Category: Sermons

“If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them”
& “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

A double text to capture two themes. Do we act out of what we have been given to see? Or do we demand that God be accountable to us? To act out of what we have been to see is captured in the first text, “if you know these things, blessed are you if you do them”; the other text expresses the vehemence of our hostility against God, “what have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

We are confronted with the challenge and the refusal. There is the challenge to act out of what we have been given to see of the majesty of God and our blessedness, the divine charity that shapes our lives into holiness. Such is the vision of the Trinity. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven” and we are invited to enter into that vision through the charity of God alive in us. But then, there is our refusal to will that order and truth, preferring, instead, the vanity of ourselves that blinds us to the real needs and even the presence of others. We ignore Lazarus at our feet. He is the image of our wounded and broken humanity, the humanity which God restores but which man ignores. What has he to do with us? we may ask. But in so neglecting Lazarus we are really saying, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

The readings at the Eucharist order our understanding of all the other lessons of this day. The point, too, is very simple. The love that is shown is the love that is to be lived. (more…)

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“If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.”

Do we act out of what we have been given to see? “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” we heard on Trinity Sunday. We are invited to enter into that vision through the charity of God alive in us. Against that stand our stubborn refusals to will that order and truth, preferring, instead, the vanity of ourselves that blinds us to the real needs and even the presence of others. We ignore Lazarus at our feet. Lazarus is the image of our wounded and broken humanity which God restores and man ignores. What has he to do with us, we may ask. But in so neglecting Lazarus, the parable suggests, we are neglecting God. “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.”

The lesson is very simple: the love that is shown is the love that is to be lived. The Epistle teaches us that love is of God because God is love. That love is manifested in Jesus Christ so that we might live in love through him. The only question is whether we will live the vision. The Epistle sounds the theme and the Gospel gives the crucial illustration through a parable about our relationship to the vision of God revealed. The Epistle is John’s treatise about that love. The Gospel is the powerful story of the Rich Man (Dives) and Lazarus.

What does it come down to? Simply this. The love of God compels us to love one another. This is not a may-be, but a must-be for our salvation. We are commanded and compelled to love out of the vision of love which has been shown to us. (more…)

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“To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?”

“No one hath ever seen God,” John reminds us, echoing the Old Testament sensibility that God by definition is beyond the things of this world and is not to be collapsed into them or even compared with them. There is a strong sense of negative theology in the viewpoint of ancient Israel and rightly so; it is the counter to idolatry, the tendency to confuse God with the things of the world, to collapse the Creator into the created.

But then, how to deal with the equally strong idea of God’s being with us, especially in the intimacy of our humanity in Jesus Christ? How to deal with the Creator becoming created, with God made man? Such is the Incarnation.

Trinity Sunday celebrates the revealed reality of God in his transcendence and in his immanence, how God is both utterly beyond and other and how God is intimate and near. It is the central mystery of the Christian faith. To negotiate between these two extremes is the paradox of revelation, the paradox of salvation. No greater mystery and none which is so compelling in its elegance and beauty. The whole challenge is to think the Trinity in the way in which we are given to think it. To think it is to discover the logic contained in the images by which God makes himself known to us.

The whole point of Trinity Sunday, and, especially in our Evensong readings tonight, is that the images through which we understand God as Father, Son and Holy Ghost are not of our making. (more…)

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“Behold a door was opened in heaven”

Today is Trinity Sunday. It celebrates the great, grand, and central teaching of the Christian faith. It is about the extravagance of God, how God is always more and greater than we can ever imagine. The Trinity is that greater extravagance – the extravagance of God, both in himself and for us. The Trinity is the mystery of God revealed, the mystery of love made known, the love that is God.

Think God and everything else comes after. But how can we think God? Only by the extravagance of God’s grace that embraces and enfolds us in the community of love, the communion of the Trinity.

And there is the extravagant grace of language, the language of adoration. The language of adoration is grace-given and spirit-inspired. God is always more – always of another order of reality beyond the mundane and the worldly, beyond what is merely human. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity,” as one of the classical and catholic creeds of the Church puts it, the Athanasian Creed – think of the Trinity in this way, the way which God in the extravagant grace of his Son has opened out to us.

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“Behold a door was opened in heaven”

Today is Trinity Sunday. It celebrates the great, grand, and central teaching of the Christian faith. It is about the extravagance of God, how God is always more and greater than we can ever imagine. The Trinity is that greater extravagance – the extravagance of God, both in himself and for us. The Trinity is the mystery of God revealed, the mystery of love made known, the love that is God.

Think God and everything else comes after. But how can we think God? Only by the extravagance of God’s grace that embraces and enfolds us in the community of love, the communion of God. There is the extravagant grace of Holy Baptism when we are named in the intimacy of God’s own naming of himself as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is the extravagant grace of Holy Communion which gathers us into the community of love, the communion of the Trinity.

And there is the extravagant grace of language, the language of Creed and Liturgy, of poetry and song. It is the language of adoration. The language of adoration is grace-given and spirit-inspired. The Athanasian Creed, found tucked away in the back of the Prayer Book, for example, proclaims in the most extravagant language imaginable the mystery of the Trinity by way of negation and affirmation.

God is always more – always of another order of reality beyond the mundane and the worldly, beyond what is merely human. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity” – think of the Trinity in this way, the way which God in the extravagant grace of his Son has opened out to us.

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“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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