Category: Sermons

“Behold, something greater than Jonah is here”

The Penitential Service for Use on Ash Wednesday and at Other Times, found in the Canadian BCP (p. 611ff.) calls us “in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word.” Locating the disciplines of Lent within the tradition of the Church and in its relation to Scripture, it provides a clear and concise explanation for the meaning of Lent. It is a challenge, to be sure.

Lent, in a way, concentrates the Christian journey of Faith into the span of forty days, forty days of a certain kind of focus and rigour, a focus and rigour that by definition belongs to the essence of the Christian Faith. We participate in nothing less than the Passion of Christ. And that is nothing less than the pageant of human redemption.

One of the prayers of the Penitential Service recalls The Book of Jonah, the story of the most reluctant prophet, no, let’s be clearer, the most recalcitrant prophet of all times! God says, ‘go to Nineveh,’ and Jonah jumps on a boat heading to Tarshish, trying to get as far away from God as possible and as far away from Nineveh, as well. Utter folly of course, as The Book of Jonah is at pains to teach us. What kind of God would God be, after all, if you could run and hide from him? Adam and Eve already tried that trick in the Garden of Eden, having hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God. “Where art thou?” God asked, knowing full well where they were but highlighting their sin and mistake. Nothing can be hidden from the sight of God. Our attempt to do so only proves our sin. Such is our predicament.

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“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

Quinquagesima Sunday signals the near approach of Lent. It is the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and in so many ways, it teaches us about the very meaning of Lent. It is a journey, a going up to Jerusalem, as Jesus puts it in Luke’s Gospel. It is a journey in love and by love as Paul’s wonderful and profound hymn of love in 1^st Corinthians puts it.

Jerusalem. Love. These are two of the key ingredients to the understanding of Lent. For what is it all about? Simply this. Lent captures in the span of forty days the entire meaning of Christian faith and love. What!? Surely that seems a bit much to claim. But no. Lent, a word derived from Old English that refers to the lengthening of the days that bring us to the joys of nature’s spring, recalls us to the journey of our souls into that greater light and life that is the Resurrection. But only through the disciplines of penitential adoration.

That is the key theme that recognizes the human problem of sin which separates us, individually and collectively, from all that belongs to the true good and happiness of our humanity. In the Christian understanding, that can only be found by our being in Christ and Christ being in us. Jerusalem is the ultimate symbol of the communion of saints and the community of blessedness which is the deep truth of all our desiring.

What do we want? In all of the confusions of our world and day, in all of the confusions of our churches and communities, in all of the confusions of our hearts and minds, we desire happiness and goodness, light and life, and, if truth be known, we desire to attain to such things everlastingly. Mistaken though we may be (and are) about the desires of our hearts and minds, the truth of what we desire is captured in the image of Jerusalem and in the deep meaning of charity or love. We seek nothing less than the love of God which is the truth of all that exists as its originating principle and as its end.

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“We must not put the Lord to the test, as some of them did
and were destroyed by serpents.”

Serpents in the wilderness; the serpent in the garden. Dust and death. And yet something redemptive and healing. The story of the Fall is a story told in the form of myth let conveying great truth. O felix culpa! O blessed fault! as the theological tradition puts it. And as for snakes and serpents, they, too, serve an arresting and symbolic purpose. I am always amazed at the cultural cross-overs and coincidences of images. The staff of Ascelpius is the symbol of the medical profession to this day. It is a serpent entwined about a rough wooden branch. The serpent as a sign of healing.

And in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, a serpent figures there, too. Gilgamesh, having learned that there is no permanence from Utnapishtim, returns to Uruk, wiser to be sure. He has been allowed to return however with the plant of rejuvenation called “the old men are young again,” an ancient form of Viagra, I suppose. On the way homeward, he stops at a refreshing spring to go for a swim, leaving the plant on the bank where its odour attracts a snake who immediately eats it. A just-so story, told to explain the phenomena of snakes shedding their skin and growing a new one, it also illustrates the fatalism of that ancient culture. Gilgamesh loses a gift for his city simply through a kind of accident and not through any fault of his own.

How much more different is the biblical account of the serpent in The Book of Genesis! The serpent is said to be “more subtle than any other wild creature.” And what does that serpent do? It asks questions. Such is a feature of human rationality. The serpent is a symbol of an aspect of our humanity, for good and for ill. What kind of questions?

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“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.”

“As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time, flowers in spring, corn in summer and apples in autumn, so the fruit for winter is talk.” Good ground and a good heart and, as a result, good fruit brought forth with patience. How wonderful in what is, literally, the bleak mid-winter, to be reminded of spring time and flowers, of the fruits of summer and fall! How wonderful to be reminded that we are the ground in which God’s Word has been sown. What kind of ground will we be?

The quote is from Basil the Great, one of the outstanding fourth century theologians, one of the Greek Cappadocian Fathers who has shaped so much of the intellectual and spiritual history of Christian thought and life, both east and west. I love the image. The idea that talk is the fruit of winter. Something is meant to be alive and growing in us, in the soil of our hearts, even in the frozen wastes of a Canadian winter!

But what kind of talk, we may ask? After all this is a world of talking heads and talk, as is so often said, is cheap. Basil’s image, so appropriate on this Sexagesima Sunday, relates to two things in today’s Gospel: the seed which is the Word of God and the ground which is our heart. There can be no fruit on a winter’s evening that is not borne out of an honest and good heart, as Luke so powerfully suggests.

The talk which is the fruit of winter, in Basil’s sense, must be our talk of God, the talk which allows God’s Word to have its sovereign sway within our lives, the talk which lets God’s Word shape our hearts and minds but only because that Word has been planted and sown within us.

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“I saw a light above the brightness of the sun”

The story of Paul’s conversion is told to us three times, twice by Paul himself. All three accounts are given by the hand of another, namely, St. Luke, in his Acts of the Apostles. Three accounts might seem a bit much!

But only because Paul, it seems, is too much. It is the nature of strong personalities that they repel as much as they attract. They challenge our understanding and for some that is just too much. For many, whether within or without the Church, Paul is derided and despised, mocked and scorned. A figure larger than life, he is, at the very least, controversial; his epistles, challenging. There is a real struggle when it comes to the praise of Paul. And yet struggle lies at the heart of all conversion.

Without struggle there can be no conversion. The conversion of St. Paul is, above all else, a struggle. It is, in short, the breakthrough of the understanding that happens through the collision of opposing points of view.

The struggle concerns the integrity of the images of salvation in the Scriptures. How to reconcile the glory of the Messiah with the sufferings of the crucified Christ? The entire personality of Paul is taken up with this question. Something new has come into the world which challenges the older understanding of Israel. That something new is the Way of Christ.

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“Whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive”

“Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it,” we heard Mary say last Sunday in the story of the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee, her imperative providing us with the form of her ‘yes’ to God in our lives. Now today, it seems we have another directive, this time from Jesus, in the parable of the labourers in the vineyard. What does it teach us? Simply this, God is the master and lord – the householder of all creation. There is the freedom of the Creator in the ordering of his creation. Everything is subject to his will and purpose, to the divine justice, we might say. It is important to be reminded of this. And yet, here is a story which Jesus tells. Therefore, it is equally a story of redemption which picks up and carries forward the story of Creation through the story of the Fall, a story of the restoration of the divine justice for all, of the hope of heaven, we might say.

Ultimately, then, it is a story about the grace of God towards us but as within the higher justice of his purposes for his human creation in spite of sin and folly, in spite of indolence and indifference, in spite of a sense of entitlement and expectation. God desires our salvation in the freedom of his will and that is always something which exceeds the limits of human reason; it is always more though not less than what we think we know. The parable highlights the primacy and the rightness of God’s grace, the justitia dei. What God gives freely, he gives according to the perfect rightness of his will.

This collides with our sense of justice. The point of the collision is to open to view the freedom, the grace and the higher justice of God. There is the essential rightness of what he does according to the purposes for which he made us and that is all grace. It arises entirely out of the sovereign freedom of God.

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“Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.”

I love Epiphany, both the doctrine and the season, which are, of course, inseparable. Epiphany teaches us something which has been largely lost in contemporary culture and the contemporary Church, namely, the realization that religion is philosophy; not cult, not politics, not social activism. As important as those things are, they are secondary to the teaching of Epiphany. Religion is philosophy, the love of wisdom that guides and directs every other aspect of our being.

From Bethlehem to Jerusalem, from Kings to Kids – at least the Holy Kid – and now, wonderfully and profoundly, to signs and wonders, in short, miracles. Here is the first miracle, “this beginning of signs” as John styles it. The story of the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee is the beginning of signs, he says, the beginning of the outward deeds and actions of Christ. Behind such a beginning of signs lies the philosophical wonder of the Epiphany season, the wonder of God with us, the wonder of the divinity of Christ opened out to us through his humanity. It communicates and reveals the great and profound philosophical insight of the great religions of the world but especially in its Christian form. Our humanity is radically incomplete without God. We are, as Dante puts it, “soul[s] made apt for worshipping,” the very thing we see in the Magi-Kings. The first thing they do upon arriving at Bethlehem is to fall down and worship. Philosophy is worship, worship of the truth. In the Christian understanding, the truth is God Incarnate. He is in our midst making himself known to us in Word and Sacrament.

And here is the explicitly sacramental moment, signs which effect what they signify, to paraphrase the sophisticated and learned understanding of our own Anglican position on sacramental theology, so wonderfully articulated in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion and so sadly neglected and ignored by the politicization of the sacraments in our social and political confusions – all because of a kind of neglect of the forms of our theological identity as part and parcel of the Church Universal.

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“After three days, they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions.”

From Bethlehem to Jerusalem, from kings to kids. In a culture that is ruled by kids, perhaps we would do well to listen to the Kid, the Holy Kid. “Did you not know that I must be about my father’s business?” Jesus asks.

It is an extraordinary and compelling scene. And it is unique. It is the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament. And read on the First Sunday after Epiphany which falls this year on the Octave Day of the Epiphany, it reminds us of an essential feature of religion that our world and culture and church has largely forgotten, namely, that religion is philosophy.

I love the story of the Magi-Kings. I am always struck by what they do when they arrive at Bethlehem. They kneel and worship. Philosophy is worship. That is, I think, the deep meaning of the love of wisdom. And it has to do with the whole of our being. It has to do with our commitment to Truth. Which is why this Gospel story of Christ being found in the temple at the age of twelve is so compelling and significant. He is found with the doctors of the Law, both hearing them and asking them questions. “And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.” In the Christian understanding, Jesus is student and teacher, both fully human and fully divine. That is the Epiphany lesson. Here we see something which belongs to the larger dimension of redemption, the opening out of the true potentialities of our humanity. It has to do with our being with God in the things of God that are given to be thought about and understood. It is not that we possess the Truth but that the Truth possesses us.

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“They departed into their own country another way”

With Matthew’s account of the coming of the Anatolian “Μαγοι,” “wise men from the east,” the Christmas scene is now complete. Everything which belongs to sight and sound, to art and music, to prayer and praise is finally completed. The crèche, itself an image, is now a crowded place of images, images derived at once from holy scripture and holy imagination. The rich fullness belonging to the story of the birth of Jesus reaches its climax with the adoration of the magi. Christmas is now complete.

And over. Epiphany marks both the completion of the mystery of Christmas and inaugurates a new and different kind of consideration. The journey of the magi impels another journey, yet one that conveys a sense of disquiet and unease. “Being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way,” Matthew tells us. “No longer at ease,” it seems, as T. S. Eliot suggests, having been profoundly changed by the mystery which they beheld in Bethlehem. Somehow what they worshipped and adored stays with them and begins to have its way within them. Something has changed. There is a questioning wonder about what we have been given to see. The question is whether we have been changed by what we have seen.

T.S. Eliot’s puts it this way in his poem, Journey of the Magi:

Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”

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“But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”

It is, I have to admit, one of my favourite Scriptural passages. It captures in a phrase the essential meaning and activity of the Church. The Church is, if nothing else, Marian, precisely in this attitude of mind and activity of soul presented in this passage. It is all part of the wonder and mystery of Christmas and how that wonder and mystery is meant to stay with us. How so? By keeping all these things, and pondering them in our hearts. In a way, it is as simple as that. We are what we contemplate.

Christmas is more than a one-day, a three-day or even a nine-day wonder. There are the twelve days of Christmas that keep us at that holy scene, that bid us abide at Bethlehem and contemplate the great mystery of God with us. Today is The Octave Day of Christmas, the eighth day, which like the musical scale, takes us home again but with an heightened sensibility and higher understanding. This morning we are presented with Luke’s poignant account of the Shepherds’ Christmas: their coming “with haste” by acting upon the Angelic message; their “[finding] Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger”; their “see[ing] this thing which has come to pass”, literally, “this saying that has happened,” and, perhaps, above all else, their “ma[king] known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child”. Luke as always is wonderfully restrained and yet precise.

The effect of the Shepherds “ma[king] known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child” is especially noteworthy. It goes to the heart of the mystery of Christmas. (more…)

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