Category: Sermons

“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance”

Pentecost. God is believable and thinkable. I am not so sure about our contemporary institutional churches but Pentecost marks the birthday of the Church universal and makes Church and churches at once believable and thinkable.

There is a wonder to Pentecost. It marks the descent of the Holy  Ghost upon the disciples to form the Apostolic Church, the Church, if you will, of which Anglicans notionally lay claim to belonging. And rightly so.

But what is the wonder? After all of the comings and goings of Christ, we might wonder, what on earth is Pentecost really about? Simply the absolute spiritual reality of God. No greater message to our depressed, discouraged and despairing age. The whole point of the religions of the world, and, especially, the Christian religion, is the idea that we are incomplete without God. That bears repeating because the assumption of the Western cultures has been that we have matured and out-grown God. We have come of age! Sadly only to discover our adolescence!

Pentecost challenges us about the spiritual reality of God and about ourselves as spiritual beings. It marks the beginning of the Church as a spiritual society, a community defined by the clarity and the charity of Christ. Nowhere is that more apparent than at Pentecost.

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“Christ sits on the right hand of the Father”

The Ascension and the Session of Christ are two scriptural and creedal teachings. They are at once forgotten and assumed, I think, with respect to Christian thinking and faith. And yet, they speak profoundly to the confusions and complexities of contemporary culture. They point us to an understanding of the objective reality of God and to a larger view of our humanity. They recall us to who we are in the sight of God.

As such these doctrines or teachings provide a strong counter to our fatalisms, ancient and modern and to our existential despair. Either the world is too much with us or we are too much with ourselves.

The great religions of the world offer the profound insight, in one way or another, that our humanity is radically incomplete without God. For Christians that insight is captured in what we might call the comings and goings of God signaled in the story of Christ. The Ascension and the Session of Christ are important moments in that story; the story of God, we might say, in which we find our story.

The image is strong and wonderful. Christ ascends and sits on the right hand of the Father. What does it mean? It speaks at once of the transcendence of God – God as utterly beyond, as almighty and all knowing – and of the immanence of God, God as having engaged our humanity in the intimacy of Christ, God as being with us. Both these theological concepts – transcendence and immanence – are comprehended in the Christian idea of God as Trinity signaled in the revealed names of God as Father, Son and Holy Ghost, names which are largely made known to us by Jesus. It is especially in the story and in the season of Christ’s Death and Resurrection that Jesus teaches us about the Father, about himself as the Son and certainly about the Holy Ghost or Spirit. It is in this understanding that God is God and that God is also with us.

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“I have overcome the world”

It is, it seems to me, the forgotten or at least an overlooked doctrine, the doctrine of the Ascension. Christ’s words from the Gospel of Rogation Sunday point us to the radical teaching of the Ascension. We have a home with God because Jesus has overcome the world.

The world no longer defines us. The Ascension of Christ frees us from our pragmatic frenzies and follies and from our fearful fatalisms. It marks the culmination of the Resurrection. Something of the fuller meaning and teaching of the Resurrection is presented to us in the Ascension of Christ. It bears eloquent testimony to the meaning of human and cosmic redemption. The world is God’s world; it exists for his will and purpose, not ours. We have an end, a home with God in Christ. “I go,” Jesus says, “to prepare a place for you, that where I am there you may be also.” That sense of an end or purpose, especially for rational creatures, is really quite strong.

But what are we to make of the language of overcoming? It seems, dangerously, to be the language of technocratic exuberance whereby we think the world is simply there for us, a resource to be mined, fished, farmed, logged and generally exploited for the advantage and purposes of our devisings, the sad consequences of which are only too depressingly before us. But it is also the language of existentialism, (at least in its Nietzschean form) the language of the will to power which trumps the possibilities of a world of truth and meaning. Yet, Jesus means, I think, something quite different. His overcoming of the world has to do with God’s radical and wonderful redemption of the world without which the joy and delight of the Ascension make little sense.

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“I will therefore that men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands”

Lifting up holy hands. Lifting up your hearts. “Prayer,” as Richard Hooker reminds us, “signifies all the service that we ever do unto God.” Prayer is about the Godward direction of our lives. It is not about the odd nod to God; it is not about the regular irregular presence at Divine Service; it is about a whole life lived towards and with God. Such is the radical message of Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation. Ora et labora, if you will, pray and work.

In the Resurrection of Christ we are given a new and radical freedom – a freedom in the world because of freedom in Christ; a freedom with one another because of our freedom with God. Prayer is the operative term, especially in the days of Rogation, the days of prayer which remind us emphatically of a life of prayer. We are, I fear, quite dead to this. We have far too small an idea of prayer, if we think about it all. Our churches are failing, to be sure, but the real failure would be to give up on prayer.

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“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.”

It is one of the profoundest statements in the Gospel. It captures in a phrase the whole of religion. It suggests something about God in himself and something about God for us. The mission of the Son – his going out and his returning to the Father – belongs to his essential identity. Everything is to find its place within the relation of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Ghost. Everything finds its place in the life of God. That life is opened to view in the mission of the Son. We have only to enter it so as to live it. Such is the grace of God.

Here is the blessing. The blessing is to know that you are a child of God. The children of God know that there are hardships and sufferings, for they are not to be ignored, but even more they know the victory of Christ – “I have overcome the world,” the world within and the world without.

And something of the meaning of that “overcoming” is sacramentally signified for us this morning in the baptisms of Warren and Isabella. By this sacrament, they are made “a child of God”, “an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven”, “a member of Christ.” We find the truth of ourselves in Christ. But we have to be incorporated into him so as to grow up into that life. Baptism is the beginning of spiritual life by the grace of Christ. It can begin in no other way. But as a beginning it signals and presupposes a continuing in the same, continuing in the way of grace through prayer and praise, through the ordered life of worship and discipleship in the Church, through the growing up into a spiritual understanding of what has here been conferred upon them this morning. Their baptism is a visible reminder to all of us about our baptisms – our profession, our calling.

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“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.”

Rogation Sunday reminds us of the cosmic dimension of the Resurrection, to the theme of the redemption of all creation. It reminds us emphatically that religion is not about an escape from the world. It sets before us a kind of theology of the land. In the story of Creation, the earth, the dry land, is said to be good (Gen.1.9,10). And we, who are made in the image of God, are also formed out of the dust, “from the ground”(Gen.2.7). We are placed in the garden of creation. The garden is the land of paradise.

In the story of the Fall, our disobedience not only alienates us from God but also from the land. The land of paradise becomes the land of sweat and toil. “Cursed is the ground because of you…In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to the dust you shall return” (Gen.3.17,18). “And the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken” (Gen.3.23). In the story of Cain and Abel, the land becomes ‘the land of blood.’ Cain slays Abel in the field: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God says (Gen.4.10). These stories are altogether fundamental to what unfolds in the story of salvation in the Old and New Testaments.

In the story of salvation, the land is also signified as the “promised land,” the land of our renewed relationship with God. The promised land is variously described in the Old Testament. Its proverbial description is the “land flowing with milk and honey” (e.g. Deut.6.3), but, in The Book of Genesis, the promised land is just “the land which I shall give you” (Gen.13.15,17). It may not be all that much to look at; it may even smell funny st certain times of the year in our rural communities especially! It signifies simply the place of our relationship with God. That is its most basic and fundamental sense.

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“Ye believe in God, believe also in me”

The gospel passage for this saints’ day commemoration is part of Jesus’ so-called “farewell discourse” in John’s Gospel from which we have been reading on the last three Sundays of Eastertide. It presents one of the most provocative, most challenging and most controversial, perhaps, of Jesus’ so-called “I am” sayings in John’s Gospel, at least with respect to interfaith dialogue. Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

The month of May is ushered in on the steps of the holy apostles, Saint Philip and Saint James, so that “we may steadfastly walk in the way that leadeth to eternal life,” as the Collect puts it.

The readings for The Feast of St. Philip and St. James complement the themes of Eastertide. The fundamental orientation of the Son to the Father is ever so strongly and rather provocatively expressed in the gospel reading, “no man cometh unto the Father but by me,” Jesus says, pointing out to Philip, too, that “he that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.” And yet, Jesus says, “believe me, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me; or else believe me for the very work’s sake.”

The things which Jesus does are the works which manifest the truth and the life and the way of God. And how are we to participate in that? Through prayer. “If ye ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” All prayer is about nothing less and nothing more than asking the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. All prayer gathers us into the fundamental orientation of the Son, “because I go unto my Father.” Here again, and providentially, we have the recurring Easter refrain, “because I go to the Father.” Everything is rooted and grounded in the life of God, the holy and blessed Trinity.

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“The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep.”

It is a powerful and familiar image. It speaks to us about care, of course, but it does so in the deeper context of sacrifice. It is about something more, though not less, than hugs and squeezes, far more, though not less, perhaps, than the comforts of pharmacare as wonderful as those can be.

We forget that this image so popular and familiar belongs to the pattern of death and resurrection and the way that pattern informs our lives of sacrifice and service. For centuries upon centuries the Gospel of Christ the Good Shepherd has been read in the Easter Season. Christ, the only Son of God, has been given to us as “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” These are powerful and profound theological concepts that relate to the quality of our lives in faith. There is something quite suggestive, important and necessary about connecting the image of the Good Shepherd to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

There is the strong theological idea that God can make something good even out of our evil and the philosophical idea that attends it, namely, that the power of the good is always greater than all and any evil.

We forget, I think, that Christ the Good Shepherd is also the Lamb of God. We forget that the care of the Good Shepherd has cure in it, the cure of the radical dis-ease of our souls because we are so wrapped up in ourselves that we no longer know how to live beyond ourselves and for one another. We can’t on the strength of our own power. We can only through the power of Christ living within us. But that means precisely dying to ourselves and living for God and for one another, the very thing that God shows us as belonging to his very nature.

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“Now I go my way to him that sent me”

The contrasts between sin and grace, between heaven and earth, and between God and man are essential features of religious philosophy. They are always before us in the liturgy or worship of the Church and in the Scripture readings. How to think about these contrasts is a critical task of our lives in faith.

The Eucharistic readings of Eastertide present these contrasts in very powerful ways. We are being challenged to think through them in order to grasp the wonder of Christ’s Resurrection and its meaning for us in our lives. The Gospel readings for the last three Sundays of Eastertide are all taken from the so-called ‘farewell discourse’ of Jesus in John’s Gospel. Jesus is preparing the disciples for his going from us into the darkness of the death of his crucifixion, on the one hand, and into the glory of his eternal life with the Father, on the other hand. We may find the first easier to understand but I suspect we are equally challenged about both.

Jesus seems to know about what is going to happen to him and this, perhaps, perplexes us. And yet, John, especially, is always drawing our attention to the theological idea of the Incarnation, the union of God and man in Jesus Christ, as the essential tenet upon which the whole story stands or falls. The crucifixion cannot be simply an accident either from the standpoint of our humanity or from the divine standpoint. That would render it entirely meaningless and miss the outstanding theological point of the Resurrection. God is able to make something good out of our evil. Nowhere do we see the potentialities for human evil more graphically and more completely than in the Crucifixion of Christ. The whole packet of human sin, past, present and future is already comprehended in the arms of the Crucified Christ. That is why images of the Crucifixion remain such a fundamental feature of Christian art and architecture.

One of the features of the liturgical revolution, especially for Anglicans, has been to downplay this essential idea, but the ideology of progressive liberalism is bankrupt and, in one way or another, we all know this, though we don’t want to face it. We live in a “disordered world” precisely because of our attachment to the themes of material prosperity, scientific naturalism and technological progress; all of which assumptions need, at the very least, to be qualified and critically examined. The idea of a disordered world, of course, is not new – which is a good thing. Why? Because the readings that are before us today, and which have been part of the life of the Church for centuries, provide us with a way to think about our own disorders and distresses by recalling us to God’s story in Jesus Christ.

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