themselves there is something else that stands out in the Gospel story. It has to do with the dialogue between Jesus and Mary. That itself is outstanding. There are really only two dialogues between Jesus and Mary in the Gospels. We heard last week about the encounter in the temple at Jerusalem. There Mary interrogates Jesus, “Son why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.” It provides the occasion for him to make manifest the higher purpose of his coming and his being with us. “Did you not know that I must be about my father’s business?” he says, pointing Mary and us to the deeper reason and purpose of the Incarnation. Something of God’s will for our humanity is made known in the incarnate life of Christ. It is a wonderful exchange.

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“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”

Only Luke gives us this story. It is the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in all of the Scriptures. We go, it seems, from the infancy narratives of the child Christ to the boy Jesus at the age of twelve, and we go, too, from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. There are no facebook pages, no Selfies, no albums of pictures, no stories that have been handed down about the boyhood of Jesus – only ones invented many, many years, even centuries later that portray an entirely different Jesus, a kind of super-brat, you might say, a wunderkind, as it were. For where there are gaps, conspiracy theories rush in to fill them. Such are the stories, fantastic and inventive, told in the gnostic gospels about Jesus as a boy. They have no part in the Canonical Scriptures. We have only this story.

But what a compelling and intriguing story! It is an Epiphany story, we might say, for no other reason than something is made manifest, something is made known, about Jesus and about who he is theologically and doctrinally speaking, we might say, in terms of his humanity and his divinity. It illustrates, too, an essential feature of the Epiphany and the Epiphany Season. It is emphatically a feast and a season of teaching.

It reminds us that ‘teaching, teaching, teaching’ is an essential feature of the life of the Church. The Collect for today makes it abundantly clear that “perceive[ing] and know[ing] what things [we] ought to do” is the precondition for doing them, albeit only by God’s “grace and power.” Human reason participates in God’s reason; human reason expresses itself in human action as well. Our doings are but our thoughts in motion.

As Paul makes it clear in the Epistle reading from Romans, we are “transformed by the renewing of our minds.” This underscores the point about being changed by what we hear and see which leads to sacrifice and service in our lives. It complements the Gospel wonderfully. For our transformation is through the grace of teaching, through the grace of Revelation and through our reasoning upon what is made known to us in the witness of the Scriptures about Jesus Christ.

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“They fell down and worshipped.”

There is nothing more foreign to our contemporary world than the idea of worship, and yet, that is exactly what the Magi-Kings are all about. What is worship? The honouring and commitment to what is greater than yourself. There is no more wonderful an illustration and story of that than in the story of the end and the beginning of Christmas, what we call the Epiphany.

It signifies the Christmas of the Gentiles, to be sure, but even more it speaks to the deeper meaning of Christmas itself. It is about the real significance and meaning of the birth in Bethlehem. Christ is God with us. The Magi-Kings intuit and understand this. Their gifts are “sacred gifts of mystic meaning.” They are gifts that teach us about the radical meaning of Christmas.

They saw, they came, they worshipped. They are moved to a long and arduous journey, “the ways deep and the weather sharp, the worst time for a journey.” But isn’t that the point? We are all on a journey in and through the weather sharp and deep realities of our world and experience.

Epiphany awakens us to the splendour and glory of the Child Christ. The light now shines from within the world and not just from without. That will be the recurring theme of Epiphany, the theme of school and teaching that illumines the seeming meaningless of human life.

“They fell down and worshipped.”

Fr. David Curry
Short Meditation for Epiphany
January 6^th, 2014

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“But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”

And so must we. It is, in a way, the deep meaning of Christmas. We find our abiding in God by pondering the wonder of God’s Word incarnate in Jesus Christ. It means coming, like the Shepherds on Angels’ wings, to “see this thing that has come to pass” and to ponder its meaning. How? By keeping all the things that are said about Christ in our hearts and minds, to be sure, and even more to ponder them.

It is a strong image. “Love is my weight,” Augustine said, echoing what is said here about Mary in St. Luke’s Gospel. Here is “the world’s desire,” to use the words of Chesterton’s poem and hymn. We ponder the mystery of the Incarnation and what it means.

The Octave Day of Christmas helps to underscore some of the essential features of the Incarnation. Christ is the Word made flesh who came unto his own, a phrase which suggests, first, the ancient people of God, the people of Israel, but, secondly, our humanity in general. But, in becoming flesh, becoming man of woman, means, as it does for all of us, a birth in a particular place, a particular culture, and with a particular history. We may use the phrase ‘a man or a citizen of the world’ but all our lives are inescapably local. This place at this time subject to these conditions. And so, too, for the holy birth of Jesus.

Yet here is the great wonder and truth of the Incarnation: through what is individual and particular we are opened out to what is universal. God makes himself known through the things of the world and nowhere more completely and more strikingly than in the birth of Jesus Christ.

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“The birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise”

So much hidden and revealed in a parenthesis, it seems. “The birth of Jesus Christ,” Matthew tells us, “was on this wise.” He goes on to confront the strange and wondrous nature of Mary being with child but not of Joseph but of the Holy Ghost and provides a wonderful insight into the mindset of gentle Joseph, “a just man,” we are told who does not want “to make her a public example.” A laconic phrase, it hides the harsher realities of the situation of women who were stoned for adultery, a custom that has sadly not entirely disappeared from our world and day. In other words, Joseph is in the dark about what is going on at this point. Yet we see something of his character: rather than expose her he “was minded to put her away privily.” That doesn’t means doing her in!

It is only at this point that he is let in on the plan by the angel of the Lord, who pretty much explains everything to him in a dream. The dream is a kind of ancient world IT, information technology, a means to convey information. The angel’s information to Joseph is very specific, not much in the way of obfuscation or ambiguity. The angel, in a rather lapidary fashion, straightforwardly explains the situation to Joseph: don’t be afraid to take Mary as thy wife; the thing which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost – you have to wonder what on earth he made of that; she shall bring forth a Son; you – meaning Joseph – “shalt call his name Jesus; for he shall save his people from their sins.” Of all the angelic statements, this one probably made more sense than the others. The idea of Yeshua, Saviour, is rooted in the Jewish Scriptures and looks back to Joshua, Yeshua, and now ahead to Jesus.

Joseph is to call the child Jesus. He is given the naming rights, a significant point, the rights of a father, though Joseph is technically only the step-father. It signals the theme of the Incarnation, namely God’s embrace of our humanity in Jesus Christ and the ways in which he is incorporated into the structures of human life, in this case the family. It establishes identity at the same time as suggesting the unique otherness of Christ.

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“And in their mouth was found no guile”

They are the Holy Innocents, the last of the jewels in the Christmas crown of the Child Christ. They are without guile or deceit, and so are unable to harm, hence innocent (Latin, in nocens). And they are, it seems, without speech, hence infants (Latin, in fans).

Unnamed yet known, unnumbered yet numbered, The Feast of the Holy Innocents belongs directly to the festival of Christmas. They are in the narratives of the nativity of Christ in the story of the flight into Egypt. They die in place of Christ who ultimately dies for all. They are the very paradigm of the innocent victim in the truest sense.

It is an awful and frightening spectacle even for an age like ours inured to brutality and slaughter. “Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked … sent forth and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem.” There is blood in Bethlehem, the blood of the little ones who die because of the wrath and envy of Herod. We live in a world where unnamed and unnumbered thousands of little ones die, the innocent victims of the social, political and personal machinations of others. How can we possibly make sense of the senseless slaughter of the little ones? Whether it is in Rwanda, in Syria, in the Sudan, or in the urban confusions of modern culture in the issues of abortion, child neglect, abuse and exploitation, we confront the hideous enormity of human sin and suffering.

The Feast of the Holy Innocents attempts the impossible. It connects their deaths to Christ and in so doing offers consolation and comfort to the Mothers in Israel, like Rachel, who confront the unbearable loss of their children. It is one of the hardest and yet profoundest aspects of the pastoral ministry to have to bury the little ones whose deaths seem impossible to comprehend. We are like “Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not.” And we are not in our loss and sorrow. It just doesn’t seem right. And, of course, it isn’t, but the great theological idea here is that their deaths participate by anticipation in the redemptive death of Christ crucified. Their deaths are not without meaning; they become in the words of the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, “redeemed among men, being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb.”

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“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee”

Christmas brings us to Bethlehem to contemplate the wonder of Christ’s holy birth but its deeper meaning points us already to Jerusalem. They are the twin poles of the devotional and doctrinal imagination of Christianity. Each is bound up in the other. Nowhere in Christmastide are we made more aware of that than on The Feast of Stephen.

He is not only the proto-martyr, the first martyr to Christ, the first figure in the Christian Scriptures to be named as one who died because of his faith and identity with Jesus. He is also the witness to the Christian concept of the connection between sacrifice and service in the face of suffering, indeed, in the face of evil.

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha as he would come to be known, rejected Hinduism through his encounter with suffering. Stepping out of the shelter of his castles in Nepal, he encountered an old man, a sick man, and a dead man being carried to his funeral byre; all forms of human suffering. He also met a wandering beggar, a Hindu ascetic, whose path Gautama decided to follow in the search for truth and wisdom and in the quest to overcome human suffering. Meditating under the Bodhi tree, he found enlightenment and became in time the Buddha, the enlightened one, inaugurating one of the great religions of the world. What was the enlightenment? It is captured in the four noble truths of Buddhism: suffering exists, the origin of suffering is desire, eliminate desire means the end of suffering, the way of overcoming desire and the self is found in the eightfold path. At the heart of the enlightenment is the idea that suffering arises because of the illusions of the self. There is no you. That is but an illusion and one which leads to suffering. Suffering is part of the illusion of you.

Suffering. The Feast of Stephen shows us another way of overcoming suffering, namely through sacrifice and service in which another truth is discovered and known. We find the truth of humanity in Christ in following him and by the quality of his life in us. It is found, too, in a deeper dimension of suffering, namely, suffering as the result of human evil. Stephen is stoned, a particularly gruesome form of execution, sadly still with us in some parts of the world. He is stoned to death because of his religious conviction, we would say. One of his persecutors, it appears, is a young man whose name was Saul. A persecutor of The Way, as the early followers of Christ were called, Saul will become Paul, the great Apostle to the Gentiles. Here in this ‘Christmas story,’ he is utterly implicated in the murder of Stephen.

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