Category: Sermons

“In Ramah was there a voice heard … Rachel weeping for her children”

We have heard the weeping of Rachel, the weeping of a mother in Israel, a mother weeping for her children “because they are not.” It is a grim scene of unmitigated grief, a mother who “would not be comforted.” No scene is perhaps more disturbing and troubling than this story and yet it belongs to the mystery of Christmas, to the mystery of human redemption.

We have heard the weeping of Rachel in the griefs of the mothers and fathers of the little ones in Newtown, Connecticut. We have heard the weeping of Rachel, too, in the grief-stricken cries of mothers who have lost sons and daughters in the mindless acts of terrorism and violence that is all too much a feature of our current world. How to make sense of the senselessness of cruel violence?

In a way, it is through this story which only Matthew tells. It is the story of Herod seeking to annihilate a potential rival to his throne by enacting a policy of infanticide, unwittingly following the same programme of political expediency as Pharoah, a thousand years before him, had followed as well. It is expedient to get rid of what seems to threaten you or even worse, perhaps, what might seem inconvenient and a bother to your lifestyle. None of us are completely removed from underlying impulses in this story. It names our violence and its root causes and, no, the root causes here are not social and economic. The causes of such mindless acts of destructive violence are found in the disorders of the human heart.

Such things may indeed contribute to a culture. The mindless acts of violence that we contemplate in our modern dystopian world belong, I argue, to the culture of narcissism and nihilism. They go together. Going out in a blaze of attention-seeking glory while taking as many as you can with you. ‘Look at me, look at me, poor me’, for whatever reason. And if you haven’t looked at me, well, I will find a way to get your attention. All is vanity, an empty nothingness.

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“These things write we unto you, that your joy may be full”

Endings and beginnings. They focus on things heard and seen, things handled and touched, things written and passed on. They open us out to what is always more than what we can completely and fully grasp. They open us out to the mystery of God with us, the mystery of the Incarnation

It is, to my mind, one of the most wonderful of the little feasts of Christmas week that reveal so much of the wonder of Christmas. The feast of St. John the Evangelist falls on the 27^th of December and is part of the celebration of Christmas. It reminds us of the important role that John the Evangelist plays in the Christian understanding of Jesus Christ. And so we read from the beginning of his First Epistle and we read from the end of his Gospel. What is written, he tells us in the Epistle is for our joy, indeed that “[our] joy may be full.” What is written, he tells us in the Gospel, is about the things which Jesus did and yet, as he says, “the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”

&In and through both readings, there is a remarkable kind of intensity and insistence on two things: the message and the messenger. The latter is John himself. He is testifying to the integrity of what he has heard and seen. “This is the disciple which beareth witness of these things, and wrote these things.” We aren’t told a lot about him because the greater emphasis is on the things heard and seen and witnessed to in his writing. What is that? It is the idea of the Incarnation.

It is not too much to say that it is through the eyes of John that we understand the great mysteries of the Christian Faith. His Gospel is often referred to as the Fourth Gospel but we would be mistaken in thinking that it means his is the last of the Gospels, the latest to be written, as it were. In modern times that has been assumed and it may be true but is largely irrelevant to the ultimate coming together of the Gospels and Epistles to form the New Testament. The idea of historical priority is a very late and modern preoccupation among scholars and is fraught with a number of questionable hypotheses. Earliest does not mean simplest, for instance, as if there is a necessary and logical progression from the simple to the complex. And certainly for many, many centuries of the Christian Church, John’s Gospel has exercised a kind of priority of reflection for no other reason than the quality of the ideas and their expression which his Gospel affords.

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“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord.”

Birth and death. Every Mass recalls the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ; somehow that sorrowing memory is also our greatest joy. It is our celebration at all occasions. No less so than at Christmas when we celebrate Christ’s Birth. It may seem strange but it is the great wisdom of the Christian Faith. As T.S. Eliot in his play, Murder in the Cathedral, has Archbishop Thomas a Becket proclaim in his Christmas homily in 1170 at Canterbury, “it is only in these our Christian mysteries that we can rejoice and mourn at once for the same reason.” In that homily, the Archbishop goes on to speak of the martyrs and of the wonderful yet curious feature of the Christian mysteries of our Liturgy that has the celebration of St. Stephen on the day following Christmas.

A martyr is a witness, a witness to something beyond and more than himself or herself. A martyr is “the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God … desiring nothing for himself” wanting only what God wills to be. That is the witness to which we are all called, in one way or another. We betray the witness when we want God to please us, amuse us, dance and sing for us, give us what we think we need utterly oblivious to the dance and song of God in creation and human lives and in the wondrous birth of Christ, the Incarnate Word.

St. Stephen is the proto-martyr, the first Christian martyr and the one who shows us the shape and meaning of martyrdom, of what witness truly means. What? Being stoned to death? No. Not that exactly but by suffering for and in the name of the One who suffered and died for us. With the spirit of Christ shaping our very being in the hour of our death. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” Stephen cries and, then on his knees, he “cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” His words echo the words of Christ on the Cross, the words of forgiveness and commendation. “Father, forgive them for they – we – know not what they – we – do.” “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit.”

Sorrow and joy in one moment. Stephen shows us what it means to worship and adore the child Christ. It means to let his life become our life and to shape our words and deeds. “In this was manifested the love of God towards us, that God sent his only-begotten son into the world that we might live through him,” as John puts it in his 1^st Epistle. Stephen illustrates the deep meaning of Christ’s birth. He has come for our salvation. He has come to redeem our humanity, to recall us to who we are in the sight of God who is our life. In the Gospel for today, Jesus makes it abundantly clear that persecution and suffering are an inescapable part of the Christian witness especially in a blind and dark and mean world. Christian witness is never about comfort.

We make our witness in what we do and nowhere more profoundly so than in our liturgy. It is your witness, your martyrdom, to be here where the Word is proclaimed and the mysteries celebrated. And here, too, is your blessedness, come what may in the times of death and dying.

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord.”

Fr. David Curry
St. Stephen’s Day,
December 26^th, 2012

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“There was no room for them in the inn.”

Death and taxes. Homeless in Bethlehem. “He came unto his own and his own received him not,” we heard last night. This morning we hear that “there was no room for them in the inn.” God’s Son is homeless in Bethlehem, in the city of David, where Joseph has come “to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.” Only God could make something of great joy out of the endless trials and sad realities of human life. “And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger.”

It is a compelling and poignant image and one which has captured the imagination of artists and poets. A manger. There is no mention of a stable or of anything else at the manger other than Mary and Joseph, the child wrapped in swaddling bands, the shepherds and, then, later, the Kings. Angels? Well, perhaps. But the so-called infancy narratives of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are quite sparse with their information. Yet, the fundamental idea and reality is more than enough and quite capable of embracing the works of holy imagination. That humble scene so briefly described in the Gospels becomes a veritable menagerie in the traditions of art and poetry, music and song.

We could blame the carols, themselves the wondrous vessels of devotion that convey so much of the doctrine and the idea of Christ’s Incarnation. Hymns and carols shape our understanding of holy things far more than perhaps we realize and for the most part, that is a good thing, though it should make us leery and more than a little suspect of the agendas of political correctness that issue in proscriptive changes to terms and images that result in a loss of theological understanding and meaning.

“Cradled in a stall was he/with sleepy cows and asses” the 15^th century carol Puer Nobis Nascitur tells us, a carol which confronts us, too, with one of the most disturbing stories of the Nativity, the Flight into Egypt to escape Herod’s policy of infanticide, seeking to remove a potential rival to his kingship, “all the little boys he killed/At Bethlem in his fury”. Death. There is blood in Bethlehem. The massacre of the little ones.

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“When all things were in quiet silence
and the night was in the midst of her swift course,
then thy almighty Word leapt down from heaven, from thy royal throne”

It is a wonderful image. It speaks to this night of images and to this season of the fullness of images. “We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth,” we hear in the great Christmas Gospel. Such is the glory of the Incarnate Word, the Word who is the only-begotten Son of the Father, the Word who is “the true light, which lighteth every one that cometh into the world.” Word, Light and Son; these are the great images of Christmas.

Yet, it might seem so strange to hear such words on Christmas night. They stand in such stark contrast to all of the busyness, bustle and bother of Christmas. They signal something so completely different from all the busy images of this season in our contemporary culture; the images of glittering candy canes, jolly fat Santas riding scooters, lighted reindeers, and inflated snowmen, abominable or not, that adorn the lawns and houses along with a few images, too, at least a few, of the holy scene of Bethlehem. How does this emphasis upon the Word of God compete with all these things? By giving them depth and meaning without which they are just so much tinsel and wrap, empty and devoid of significance. Without them we “know only,” as T.S. Eliot puts it, “a heap of broken images.” These words are the antidote to the real poverty of our age, our spiritual poverty. They offer the redemption of images.

In and through all the trappings of the season there is something more, something profound and holy. It is captured in the great readings of Christmas night from The Letter to the Hebrews and from The Gospel according to St. John. Thundering words, we might say, that speak to us about God’s “almighty Word leap[ing] down from heaven, from thy royal throne.”

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“Who art thou?”

In a way, Advent is the season of questions. And the questions of Advent reach a kind of crescendo on the Fourth Sunday in Advent in a barrage of questions which, paradoxically, are all about John the Baptist. But, of course, everything about John the Baptist is really about the One who comes.

Our Gospel story has a wonderful intensity to it that is indicative of the strong desire to know in the face of the confusions of the world. Such is the significance, we might say, of “the witness of John,” especially in our rather skeptical and cynical age which despairs of thought and where questions are merely rhetorical ways of dismissing any serious encounter with what might just challenge us and change us. Skepticism about ideas, we might say, is the leading idea of our times. Such is a form of darkness, a kind of dogmatic despair.

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“My Lord, and my God”

The Apostolic Saints are part of the Advent and none more so than Thomas, “called Didymus,” whom we more commonly call ‘Doubting Thomas.’ In the darkest time of nature’s year, there is another form of darkness that deepens nature’s darkness into something even more strange and fearful. The darkness of doubt leads to despair, the death of souls and communities, of cultures and churches.

Thomas’ feast day falls always within the season of Advent.  He is the advent saint par excellence not just because his day of commemoration falls always within Advent and so close to the winter solstice and to Christ’s holy birth, the birth of God’s Son into our world of darkness, but because his doubting leads not to the darkness of despair and death but to the light of faith and hope. The doubting of Thomas provides for “the greater confirmation of our faith,” as another Thomas, Thomas Aquinas, reminds us.

The propers for his feast-day illumine the radical nature of Christ’s Incarnation. Ephesians reminds us of the fellowship of faith, that we are “fellow-citizens with the saints,” that we are “of the household of God,” “an holy temple in the Lord,” “an habitation of God through the Spirit,” and that Jesus Christ himself is “the chief corner-stone,” the structural and animating principle upon which all these images of indwelling depend.

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“Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?”

Among the many great and imaginative features of Dante’s poetic and theological Summa, The Divine Comedy, there is the amazing poetic invention of the Vestibule of Hell, a place deliberately designed by God, Dante suggests, for those souls unworthy of either Heaven or Hell! They are “a dismal company of wretched spirits” barely worthy of mention, who willed and then unwilled their will, unable to commit to anything. They follow for eternity the whirling banners of the ages, chasing first this and then that, utterly distracted and endlessly fickle. Vergil, the pilgrim Dante’s guide, explains that “they’re mingled with the caitiff angel-crew/Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him/were faithful, but to self alone were true.” Heaven has cast them forth and Hell rejects them too!

“But to self alone were true.” That is a haunting indictment of much of our contemporary world where being true to yourself has often been touted as the highest virtue, taking literally Polonius’ tendentious advice in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What we have forgotten is what Dante knew. You cannot be true to yourself without being true to God and to the good order of his creation. Self-knowledge requires knowledge of others and of an objective order without which no knowledge is possible.

What happens to a culture when there is no longer any confidence in knowing or willing anything objective or true? Where there is nothing to live for, then, there are the conditions of mindless violence and evil such as what has happened in Newtown, Connecticut; the sad, mindless and wicked massacre of the little ones. No place is safe from such senselessness. We have seen in our own day too much of the massacre of the little ones. It is itself one of the hard themes of Christmas, the massacre of the Holy Innocents, which, while given a political reason, namely Herod’s fear of a rival to his throne, is also viewed as a kind of senseless act: “all the little boys he killed/At Beth’lem in his fury;” a senseless and disturbing act that nonetheless is gathered into the redemptive purpose of Christ’s holy birth. “Jesus Christ was born for this!” For only God alone can make sense of the mindless wickedness of human evil. As Bruce Cockburn puts it in “Festival of Friends”:

Some of us live and some of us die
Someday God’s going to tell us why
Open your heart and grow with what life sends
That’s your ticket to the festival of friends.

Like an imitation of a good thing past
These days of darkness surely will not last
Jesus was here and he’s coming again
To lead us to his festival of friends.

We want to know the reasons for the things which belong to human sin and wickedness, to all the forms of our radical unreason. But all too often we want things on our terms. The deeper challenge is to reclaim the vision of truth which constitutes the good of intellect and to will it in our lives.

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“Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?”

Among the many great and imaginative features of Dante’s poetic and theological Summa, The Divine Comedy, there is the amazing poetic invention of the Vestibule of Hell, a place deliberately designed by God, Dante suggests, for those souls unworthy of either Heaven or Hell! They are “a dismal company of wretched spirits” barely worthy of mention, who willed and then unwilled their will, unable to commit to anything. They follow for eternity the whirling banners of the ages, chasing first this and then that, utterly distracted and endlessly fickle. Vergil, the pilgrim Dante’s guide, explains that “they’re mingled with the caitiff angel-crew/Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him/were faithful, but to self alone were true.” Heaven has cast them forth and Hell rejects them too!

“But to self alone were true.” That is a haunting indictment of much of our contemporary world where being true to yourself has often been touted as the highest virtue, taking literally Polonius’ tendentious advice in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What we have forgotten is what Dante knew. You cannot be true to yourself without being true to God and to the good order of his creation. Self-knowledge requires knowledge of others and of an objective order without which no knowledge is possible.

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“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour,
who is Christ the Lord”

All the fuss and rush and busyness of this time of year, it seems to me, cannot hide the real wonder and mystery of Christmas. Somehow, it breaks through even in a world that is torn and divided, religiously and politically, socially and economically. It is easy, of course, to be cynical and despairing about Christmas, to see it as overly commercialized and caramelized with sentimentality and hype. No doubt, it is. And no doubt, too, some of us can’t wait until all the fuss and bother is over and done with for another year. Throw out the tinsel with the tree!

And yet, there are “the hopes and fears of all the years” that are found even in the busyness of the season. There are the hopes and desires of our humanity for peace and joy, the hopes and aspirations for truth and righteousness in a world that seems, at times, so false and frightening, so dark and disturbing. There is much, no doubt, that distresses and perplexes. And yet, the strong notes of something more make their presence felt in story and song, if we would but sit and listen. There are the things that abide even in the passing of the season. They are about the things of God with us. Emmanuel means God with us.

“For unto you is born this day,” St Luke proclaims with a kind of excitement and urgency, “a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.” It is a remarkable statement. It opens us out to hope and joy, to something more beyond the depressing realities of our daily lives.

It is the burden of the Christian witness to proclaim Messiah’s birth, to celebrate “the Word made flesh”. It is the message of the season of Christmas, to be sure, but one which connects with those universal “hopes and fears” in human hearts and gives them voice and meaning, allows them to take flesh, as it were, and live in us. Peace and joy, truth and righteousness are not empty words and meaningless concepts. No. They are the ideals that dignify and adorn our humanity, ideals that challenge and convict our hearts. The things that abide are the things that won’t go away. Perhaps we need the crazy business of the Christmas season to remind us, yet again, of the things which really matter, the things which abide even in the face of our distracted and weary busyness.

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