Category: Sermons

“Whose is this image and superscription?”

Autumn leaves lie scattered on the wind. The glory of the Fall fades into the somber grey of November. At the risk of indulging too much in the pathetic fallacy, not to mention privileging the seasons of the northern hemisphere, there is, it seems to me, a contemplative feel to nature at this time of year. Certainly, the Scripture readings in the Offices and at the Eucharist reflect an emphasis upon wisdom. They recall us to contemplation and reflection.

I love the contrast between the fading of nature’s glory and the opening out to us of the glory of God in the Communion of Saints, the vision of our redeemed humanity. We meet within the Octave of the Feast of All Saints’ and this morning’s Epistle reading reminds us of the spiritual reality of that communion. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul tells the Philippians, and bids them and us “look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change this lowly body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body”, words which are echoed in the Service of Committal in the Burial Office. Death and glory.

The Feast of All Saints’ embraces The Solemnity of All Souls’. All Souls’ reminds us of the somber reality of our common mortality but it does so within the vision of the hope of heaven, the vision of our humanity transformed. These celebrations challenge us about how we think about our humanity, about what it means to be human and about our lives in the human community, politically, economically, socially, and religiously. They challenge us about the necessity of making certain distinctions and about understanding the forms of interaction within the varied areas and aspects of our lives. “Our citizenship is in heaven” but we have certain obligations in the political and social communities of which we are inescapably a part as well. The Gospel speaks directly to the questions about their interaction.

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“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

A miracle story, to be sure. What do the miracles teach us? They teach us something about the nature of God and about the truth of our humanity. But there is something particularly special and important about this gospel story. It is taken from The Gospel according to St. John. There is an important connection between Word and Wisdom that is wonderfully illustrated in this Gospel.

It is a miracle of healing, and so not unlike any number of healing miracles, it might seem. But there is something special about this story and it is not that Jesus is reluctant to make house calls! John tells us that this was “the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judea into Galilee.” That begs the obvious question about the first sign. What was that? Not a healing miracle per se but the story of the turning of the water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, a miracle that points us to the meaning of the Incarnation and to the social joys of heaven which God seeks for us in and through the fellowship of the Church here and now as well as in heaven. This second sign teaches us something profound about the nature of God and about our humanity.

It teaches us that the Word of God is not confined to the limits of time and space. We are being reminded of the eternal Word of God which cannot be constrained to our experiences and expectations. A certain nobleman beseeches Jesus to come down to Capernaum, another town, to heal his son who was at the point of death. Like so many of us, we want God to do something for us immediately and directly. Here we are reminded of the greater truth of God’s Word and its truer movement in us. Jesus rebukes our presumption about wanting signs and wonders without which we will not believe. For we have forgotten, it seems, what The Letter to the Hebrews wisely teaches, namely, that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” There is a greater power and truth to God’s Word.

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“I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven.”

There is something quite wonderful in the way in which Jesus teaches one of the great and most distinctive Christian ideas, the idea of forgiveness. He takes Peter’s argument about number, about how many times do you forgive someone who has offended you, to open us out to the infinite nature and quality of forgiveness. It is not merely a matter of substituting a greater number for a lesser number, 490 in place of 7, as if forgiveness could be quantified. No. Forgiveness is a divine quality given to us so as to be lived in us. Not to forgive is to deny the forgiveness that has been given to us. It can only result in cutting ourselves off from God because we have cut ourselves off from one another. Love is dead in us.

This is the point of the parable that Jesus tells. “And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him.” The servant who has been brought to account owes a great debt to his king and is forgiven his debt only to refuse to forgive the paltry debt that another owes him. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, he refuses to forgive his fellow-servant. We sense the outrage, the wrong, the violation of the ethical idea that you should do as others have done to you. Forgiveness received requires forgiveness to be shown towards others; and if it isn’t, then we are in a mess. There seems to be about this a certain quid pro quo, a kind of justice.

True enough but I think this hides the much more radical nature of forgiveness, its divine nature, as it were, and the seriousness of forgiveness. Forgiveness returns us to the will of God for our humanity. It is really about nothing less than the life of Christ in us. It is Paul’s prayer “that [our] love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement”. Forgiveness is nothing less than the love of God ruling in our hearts.

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“For wisdom is known through speech,
and education through the words of the tongue”

Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach is not to be confused with either The Book of Ecclesiastes or The Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. Like the latter, however, it belongs to a collection of books known as the Apocrypha written in the inter-testamental period, between the time of the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, and the New Testament. An interesting collection of writings, they have had a fascinating history of reception and rejection in the history of the Christian Churches. Nonetheless, they are an important collection and for Anglicans they belong to what is received as the Scriptures, albeit in a peculiar fashion, not “to establish any doctrine,” essential or creedal doctrine, that is to say, but “for example of life and instruction of manners.” Passages from the books of the Apocrypha are appointed to be read at the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer on the last Sundays of the Trinity Season beginning on the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity.

These books embrace a number of different forms of literature but the most outstanding form is known as ‘wisdom literature’. Bearing the imprint of the philosophical culture of ancient Greece, these texts provide an important way of thinking about the revealed Word of God and about living a holy way of life based upon wisdom. Tonight’s lesson is a marvelous encomium or song of praise to wisdom personified as a woman, at once the source, perhaps, of Lady Philosophy and/or of Mary, the mother of God, sometimes referred to as the Seat of Wisdom. But more theologically, properly speaking, wisdom is understood to be the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus the Word and Son of the Father. Word and wisdom are inescapably united.

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“For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be
an image of his own eternity”

The long Trinity season runs out in a series of reflections on wisdom. It is on this Sunday that we begin to read in the Sunday offices of Morning and Evening Prayer from the Books of the Apocrypha.

This follows an ancient understanding about the role and place of those books in the doctrinal understanding of things. At the heart of the Protestant reformation was a new sensibility about the primacy of Scripture and the nature of its interaction with tradition and reason in determining the teaching or doctrine of the Church on matters of essential faith, on matters of morals, and on matters of polity or church government. As a consequence, there was debate and question about a collection of books that arose between the time of the setting down of the Old Testament – the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures – and the period of the Christian New Testament. The debate had largely to do with the claims about certain teachings alleged to be based upon these texts to which the Reformers took exception.

For some Protestant Churches these books are not regarded as part of the Scripture. For others, like Anglicans, for instance, these books are received and read not “to establish any doctrine” – meaning essential or creedal doctrine – but “for example of life and instruction of manners” as Article VI of the Thirty-nine Articles states. In this the Anglican Churches understand themselves to be following the example of Jerome, the great translator of the most influential and famous version of the Bible, the Latin Vulgate, which was the Bible for more than a millennium for the western and European world. Anglicans read the Apocrypha or are encouraged to do so as complementing the Old and New Testament.

In a way this is necessary in order to make sense of the New Testament, since there are several instances where the New Testament writers make explicit reference to events and ideas found in the Apocrypha. Such is the argument for the inclusion of Apocryphal texts in the public reading of Scripture in the life of the Church. But there have been Anglicans of an Evangelical persuasion who would not be persuaded about reading from the Books of the Apocrypha and so for the sake of those of tender conscience, the Prayer Book (Cdn., 1962), makes provision for alternative Old Testament passages to be read instead on the last Sundays of the Trinity Season. This reveals what was once a typical kind of Anglican compromise, a kind of principled accommodation to different theological sensibilities, even a kind of wisdom, at least practically speaking, it seems to me.  It is an approach, perhaps, that has been lost in our church for some time.

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“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

A miracle story, to be sure. The Trinity season and the season of Epiphany abound in miracles. They teach us something about the nature of God and about the truth of our humanity. But there is something particularly special and important about this gospel story. It is taken from The Gospel according to St. John and there are few gospel readings from John’s Gospel in the long Trinity season. Yet that season runs out in wisdom as we are reminded in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer today, the twenty-first Sunday after Trinity. For we begin to read from the Apocrypha and, particularly, from the wisdom literature in the Apocrypha on this Sunday. I want to suggest that there is an important connection between Word and Wisdom that is wonderfully illustrated in this Gospel.

It is a miracle, to be sure, a miracle of healing, and so not unlike any number of healing miracles, it might seem. But there is something special about this story and it is not that Jesus is reluctant to make house calls! John tells us that this was “the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judea into Galilee.” That begs the obvious question about the first sign. What was that? Not a healing miracle per se but the story of the turning of the water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, a miracle that points us to the meaning of the Incarnation and to the social joys of heaven which God seeks for us in and through the fellowship of the Church here and now as well as in heaven. This second sign, the word sign here is significant, teaches us something profound about the nature of God and about our humanity.

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“I am the bread of life”

Powerful and yet familiar words. They speak profoundly to the special meaning and purpose of Thanksgiving. Ultimately, thanksgiving is a spiritual activity. To push it even further, I would argue that there is no true thanksgiving which is not a thanksgiving to God.

We are rather good about the idea of thanksgiving for something or other. We get that because we like to be on the receiving end. The idea of thanksgiving makes some kind of sense if we have been given something, especially if it is something which appeals to our appetites and desires. Where we fall down on the thanksgiving front is on the radical idea of thanksgiving to God for all and everything that exists. For that requires reflection and awareness, an aspect of self-consciousness. The deeper and more explicitly spiritual aspects of the act of thanksgiving reveal to us what runs completely counter to our culture of entitlement. You may like to have turkey, squash, potatoes, pumpkins, even zucchini, and so forth – certainly I do – but no, none of us deserves any of it. Even if we have raised and slaughtered the turkey, grown and harvested the various fruits and vegetables of creation, all of those things and our labour included depends radically and completely upon God and upon the good order of his creation.

We create nothing of ourselves. We are only secondary creators, acting in accord with the good order of God’s world and out of the idea of having been made in the image of God. God is the Creator. Thanksgiving reminds us of our human limitations and recalls us to God’s “bountiful goodness” as this Sunday’s Collect so wonderfully puts it. There can only be life and there can only be a bountiful harvest of edibles and delectables as well as a harvest of rational and spiritual pleasures and principles because of God’s great “bountiful goodness”.

That is the central spiritual insight of thanksgiving. It is less about thanksgiving for and more about thanksgiving to. Why? Because there can be no harvest whether of material or spiritual goods without God.

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“There was war in heaven”

Michaelmas daisies dance along our maritime roadsides in the soft September air. They remind us that dancing with angels belongs to the truth of our humanity.

Dancing with angels is a way of speaking about what we do every day in our spiritual and intellectual lives whether as students or teachers, priests or parishioners. Angels are very much about the principles of the understanding, the intellectual and spiritual principles that belong to the understanding of creation and our humanity. They remind us that there is more to reality than what meets the eye. They speak, in a kind of way, to another feature of our humanity, too, our loneliness, or what Alistair MacLeod calls our “inarticulate loneliness,” out of which comes the struggle to articulate and communicate, to take hold of meaning which is only possible in an intelligible world. The angels remind us that we have dance partners in the pursuit of understanding and in the struggle to act rightly and to be good.

In the year 1257, perhaps even what has come to be known as Michaelmas term, at the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, affectionately known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, undertook in the Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, “Disputed Questions on Truth,” the question “Can a man be taught by an Angel?”(Q. 11, art.iii). Angels can teach us, he says, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or by the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but, as he says, by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding.”

Angels can help us to understand the terrible, hard and harsh events of our own world and day. After all, will we really even begin to comprehend the terror of terrorism, whether it is the massacre of a church congregation in Pakistan or the hostage-taking in Kenya, merely through the lenses of social and economic determinism? Don’t we need the spiritual wisdom which talks about the struggles between the good and evil which we are afraid to name, the spiritual struggles which the religions of the world in their truth and integrity contemplate and know, proclaim and show?

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