Category: Sermons

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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…)

Print this entry

“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.”

(more…)

Print this entry

“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…)

Print this entry