Category: Sermons

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle found in all four gospels but our text about gathering up the fragments is unique to John. The whole of chapter six in his Gospel is sometimes called ‘the Bread of Life discourse’. It is, I think, quite a powerful theological argument about the essential doctrine of Christ as God and man and as Saviour and Lord and highlights the struggles that belong to grasping the meaning of the Incarnation. John provides an extended discourse on Jesus as “the Bread of Life” that belongs to his life with and from the Father and with us through the sacrament without which, he says, “you have no life in you.”

He points to the sacramental logic where bread and wine signify his flesh and blood. “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” For “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” That abiding is our participation in his eternal life and in our being raised up into the divine life at the last day. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.” Yet this is, as many of the disciples say, “a hard saying,” and “many,” John tells us, “drew back and no longer went about with him.” This prompts Jesus to ask the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter grasps the essential teaching of the entire chapter. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” This is Peter’s confession as given by John.

The chapter ends with an explicit reference to the betrayal of Christ, thus pointing us to the radical meaning of his going up to Jerusalem that we heard on Quinquagesima Sunday and to the image of Jerusalem as above and free, the mother of us all, as the symbol of our life as the children of promise, as we heard in the epistle reading from Galatians this morning. There is more to this Gospel than a picnic in the park with Jesus.

These readings provide us with a rich feast in the wilderness journey of Lent. They gather together and concentrate for us the themes of wilderness and paradise that belong to the first four Sundays in Lent. Jesus was “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” on the First Sunday in Lent; the Canaanite woman comes out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon and meets Jesus half-way, in the wilderness, it seems, on the Second Sunday in Lent; and on the Third Sunday in Lent we have a graphic depiction of the desolating wilderness of our souls in our despair of the absolute goodness of God in whom we are meant to find our blessedness in hearing the word of God and keeping it. John in chapter six makes explicit reference to the word wilderness by recalling the Exodus when “our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness”; the other gospels simply say “in a lonely place.” Yet in all the gospels there is the sense of paradise in the wilderness, a transformation of wilderness into paradise, we might say, and so, too, for the previous Sundays in Lent. Paradise is always there; it is we who have exiled ourselves from it.

(more…)

Print this entry

“For ye were sometimes darkness”

At first glance, it seems so stark and dark and not a little foreboding and threatening. Yet the readings for the Third Sunday in Lent mark a crucial and critical moment in the journey of the soul to God. If Lent is the pilgrimage of love, of love setting our loves in order, then it must consider in a serious manner the nature of sin and evil as it appears in the negation of the goodness of our created being and thus the denial of the end or purpose of our humanity as ordered to God. Such is the darkness in the Epistle from Ephesians, on the one hand, and the compelling image of “the unclean spirit” in the Gospel reading from Luke, on the other hand, the one who takes to himself “seven other spirits more wicked than himself” and whose state “is worse than the first.” What is the devil except the explicit image of self-contradiction? Lucifer created to be the bearer of light contradicts his own being by claiming to be God. But God is God, not Lucifer. This kind of fixation upon ourselves as absolute is mere fantasy; it means willing a lie. Self-contradiction is self-deceit.

In other words, these readings require us to take seriously the destructive nature of sin and evil as belonging to self-contradiction and the spiritual emptiness that results. This is powerfully shown in the Gospel without which we cannot really understand Paul’s exhortation for us to “walk in love as dear children of light,” rejecting “the unfruitful works of darkness,” since light makes manifest or known the things of darkness. The light is greater than the darkness of human sin and evil. The psalmist’s words that “the right hand of the Lord bringeth mighty things to pass,” alluded to in the Collect, is further intensified by Jesus’s words that “if I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God hath come upon you.” The light is the light of the Gospel, the light of Christ, the good news of the Word of God which alone overcomes the darkness of sin and evil.

What is this all about except a strong argument for the absolute goodness of God which sin and evil negate and deny? Like last Sunday, we have a healing of the soul. Jesus casts out a devil and the one who was dumb or mute, meaning unable to speak, is now able to speak. “The people wondered,” we are told. But in what way? There is a division among the people but even more there is a division in our hearts and minds that goes to the very nature of sin and evil. It is about calling what is good evil. That is to will a lie. Every lie is nothing in itself. It depends utterly and completely upon the truth which it negates but renders us paralyzed and obsessed with what is only partial and incomplete. This is what is meant by demonic possession however differently we might want to speak about it in the language of mental health.

(more…)

Print this entry

“O woman, great is thy faith”

The encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman is an arresting and compelling scene and yet, equally, a most disquieting and disturbing one. She “asks, knocks, and seeks,” we might say, but what does it take to receive? It means, it seems, at the very least, a remarkable kind of perseverance and depth of soul. It reveals nothing less than the power and the truth of faith.

The woman comes to Jesus with a request for the healing of her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil.” There are a number of healing stories in the Gospels but rather few about the healing of the mind or the soul. Like this story, they are about demonic influence and possession. This is not to be mocked or derided but appreciated in its power and truth. And what is that power and truth? The power and truth of what opposes the power and truth of God and the image of that power and truth in us. The point is that we can be overtaken in our very selves in various ways. This story touches upon ancient wisdom and human psychology.

What is equally remarkable is that she is a Canaanite woman, meaning one who is outside the households and tribes of Israel. The marvel of the story is that she who is from outside of Israel is in truth “an Israelite indeed,” meaning one who truly strives with God, emphasis on the word ‘with’, not ‘against’. Her question to Jesus is not for herself but for her daughter. She is, and this is key to the story, quite determined in her quest. She has a hold of a truth in Jesus which she will not relinquish. At least on one level this is a story about perseverance, about holding on in the face of adversity, about trust and faith.

What is so disturbing, and yet so profound is how she is answered in her request. First, there is no response – “he answered her not a word”- there is only silence. Secondly, there is rejection – “send her away, for she crieth after us”, say the disciples. Thirdly, there is refusal – “I am not sent”, says Jesus, “but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And fourthly, there is repudiation – “It is not right to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” What could be more devastating, more disparaging, more discouraging than that?

Only at this point of utter humiliation as it must seem, when we are speechless with shock at the harshness of it all, is there the beginnings of the complete turn-around of grace that leads to the ultimate exaltation – “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” It is not simply about a kind of stubborn willfulness on her part. She gets what she seeks only because of her insight into the truth of Christ. How do we know that? Only through the struggle. That is perhaps the real lesson for us. The struggle matters. The struggle is nothing less than the struggle of faith. She who is from outside of Israel symbolizes the very truth and meaning of Israel. It means striving with God.

(more…)

Print this entry

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

At first glance it reads like a debating challenge, a war of words. And in one sense it is, yet not as a contest for what most persuades but rather as a testament to what is most true. That is what is at issue in the temptations of Christ.

They are our temptations. Matthew and Luke, though ordering them differently, present three temptations which encompass the meaning and nature of all temptation. Yet they all come down to one thing really: the denial of God, on the one hand, and a picture of the truth of our humanity as found in Christ, the word and son of the Father, on the other hand. All temptations are about turning to what are partial, incomplete, and distorted forms of the truth.

The three categories of temptation vary only in the degree to which God is denied. The three temptations can be understood as the temptation to distrust, the temptation to presumption, and the temptation to defiance and denial explicitly. All the temptations common to our humanity are comprehended in these three and all belong to the Lenten project of setting our loves in order over and against the forms of the disarray of our affections and thoughts. But what is the point of this whole matter of temptation? To highlight for us and to compel us to the realization of what properly belongs to the truth of our humanity and to the redemption of our humanity in the one who overcomes the tendencies in us to lose sight of the truth of our being which is only found in the truth and goodness of God.

“If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” The first temptation is to distrust because it suggests that God will not provide for us, therefore we must shift for ourselves by way of whatever means, even unlawful and unnatural means, such as turning stones into bread, which is to say, subverting the order of things in creation to our own immediate ends. The temptation is to distrust God’s power and goodness. It is the false fear that God will not provide. The Old Testament form of this is the temptation in the wilderness (recalled in the Venite), “the temptation of Meribah” – the hungry temptation – when the people of Israel murmured against God’s provision for them in the wilderness, the provision of manna, the proverbial ‘bread from heaven.’

(more…)

Print this entry

Fr. David Curry delivered this homily at King’s College Chapel, Thursday, March 6th, 2025.

“Charity never faileth”

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains…

With such a summary of natural philosophy – measuring the heights of mountains, fathoming the depths of seas, of ethical and political philosophy – the measuring and fathoming “of states, and kings,” of metaphysics or natural theology – “walking with a staffe to heav’n and tracing fountains,” the causes of things, Herbert begins his poem, The Agonie. Then by way of complete contrast to such a summa of philosophical thought, he immediately adds an important ‘but.’ But what? “But there are,” he says, “two vast, spacious things,/ the which to measure it doth more behove”, things that are more significant and more necessary for us to ponder, “yet few there are that sound them.” And what are those “two vast, spacious things?” They are “Sinne and Love.”

We meet just after Ash Wednesday to commemorate this evening, Thomas Aquinas, Doctor and Poet, as the Prayer Book calendar puts it, and the martyrs St. Perpetua and her Companions. Aquinas is one of the great theologians of the western church, one who, I think it is fair to say, has taken much care to sound out, meaning to inquire into and make known, sin and love in his theological writings and commentaries. But what might such a 13th century giant of medieval thought have to do with Anglican thinking and devotion? Rather a lot and as testimony to our essential catholicism. It would be hard to make sense of Richard Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity or John Pearson’s On the Creed, to name but two of many, without an understanding and appreciation of the works of Thomas Aquinas. It was Pearson who, as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford just after the English Civil War, argued for using Thomas’ Summa Theologiae for teaching systematic theology to those entering the church rather than the Sentences of Peter Lombard.

The structure and images of Herbert’s poem are profoundly Thomistic. The poem references the philosophical sciences as derived from Aristotle and as taken up by Thomas: in short, physics, ethics, and metaphysics. Like Thomas, he argues for the necessity of another science, what Thomas calls sacra doctrina, namely, what is revealed through the Scriptures. As Herbert suggests, Scripture teaches most clearly about what we most need to know, sin and love.

(more…)

Print this entry

Return to me with all your heart … return to the Lord, your God

The words of the prophet Joel reverberate throughout the Ash Wednesday liturgy. “Turn thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned,” we pray. They are framed as well by recalling the dust of our creation. “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” Dust and ashes: the dust of the ground of our created being and the ashes of repentance. Yet both the dust and the ashes are profoundly about our turning and being turned.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. It is in every way a season of renewal, a renewal of our hearts and minds in the things of God. It is about our turning back to God from whom we have turned away. Yet that turning is itself the motion of God’s love in us returning us to the truth and dignity of our humanity found, as it only can be found, in God. It is all about the turning, or the “turning again,” as T.S.Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday puts it.

The poem begins in an almost mantra-like fashion. “Because I do not hope to turn again,” It begins, it seems, with a sense of hopelessness and despair. He quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 29, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” with its sense of separation and abandonment, of “myself almost despising,” yet as one who “looking upon himself and cursing his fate” still hopes, “wishing me like to one more rich in hope,/ Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, /Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope.” Eliot changes but one word, art for gift, “Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” It is a nod perhaps to where his poetic meditation ultimately leads. In the sixth and last section of the poem, the mantra turns to “although I do not hope to turn” and ends with a prayer. “Suffer me not to be separated and let my prayer come unto thee.” Hope, over and against even the denials of hope, ultimately cries out in prayer, a longing for a sense of unity and wholeness.

Between the beginning, which seems to eclipse any possibilities of continuing, and the ending, which at the very least opens out the possibilities of renewal, there is a kind of meditation. The poem is a meditation upon the ambiguities, the hesitancies, and yes, even the denials of desire, but as interspersed with the countering cries of the heart in the language of prayer. There are the cries for mercy, for forgiveness, for salvation, for “our peace in His will,” quoting Dante. The poem captures something of the disquieting unsettledness of our contemporary culture and our restless hearts.

(more…)

Print this entry

“If I have not charity, I am nothing”

Such strong and yet compelling words. They shape the great Collect for today. Love is simply everything and without it we are simply nothing. What? How can that be? It is an extraordinary statement yet it goes to the very heart of the Christian Faith. Without love, we are nothing. But what is love?

It is an ancient and modern question, perhaps considered more deeply by the ancients than the moderns, but then you would expect me to say that, wouldn’t you? Plato treats the question in his famous dialogue, The Symposium. It belongs, I think, at least alongside or in a kind of reciprocal engagement with Paul’s great hymn to love in today’s Epistle. That would be a symposium par excellence! But what is the love that Paul celebrates? It is nothing less than the love of God, the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves. This is not an add on but the underlying truth of all our loves, of all love and desire. All love and desire is for the good but our seeking is only one part of the equation. For our seeking is something given by God. God moves our souls to seek what our souls most desire which is nothing less than God. God is love.

But you will protest in contemporary fashion: Isn’t love, love? Love is love? But that is to say nothing, a tautology. Love of what, in what way, and for what end?, we have to ask. Love is not static but dynamic. It is the desire or the eros of our souls, though the word Paul uses is not eros but agape, a love that signals more the unity of the human community, the love that is fellowship. The preceding chapter ends with the words: “I will show you a still more excellent way,” having exhaustively gone through an analysis of the human community by way of analogy with the unity of the parts of the body yet as belonging to something more. For “now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” All our human attempts at justice and right, about a unity of diversities, to put contemporary social justice and identitarian concerns in the most positive light, is ultimately and only found in God.

Divine charity perfects human charity; it is its true end and meaning. The true desire of our souls for the unity that unites all differences is accomplished and concluded in the divine fellowship. That unity of differences is not quite the same thing as “diversities,” which Andrewes points out is just “a heap of things,” indefinite and indeterminant. But love cannot be indifferent to the realities of our lives and the lives of those around us. Love indifferent is imperfect love. What is love if it doesn’t care?

(more…)

Print this entry