Category: Sermons

“That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope”

Scripture speaks to Scripture, opening out to us the Word that carries hope in its breath. The Holy Scriptures are “written for our learning,” St. Paul exclaims, and Archbishop Cranmer prays the same in the wonderful Collect that adorns this day and this week, a Collect that embodies a whole approach to the Scriptures. It encapsulates a way of understanding the Scriptures. They are writings that teach us “that we through patience and comfort of [them] might have hope.”

Hope is one of the great lessons of the Scriptures. Why? Because hope is precisely something which is not dependent upon us. The hope to which the Scriptures awaken us is real hope, the hope that has realized the utter limitations of human endeavour, the hope that has faced the empty abyss of ourselves and the vanity of our actions, the hope that has considered the reality of sin and death. Of suffering and hardship. Looking into the things of judgment and condemnation, hope also looks up to God and to the coming of God into our midst.

The coming is hope itself. We look for what we do not see. We wait for it. In the coming of Christ we look for what we do not see in ourselves but see in him, namely, the redemption of our wounded and weary humanity, of our dark and suffering world. But it takes the Word proclaimed and celebrated to awaken us and to sustain us in the hope of the Gospel and in the hope that we might begin to see this even in our selves.

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“The night is far spent, the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off
the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light”

There is something quite wonderful about Advent. It signals the motions of God’s Word towards us in ways that are quite stirring and comforting, and, at the same time, quite challenging and really rather frightening. The image of the far spent night stops us in our tracks and bids us reflect. In the darkness of nature’s year we are bidden to consider the darknesses that are within and not just without.

The themes of light and life all dance and swirl around the idea of the divine Word, the Word of God which convicts and convinces us, the Word which confronts and comforts in equal measure. The season and doctrine of Advent, for it is more than a season, it is equally and profoundly a teaching, are almost eclipsed in the shallow sentimentalities of all of the hub-bub about Christmas. The meaning of Advent gets lost and with it the meaning of Christmas, too. For none of the festivities of Christmas make any sense at all apart from the doctrine of Advent. And nowhere, perhaps, are the central themes of Advent more compellingly before us than on The First Sunday in Advent.

“Give us grace,” the Collect implores Almighty God, “that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life.” Christianity makes no sense and Christmas becomes a lot of nonsense without this awareness, the awareness of the darkness and of “the light which shineth in darkness and the darkness overcame it not.” What kind of darkness? The darkness of ‘the far spent night’ is the darkness of sin and folly, the darkness of sadness and despair, the darkness which is entirely and primarily within each of us, the darkness to which we so easily succumb. We forget how profound this naming of the darkness within us really is. We forget that to be able to name the darkness is because of the light of the divine Word. “Thy word is a light and a lantern,” as the psalmist says.

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“My words shall not pass away”

What strong and disturbing words do we read and hear in Luke’s apocalyptic warnings. “There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring” (Luke 21. 25-33). Nothing really new about that, of course, “same old, same old,” we might even say, other than being far more eloquent than, perhaps, either the news or the weather!

And yet, it must surely give us pause, “men’s hearts failing them for fear,”  anxious and worried on account of “looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.” There is a profoundly cosmic quality to these Scriptural warning notes which signal the Advent theme of judgment at once coming to us and ever present.

But exactly how, to use Cranmer’s words in his marvellous collect for Advent II, do such disturbing warnings about judgment provide us with “patience and comfort of thy holy Word”, let alone “hope”? And yet that is precisely Jesus’ claim here. “My words shall not pass away.”

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all religions of the Word. They are all logo-centric, we might say. Even though the meaning of Logos or Word is different for each, they are all nonetheless quite explicit about the primacy of the Word of God as revealed to our humanity. They are all revealed religions as distinct from the various nature religions and the religions of the political that surround them and out of which they emerge in one way or another. And they are all religions which place a high value on that Word of God as mediated to us through written texts, through Scripture, whether the Scriptures are the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, comprising the Torah or Law, the Prophets and the Writings for Jews, or the Arabic Qu’ran for Muslims, the recitation of Allah’s will by the Angel Gabriel (Jibril) to Mohammed, or the Scriptures for Christians which embrace the Old Testament (largely written in Hebrew) and the New Testament written in Greek. Scripture is simply that which is written.

“Whatsoever things were written aforetime,” St. Paul states, “were written for our learning.” (more…)

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“We have found the Messiah (which is being interpreted, the Christ)”

These are the words of Andrew as recorded in John’s Gospel in the story read, at least in Canada since 1959, on The Sunday Next Before Advent. Andrew is the one of the two which heard John speak about Jesus and so followed Jesus. But even more than that Andrew brings others to the discipleship of Christ. “He brought him to Jesus.”

Can anything greater or better be said of any of us than that? It turns of course on the insight and knowledge of who Christ is. John in his Gospel feels obliged to explain the idea of the finding of the Messiah. The term, he senses, needs to be interpreted or explained. That tells us this means he is speaking beyond the context of the Jewish community. For the Jews, a term like Messiah is at once well-known and greatly anticipated, certainly a term needing no interpretation. John connects the idea of a promised Messiah with the concept of the Anointed One, the Christ.

From the perspective of John’s Gospel, Andrew initiates a chain-reaction; the beginning of the missionary life of the Church which is about nothing less than bringing souls to Jesus. In the life of the Church, the Feast of St. Andrew is always either just before or immediately after The First Sunday in Advent. His celebration or observance has just that double sense of a beginning and an end, of a making known and a following of Jesus Christ. In other words, it captures the twofold aspect of Christian mission and discipleship. Souls are brought to Christ so as to follow Christ. “Follow me,” Jesus says to the two brothers, Simon Peter and Andrew, in Matthew’s Gospel reading tonight, “And I will make you fishers of men.”

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“Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost”

What?! Where did that come from? That wasn’t from today’s Gospel on this day distinguished with double prepositions, The Sunday Next Before Advent. And yet, for centuries upon centuries, the Gospel story of the miraculous feeding of the multitude in the wilderness (John 6.5-14) was read on this day. It was only in the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer that there was a change to reading instead from the first chapter of John’s Gospel (John 1.35-45) that you heard this morning.

“Come and see,” Jesus says to the disciples of John and to us in today’s Gospel. Ultimately, it is an invitation to the banquet of divine love opened out to us through the pageant of God’s Word. Advent signals the coming of God’s word to us. But throughout the year we have been struggling to live in and from that Word in our lives. The task of the Church is simply to proclaim the Word of God faithfully and sacramentally. Today marks a kind of gathering or summing up of the past year of grace even as it catapults us into a new year; it is a time of endings and beginnings. We might say with the poet, T.S. Eliot, that “in my beginning is my end” (The Four Quartets, ‘East Coker’).

Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, something which the architecture of Christ Church constantly reminds us. Look up! Lift up your heads! See the beams that support the building. They are shaped in the form of the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, the Alpha and the Omega. We are embraced in the pageant of God’s Word through the liturgy of the Church and in the very structure of the building. “The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,” as another poet, George Herbert, puts it and here, indeed, the wood of the Church resounds with the name of Christ. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of all our lives.

What does this mean for us? (more…)

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“You will be enriched in every way for great generosity”

The theme of rejoicing continues in our Evening Prayer readings. The first lesson is taken from The First Book of Maccabees, a book from the Apocrypha, too, complementing this morning’s reading from Ecclesiasticus, but belonging instead to the genre of historical writings. It is largely a war story about dark and difficult times for the Jewish people under the Hellenistic rulers that came after Alexander the Great’s conquest of the world. This passage is a song of rejoicing at a moment of peace and relative prosperity as the result of the leadership of Simon Maccabeus. There is peace and conversation, security and order, a climate of lawfulness and worship. “He made the sanctuary glorious, and added to the vessels of the sanctuary.”

There is a sense in which the contemplative worship of God is simply everything. For the time of the Maccabeans, what was at issue was Israel’s worship of God over and against “the abomination of desolation,” a statue of Antiochus Epiphanes, claiming to be Zeus set up in the holy Temple itself; in short, a sacrilege and idolatry. Idolatry always confuses the things of this world with the Lord and Creator of all things. It can take many forms.

Our second lesson from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians is really a powerful fund-raising letter! Perhaps the greatest appeal for funds in the Scriptures! Here Paul is exhorting the Corinthians to keep up their good reputation for being generous to others in need. He is exhorting them to give more, to be generous in providing relief for the Church in Jerusalem. A Christian appeal for funds, his argument is grounded in “the surpassing grace of God in [them],” a grace which belongs to the infinite and “inexpressible gift” who is Christ Jesus. That is and must be the basis of Christian charity whether in times of peace and prosperity or in times of scarcity and struggle. We live in the body of Christ. We live for the body of Christ with one another. We act out of the generous love of God which has been given to us in Christ Jesus. There is a joy which lies at the heart of the Christian understanding of things.

What is that joy? It is the joy of redemption that springs from the Covenant of the Most High and from the compassion of God in Jesus Christ. The divine generosity compels us to be generous, too. “Give and it shall be given unto you,” far more than what we can ever imagine, let alone deserve.

“You will be enriched in every way for great generosity”

Fr. David Curry
Choral Evensong
November 18^th, 2012
Trinity XXIV

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“Remember the covenant of the Most High”

The Christian year runs out in wisdom and repentance. Both are the occasions of joy, joy tinged no doubt with sorrow, and yet a joy that is greater because of the knowledge of sorrow and pain, of sin and folly.

Ecclesiasticus or The Book of the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach belongs to the Apocrypha, to a collection of books written between the time of the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, and the explicitly Christian Scriptures, the New Testament. In many of your bibles – at home and in the market place – you will not find these books. There is a story to that, to be sure. For some protestant Christians these books are anathema – forbidden and denied a voice in the life of the church. So why are you hearing from one of these books this morning?

Because of an ancient understanding that is part and parcel of a clearly defined Anglican approach to the Scriptures. Let me repeat that. A clearly defined Anglican understanding of the Scriptures. We read these books as having a special but distinct place within the overall approach to the understanding of the Christian Faith. Article Six of The Thirty-nine Articles – one of the major expressions of doctrinal authority for Anglicans (along with The Book of Common Prayer and The Ordinal, meaning the liturgy for the ordination of priests, deacons and bishops) – states clearly, unambiguously, and in a wonderfully Anglican way, minimally,  that is to say, saying only as much as needs to be said and not a jot more, that “following Ierome,” meaning Jerome, the great translator of the Hebrew and the Greek Bibles into Latin, thus shaping the culture of medieval and early modern Europe more than anyone else, these books are to be read “for example of life and instruction of manners: but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”

They are not independent sources of doctrine, that is to say, the basis for the essentials of the Faith, and, yet, they clearly relate to the living out of our Faith and to the deepening of our knowledge and understanding of what the Faith is which Christians profess and believe. Indeed, without the books of the Apocrypha we would be hard pressed to be able to give a coherent account of a number of things which Jesus says and be able to understand almost nothing of the context in which he says them. Here are books which contribute precisely to the context, explicitly named in Luke’s Gospel, of the parable of the lost sheep and the lost coin, themselves the prelude to the greatest parable of human redemption imaginable, the parable of the so-called prodigal son. The context is the animosity of the Pharisees and the Scribes who murmured against Jesus saying, “this man receiveth sinners and eateth with them.”

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“If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole”

It is a poignant scene, actually a scene within a scene. What she said “within herself” is heartfelt: “if I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.” Perhaps such thoughts may touch our hearts as well. But is that all? Just a little touch? It sounds suspiciously superstitious, as if there is some sort of mystical healing property to “the hem of his garment.”

Clearly Jesus wants something more for us than just a touch. He wants us to enter into his knowing love for us. Only then will we be whole. The woman both knows and doesn’t know this. To put it another way, she doesn’t know that she knows.

Jesus wants her to know. He wants us to know. God will not keep his back to us. He has turned himself to us. Such is the nature of Incarnate Love. “Jesus turned him about and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole.” These are wonderful words. They are saving words. They are said to her face-to-face. She wanted to be whole. But to be whole is to enter into his knowing love for us. It can only happen because Jesus turns to us. Advent, so soon upon us, is about God’s turning towards us and speaking to us face-to-face.

It will not do to steal a cure from him unawares, to be healed by him without him knowing it. Such is an incomplete awareness about the one from whom we seek wholeness. Jesus turns and looks at her, face-to-face. More than her secret, surreptitious touch of him, there is his turning to her, his looking upon her and his speaking to her. Such is salvation – her wholeness and ours. It is found in his looking upon her and her looking upon him, by our being knowingly in his knowing love for us.

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“Greater love hath no man than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends”

The significance of this time of remembrance should not be lost on any of us. That it gets harder and harder to remember each year because there are fewer and fewer veterans only heightens the necessity of our remembering.

We may name those who gave their lives, to be sure, but we can’t really say that we know them in any kind of personal way. Few can really remember anyone who died in the First World War. Our remembering has less to do with our personal knowledge and more to do with what they died for. Only so can we enter into the meaning of their sacrifice.

Remembrance Day is really a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. The intention of All Souls’ Day is to remember our common mortality, to commemorate all those who have died and to do so within the greater context of All Saints’, the celebration of our common vocation in the Communion of Saints. The intention of Remembrance Day is to remember all who died for the sake of our political freedoms and life. We remember them to God for without that there is no real remembrance.

To say that Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day is not to say that our civil remembrances are not religious. They are and profoundly so. Rather it is to remind us of the spiritual and, specifically, Christian principles which underlie the modern national states even in their contemporary confusion and disarray. To remember is to honour what they fought and died for in faraway places and in scenes of absolute horror. We meet at empty tombs – cenotaphs – because their bodies are not here. That alone should remind us of the hell of war and of the destruction and evil which we inflict upon one another. The dust of our common humanity is soaked in blood. Nowhere are we reminded more strongly of the great cost of “render[ing] unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” than on Remembrance Day. But, mercifully, Paul reminds us that “our citizenship is in heaven;” that is, if we render “unto God the things that are God’s.”

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