Category: Sermons

“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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“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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