Category: Sermons

“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”

It is, we might say, the promise of the Resurrection. But it is not just  ‘pie in the sky by and by’; it speaks to a profound Christian reality here and now. We “mourn and rejoice at once and at the same time in this world,” T.S Eliot suggests in his play Murder in the Cathedral. It is the very nature of the life of the Church; the life of prayer and praise is about our communion with God. And yet, we are allowed to look beyond mourning, beyond sorrow and lament to joy and delight as being the true hope and reality of our humanity. Only so can we both mourn and rejoice at one and the same time.

We live, the French Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf argues in a “disordered world.” In one way, that is not new. It belongs to the human condition, to what is the reality of the Fall. But how to live in a disordered world is the far more interesting question. I want to suggest that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection speaks directly to the situation and reality of our living in a disordered world.

What do we mean by the disordered world? We can no longer deceive ourselves about being “assured of certain certainties” (T.S. Eliot, Preludes IV), it seems to me. We live in the ruins of a revolution. We live, certainly, in the failure and collapse of certain assumptions about material prosperity and about scientific progress. We are beset by the prophets of apocalyptic doom and, no, they are not religious fanatics so much as doomsday environmentalists. And yet, even that is being challenged. In short, without giving a full blown chronicle of the contradictions, confusions and complexities of our contemporary world, disordered seems to fit the bill rather nicely and to capture our present sense of uncertainty and unease.

How to deal with it? I think this is where an openness to what we have forgotten and dismissed and even denied is required. What is it? Simply what we are being given to see in these remarkable lessons which belong to the season of Easter. They offer nothing less than a new and radical way of looking at our humanity. The doctrine of the Resurrection, I wish to argue, speaks wonderfully and profoundly to the disorders of our world and day.

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“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”

It is, we might say, the promise of the Resurrection. But it is not just  ‘pie in the sky by and by’; it speaks to a profound Christian reality here and now. We “mourn and rejoice at once and at the same time in this world,” T.S Eliot suggests in his play Murder in the Cathedral. It is the very nature of the life of the Church, concentrated for us in the Great Thanksgiving Prayer at Holy Communion. And yet, we are allowed to look beyond mourning, beyond sorrow and lament to joy and delight as being the true hope and reality of our humanity. Only so can we both mourn and rejoice at one and the same time.

We live, the French Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf argues, in a “disordered world.” In one way, that is not new. It belongs to the human condition, to what is the reality of the Fall. But how to live in a disordered world is the far more interesting question. I want to suggest that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection speaks directly to the situation and reality of our living in a disordered world.

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

It is a powerful and familiar image and yet one which I think we utterly fail to comprehend. Perhaps the most familiar of all of the biblical images and certainly the one which is most commonly represented in the church culture of the Maritimes, it has, I fear, been co-opted by the therapeutic culture and emptied of its deeper meaning. 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 on the Second Sunday after Easter. The Collect makes the explicit point that 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 Christ the Good Shepherd to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And yet, that is exactly what our readings do this morning. The lesson from 1^st Peter is quite explicit. It speaks about Christ “who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” as well as signifying that it is by his stripes – his wounds at our hands – that we are healed and even more, “returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of [o]ur souls.” This is strong stuff; the theological idea that God can make something good even out of our evil and the philosophical idea that attends it that the power of the good is always greater than all and any evil.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Ad Jesum per Mariam – through Mary to Jesus.  Mary does not want us to come to her, the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther observes, but through her to Jesus. It is, ironically, it might seem, one of the great mottoes of the Jesuit order founded several decades after Luther’s outstanding commentary on the Magnificat and after the cataclysmic shift in religious sensibilities that changed the map of Europe to this day and which is part and parcel of the emergence of early modernity.

There is something quite marvelous about The Feast of the Annunciation. Perhaps one of the most common and familiar scenes depicted in Art and Sculpture, in Stained Glass and Tapestry, the Feast of the Annunciation always coincides with the seasons of Lent and Easter, sometimes even falling on Good Friday or Easter itself. By virtue of the coincidence of the 25th of March with the weeks before and after the Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox which marks Easter, her feast day is sometimes transferred to the first Tuesday after The Octave of Easter; in short, after Holy Week and Easter Week. What does this mean and what is its significance doctrinally and devotionally? Simply this, Mary points us to Jesus and to our life in Christ even as her Annunciation marks the beginning in time of God’s being with us in the intimacy of his humanity which he derives from her. It signals the humility of our true humanity in the one who points us to Jesus even as it is through her that Jesus is with us.

Christ is, as Irenaeus put it is “that pure one opening that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.” That pure womb is Mary; her purity is about her pure openness to God.

Mary’s word to us in the season of the Resurrection is her word to us at all seasons. “Be it unto me according to thy word.” We attend to this text in the tones of resurrection joy. His word living in us even as it lived for us through her. Our yes to his Resurrection through her yes to the Annunciation.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of The Feast of the Annunciation (transf.)

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“The same day at evening, being the first day of the week,
when the doors were shut …”

It is, I think, an arresting image. In a few simple words, John sets the scene. “The same day at evening, being the first day of the week.” What day is that? The day of the Resurrection, Easter day. And yet we read this passage on the Octave Day of Easter, today, this morning actually, but how appropriate! Why? Because it is as if we are there, in that moment, still in the meaning of that day, the day of Resurrection. The idea of the octave, a concept belonging to the musical scale, applies to our lives theologically and spiritually, from the first note to the eighth note, the same note. Just so Easter Day and the Octave Day are, in a way, the same day. It is as if time is somehow suspended or better, as if we are in the eternal moment of Christ’s Resurrection. In a way, that is the meaning of every Sunday in the Christian understanding. Every Sunday is a celebration of the Resurrection.

But the real wonder of this image, at least for me, is in the idea of closed doors. The disciples were behind closed doors on that same day at evening and they were there in the same Upper Room “in the same night that he was betrayed” where Christ had identified himself with the bread and wine of the ancient Passover feast, the festival of Israel’s deliverance by God from Egyptian slavery. And they are there in fear, “for fear of the Jews,” John tells us in a phrase which might trouble us and certainly has had an ugly history in terms of how it has been used, namely, in blaming the Jews simply for Christ’s crucifixion and death. The whole story and, certainly the theological story for Christians, is that we are all implicated in the sequence of betrayals that contribute to the events of Good Friday. They are afraid for themselves because of what happened to Jesus. An inescapable feature of those events is Israel’s betrayal of God and the law but it is part of the larger story of humanity’s betrayal of the truth of God and our betrayal of ourselves.

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The ten sermons delivered by Fr. David Curry from Passion Sunday through Easter have been compiled into a single booklet entitled Judas’ Kiss: Passion and Resurrection at Christ Church 2013. Click here to download the pdf document.

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Christ is Risen. Alleluia, Alleluia!

The Church’s ancient proclamation captures the joy and the excitement of this day. But make no mistake, the Resurrection is not some sort of clap-happy event, a happy ending to an otherwise sad and bitter tale. No. The joy and the excitement of Easter are born out of the Passion and Death of Christ. No Passion, no Resurrection. No Good Friday, no Easter day. The intensity of the Passion gives rise to the joyfulness of the Resurrection.

The Resurrection is a bodily event. But it gives rise to a new understanding of everything. There is, we might say, a resurrection of the understanding. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is, as I am fond of saying, radical new life. Radical is the right word, actually. It refers to the root of things, the radix. The Resurrection goes to the root of all life itself. That root is the reciprocal love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

The God who creates ex nihilo – out of nothing – recreates out of the greater nothingness of sin and death. The Cross has made visible that greater nothingness. The full force of sin and evil are revealed in the crucified Christ. The greater nothingness is the vanity of our wills as against everything that is good – against one another in the human community, against the good order of creation, and against God himself. But the Cross has also made visible the far greater love of God both for us and in itself.

If the message of Good Friday is that God is dead, then the message of Easter is that death is conquered, death is dead. “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more;/death hath no more dominion over him.” Christ is risen from the dead never to die again. The meaning of death itself is changed. The tomb is not only empty; it has become the womb of new life. The unending life of the Resurrection is accomplished in and through the darkness of death. Christ is Risen!

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“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”

The kiss of Judas is the archetype of all betrayal. Holy Week in all of its intensity and drama has set before us the pageant of all our betrayals. What we contemplate is the Judas within each of us. How is this possible? Because of the love of God which is greater than our betrayals, because Truth has more power than all sin and evil. Betrayals, after all, are themselves an acknowledgment of a truth which we have denied. Even more, as we see in the pageant of the Passion, that truth is so much before us even in denial that we seek to destroy it. We kill God.

God is dead. That is the disturbing wonder of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. And yet the death of God in Christ – for the death of God only has meaning through the Incarnation – accomplishes a strange marvel. There is the quiet peace of this holy day. It is the peace of Paradise. All the rage and spite, all the bitter agony and ugly violence of Good Friday is past and gone. We have, literally, done all that we could to annihilate God from the horizon of our minds. We have, literally, in the crucifixion of Christ done all that we could to deny the dignity of our humanity. It is not just  God who is dead in Christ; we are dead in ourselves and dead to God.

All our wild sin and evil has had its say. It all amounts to what it is. It is nothing. It is all a denial of what truly is, a denial of God and creation, a denial of all that is true and good about ourselves as well. “Nothing is but what is not,” indeed, to adapt Shakespeare’s phrase from Macbeth. And yet, there is the peace of Holy Saturday, the sense of paradise. Why? Precisely because the fury and folly of sin and evil has done its worst; there is, literally, nothing more that we can do by way of sin and destruction.

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“Christ our Lord became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross”

“While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Such is the mystery of this day, the double mystery of our disobedience and Christ’s obedience, his obedience unto death, a death that is somehow a blessing for us. How shall we think about Good Friday? The Scriptures unveil the great spectacles of obedience and disobedience that help us to ponder the deep mystery of human redemption in the passion and death of Christ. We ponder the mystery of Christ crucified.

The words of the Crucified challenge and confront us in our complacency and our cynicism and in our folly and our despair. These words which illumine so much of our understanding of the Scriptures and human life are also illumined by the whole pageant of God’s Word written.

The stories of Isaac and Absalom are the stories of obedience and disobedience that provide an interpretative framework for our reflection together on the mystery of human redemption.

The story of the Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac belongs historically and traditionally to the sorrowful and serious theological considerations of Good Friday. A most disturbing story, think how troubled Søren Kierkegaard was by this story, for example, it nonetheless helps us to think about Christ’s crucifixion. In Genesis, God puts Abraham to the test, to an almost unbelievable and utterly disturbing test, bidding him sacrifice his only son, the son whom he loves, the son of God’s promise to him and Sarah, the son through whom “all your descendants shall be named” and “through whom all nations of the earth shall be blessed.”

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