Category: Sermons

“The good ground are they which in an honest and good heart having heard the word keep it and bring forth fruit with patience”

Sexagesima Sunday recalls us to our origins and to our end. It signals our identity in God’s will and purpose for our humanity. We are recalled, yet again as last week, to creation but more explicitly this week to the dust, to the ground of our lives. We are in a profound sense “of the earth, earthy,” for such is Adam and we are all in Adam, literally, “of the ground,” adhamah. And yet, we have a heavenly vocation, namely, to be the dust transformed or as our gospel parable puts it, to be “the good ground.” It is a metaphor for ”an honest and good heart” which “having heard the word keep it and bring forth fruit with patience.” The echoes of Genesis are all too evident. The teaching is explicit; the seed is the word of God. We are the ground but what kind of ground?

Sexagesima Sunday brings out the deeper dynamic and meaning of the doctrine of Creation. As created beings we have a relation to the dust of the ground. Dust here is an image for the most basic elements of the material world, the dust out of which God has made and fashioned everything else. Long before the metaphors of ‘quarks and antiquarks’, as it were, there was dust, the dust of the ground of God’s own making. Our humanity too is understood to be made in God’s image but also “formed of dust from the ground,” the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. Thus the idea of our selves as created beings requires the realization of our special relation to the Creator, to God. So there are two things, our relation to the dust of the ground, and our relation to God; both belong inescapably to the idea of creation.

We are the dust into which God has breathed his Spirit. Will we turn to the dust or to God who raises us up from the dust? Only if we nurture the life-giving and spirit-forming Word that has been sown in the dust and ground of our souls can we be raised up. The ‘ground of our being’ is not simply the dust of the earth. More profoundly, it is the Word and Will of God as sown in the ground of God’s creation, in us as human beings.

Today’s gospel presents us with the parable of the Sower and the Seed. To put it bluntly, we are dirt. That is not an insult. It is a salutary reminder. It is a call and a challenge because it asks us, ‘What kind of dirt? What kind of ground will we be? The good ground or the bad?’

On these “gesima” Sundays, the emphasis is on human activity, or to put it more precisely, on the activity of the virtues of the soul which belong to the truth and purpose of our humanity as spiritual and intellectual creatures. They belong to the ways in which human activity is taken up into God’s greater activity and perfected. The “gesima” Sundays place us on the ground, in the land. Such too is the meaning of our Parish. We are here and not elsewhere. This land, this place, this community, is the place where God’s Word has been sown. What kind of ground will we be? The question is both for each of us individually and corporately.

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“My soul cleaveth to the dust: O quicken thou me, according to thy word”

Septuagesima Sunday marks a new beginning. We begin at the beginning, even with dust and dirt, as it were, the ground of creation, quite literally, we might say. Thus at Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, we begin reading today from The Book of Genesis and the Prologue of John’s Gospel. The conjunction of these readings is quite profound because these beginnings recall us to our end; in short, to the radical meaning of our life in Christ. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” He is “the Word made flesh” who “dwelt among us,” that in him we might “behold his glory, the glory of the only-begotten of the Father.” But only in accord with his will and in what he makes known to us, namely, “grace upon grace.” John tells us that “no one has ever seen God,” yet “the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known,” literally, “exegeted him.” It means to interpret, to make known, or to lead out into an understanding. It is the only time in the Scriptures that the word exegesis is used about the life of God himself. Beginnings and endings in a radical sense are set before us. All this belongs to an ancient tradition conveying ancient wisdom, namely, a profound reflection upon the mystery of Creation within the Revelation of God as Trinity.

We begin with Genesis only to find ourselves in the midst of the vineyard of creation in today’s gospel from Matthew. It recalls Genesis and the purpose of creation. Genesis is at once a difficult and a necessary starting point. It is difficult because of the contemporary tendency to view the Book of Genesis in one of two ways, both of which are false. The first way is to attempt to read Genesis as a kind of scientific treatise, which it isn’t – this is the folly of creationism: at once pseudoscience and pseudo religion. The second way is to read Genesis as a haphazard collection of fables and myths, which it isn’t: a form of historicism or positivism, equally pseudoscience in terms of the human sciences and pseudo religion, too.

The Book of Genesis does not propose a human discovery of God. It begins emphatically with God. “In the beginning, God.” There is the proclamation of God as the absolute beginning after which everything else is secondary, after which everything else is derivative, after which everything else is a product. And while something of the ‘Mind of the Maker,’ to use a famous phrase by Dorothy L. Sayers, is made known in what he makes, the Creator is not simply equated with what he makes. He is known as beyond and in control. It is his creation. The distinction between the Creator and the created is absolutely crucial and necessary for the understanding that John presents in the Prologue to his Gospel about Jesus as the exegesis of God by his being incarnate in human flesh. He makes God known as Trinity.

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“Whatsoever ye do, in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus”

Epiphany runs out this year in the themes of mercy and judgment as belonging to the radical meaning of Christ’s Epiphany. He is the Judge of all humanity and the Lord of all Mercy. Today’s Epistle from Colossians complements and illustrates the Gospel by highlighting the qualities of Christ that we are meant to embody and express in our lives despite the limitations of the world and ourselves. Epiphany is not and cannot be a flight from or a negation of the world; the overarching theme is God’s will and purpose for our humanity regardless of the circumstances of our lives. This is the significance of the images of wheat and tares, weeds, we might say.

Wheat and tares grow together in the field of the world. Wheat and weeds are there together, both the good and the bad. But who can be sure which is which? What is weed and what is wheat? To ask this question recognizes the limitations of our judgments. “Let them both grow together until harvest,” says the sower. God is the gardener and God is the judge. Not you and not me. That is itself a great mercy.

This doesn’t simply mean suspending our judgment in the abdication of our responsibilities. We have the obligation and the ability to discern right from wrong and, by God’s grace, to act accordingly. We are bidden to be God’s good wheat in the world of wheat and tares. That requires a check upon our judgmentalism both about ourselves and one another. Forbearing one another and forgiving one another is the counter to our judgmentalism. As we all know that is not always easy and increasingly so in our rather disturbed and disturbing world of folly and division, of uncertainty and fear, of vanity and nonsense, of wars and destruction; the list goes on as do the various ways of trying to make sense of our current dystopias, some more insightful and helpful than others. The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, for instance, suggests that we are only just now coming out of a kind of 75 year old fantasy, the post-World War II world of relative peace and prosperity that seemed to promise endless material progress and limitless personal freedoms. No longer.

Our judgmentalism is our presumption to know what we cannot and do not know about others and even about ourselves. We would put ourselves in the place of God as judge, having forgotten the lessons of Epiphany. We would presume to have a total and absolute view when, in fact, our viewpoint is altogether restricted and limited. We see, at best, “through a glass darkly,” as Paul will say. To know this is to be aware of the limits of our knowing. Yet this is the beginning of wisdom. It frees us from the tyranny of ourselves.

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“When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his son, made of a woman,
made under the law”

Candlemas is the mid-winter festival of light and life at once looking back to Christ’s nativity and looking ahead to his Passion and Death. Intriguingly, it is both a feast of Christ and of Mary, combining two ancient precedents. For the Eastern Church it was a feast of Christ, “the Presentation of Christ in the Temple,” first noted in Etheria’s Peregrinatio to Jerusalem in the late 4th century. For the Western Church, it became a feast of Mary, “the Purification of Mary.” John Cosin, a 17th century Bishop of Durham, combined both titles in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother Prayer Book of the Anglican Churches. All of this belongs, we might say, to the light of history. By the mid-fifth century, lighted candles were introduced to the festival, hence, the more convenient moniker, Candlemas.

You have, no doubt, begun to notice the lengthening of days. Candlemas, too, is associated with the astronomical tradition of cross-quarter days, days which fall more or less midway between the days which mark the four quarters of the year; in this case, Christmas, December 25th, and the Annunciation, March 25th. Candlemas falls roughly between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox (March 20th this year; Easter being the Sunday after the first full moon post-equinox). All this belongs, we might say, to the light of nature, make what you will of rodents such as groundhogs and their shadows!

But as Luke makes clear, the story of the purification and presentation belongs to the light of law and prophecy. “when the days of her purification, according to the law of Moses, were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord; (as it is written in the law of the Lord, every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord).” Thus two customs of the Law meet in this story: Mary’s purification seven days after giving birth, and the presentation to the Lord forty days after his birth. in the wonderful paradox of the Lord being presented to the Lord! All belonging to the light of the Law, we might say. But then with Simeon and Anna, we see the light of prophecy at once fulfilled in Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis, in his startling and prophetic words about the child Christ and Mary his mother, and in the wonderful words of Anna the prophetess. All this belongs, we might say, to the light of prophecy.

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“Overcome evil with good”

It is a strong statement about the power and nature of the good and a strong indictment of a form of false or incomplete justice that belongs to revenge. Revenge is about our wanting to get back at someone who has wronged or hurt us as we think or imagine. But if we are honest with ourselves it means recognizing that we do not simply want to get back, to do just as it has been done to us. No. What we really want is to annihilate or humiliate the other; to “nuke them till they glow,” as I recall some dyed in the wool theological liberals at Harvard saying at the time of the Iranians taking American hostages. Justice as getting ahead not getting even.

Paul suggests that is not the way to go. It is our way but not God’s way, quoting first, Deuteronomy on vengeance, and, then, Proverbs, about feeding and giving drink to your enemy. But what exactly is meant in saying that in so doing “thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head?” How is that good and just. It sounds more than a wee bit vindictive. But is it? Might it not rather suggest the conviction of conscience in countering evil with good and thus awakening that sense of the greater power of the good in the other, the enemy? It transcends the false and limited forms of human justice. The injunction at the beginning of the Epistle reading from Romans to “be not wise in [our] own conceits,” our own thinking, is complemented by the concluding injunction to “be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Such injunctions are far more than the chorus of empty platitudes that dominate our contemporary culture. Be kind, be nice, be good, be happy – all true but what do they mean? What does it mean to say to your children that you just want them to be happy without giving them any idea of what happiness is? That is to leave them alone and empty in themselves as if happiness is merely subjective. Aristotle, who uses the word eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness in his Nicomachean Ethics, means by it something far removed from our modern assumptions. It is a life of virtue lived in accord with reason; something substantial and more than simply something emotional and personal. As such the great traditions of ethical philosophy or theology provide us with something more and greater that shape and inform our lives in what is ultimately good even in the face of “our infirmities, and in all our dangers and necessities,” as the Collect wisely says. The good is the mercy of God who speaks to the truth of our desires and gathers us to himself, seeking our good and our wholeness; ultimately the healing of soul and body.

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“Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us”

The Epiphany event of the Magi-Kings coming to Bethlehem focuses on the gifts they bring. The gifts manifest the meaning of the one whom they seek and find in Bethlehem. The gifts they present belong to the nature and meaning of adoration. Adoration is a kind of focused wonder. It belongs to the highest feature of our humanity as contemplative beings. Adoration speaks to the greatest dignity of our humanity in the contemplation of the greatest good in itself and for us. The gifts they bring belong more profoundly to the gift that has brought them to Bethlehem. The greater and greatest gift is Christ. Our finding him is really about our being found in him.

The Magi-Kings found him in Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph found him in the Temple. But all because we are found in him. Christ is the gift through whom all gifts are given, the gifts that adorn and dignify our humanity as found in God’s love for us. This is truly astounding, an astonishment that should awaken in us philosophical wonder. It is what we see in the readings both today and last Sunday.

To be recalled to the God who is the giver of every good gift is the deeper meaning of Epiphany. God makes himself known to us and makes known the qualities of our life in Christ by virtue of the gifts that are given to us. The gifts differ according to the grace that is given to us, gifts that vary with the differences in our created being. Yet the gifts belong to the restoration and perfection of our humanity.

Epiphany signifies the manifestation of God in Christ but also in the world as creation. It is not by accident that the Second Sunday after Epiphany presents us with the first miracle of Christ. “This beginning of signs,” John tells us, “did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested forth his glory.” It is an epiphany which makes known the divinity of Christ as the Lord of Creation who seeks the greater good of our humanity. There is in these readings a sense of cosmic consciousness, of creation itself as partaking of the divine nature. Our good is inseparable from the good of creation itself. In this way, we might begin to make sense of the idea of miracles as essentially making known the greater miracle of life itself, the greater miracle of creation as given by God.

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“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Epiphany is a Greek word that has carried over into other languages such as English. It is derived from a word that refers to what appears; in other words, to what is manifest or made known. In the Christian understanding, it also refers to the festival of Epiphany understood, as the Epiphany Collect makes clear, to the idea of “the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.” That remarkable story is wonderfully complemented by the readings for The First Sunday after the Epiphany.

This is challenging to our culture and world. Why? Because the whole idea of Epiphany, both the concept and the event, is so emphatically and primarily intellectual and spiritual. The emphasis, as today’s Collect makes clear, is on the primacy of knowing: Grant that we “may both perceive and know what things we ought to do” and “may have grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same.” The Epistle and Gospel both turn on the primacy or centrality of knowing as essential to our life in Christ, captured most fully in Paul’s words, “be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

It is a significant phrase. “The renewing of your mind” was one of the favourite and most frequent passages of Scripture used by Fr. Crouse in many of his sermons and papers. It speaks powerfully to a fundamental and essential feature of our humanity as indicated by Aristotle and Augustine, to name but two figures in the history of thought and spirituality. “All human beings by nature desire to know,” Aristotle notes. “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee,” Augustine famously begins his Confessions, launching the journey of the human soul to its patria or end in God’s eternal loving and knowing of all things. As Aquinas observes, “God is the beginning and end of all created things, especially rational beings.” Knowing and our desire to know are essential to the understanding of what it means to be human. “Know thyself,” the Delphic Oracle proclaims. It means to know who we are within the order of the Cosmos or, to put it in Christian terms, Creation, and thus to know ourselves through our relation to God, the beginning and end of all things.

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“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem”

“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass,” the Shepherds say, “which the Lord hath made known unto us,” albeit by way of an Angel. It is the Shepherd’s Christmas, their going to Bethlehem. Presumably they took the sheep with them. Tomorrow the Magi-Kings from Anatolia will make their way to Bethlehem via Jerusalem “hav[ing] seen his star in the East.” We easily forget what Matthew tells us. The Magi only learn about Bethlehem from Herod in his consultation with “all the chief priests and the scribes of the people together” in Jerusalem who say that Bethlehem is “where the Christ was to be born.” All come to Bethlehem and so must we. And why? That we, like Mary, might “keep all these things” “which were told by the shepherds,” “concerning this child,” and ponder them, like Mary, in our hearts.

All come to Bethlehem so that Bethlehem may abide in us. With the Magi-Kings coming at Epiphany tomorrow there will be, we might say, the break-out from Bethlehem. After presenting their gifts to the child who is God, and King, and Sacrifice, “they departed into their own country another way;” yet, as T.S. Eliot wonderfully puts it, “no longer at ease” in their former ways. Something has changed in them. It is what abides in them from the mystery of Bethlehem. Bethlehem abides in them and weighs in upon their minds. So too, I hope, for us.

The abiding presence of Bethlehem informs the Christian imaginary about the mystery of Christmas and of the Christian Faith itself. In carol and story, in art and in the great variety of crèches, the symbolic significance of Christ’s humble birth in Bethlehem, at once “the least of the cities of Judah” in Micah and yet “not the least” in Matthew’s account, an apparent contradiction that Richard Hooker explains and resolves, is signalled to us. The 15th century Florentine tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Fra Lippi captures something of the transformative fullness of the Christmas mystery. It is a crowded scene. Not easy to find any shepherds and their sheep there among the exotica of peacock and pheasant; an ox and ass are prominent in the stall, a greyhound lies in the foreground. There are horses and a great parade of people. The focus is on the Magi adoring the Child Christ seated on the lap of Mary. All come to Bethlehem.

It is a kind of reprise of Paradise, an image of the harmony and unity of God and the whole of his creation. The artistic images symbolise the meaning of Bethlehem for us as something that abides in us even in the break-out from Bethlehem. Epiphany in a way is about nothing more than Christmas for all people, omni populo, as John Cosin so clearly states. Epiphany season will be about attending to the mystery of the God who became flesh. It will undertake to teach us about God in his divine attributes and character and what that means for us. It will, in other words, carry the meaning of Bethlehem with us into the meaning of Jerusalem. They are the twin poles, already circling around us, of the Christian understanding of God’s deep and intimate engagement with our humanity without which we are less than ourselves. What is revealed and made known in the mystery of Christmas and Epiphany belongs to the fullness of understanding about our humanity in its truth. They signal the profound idea that we are capax dei, capable of God but only through the mercy of God and our thinking upon that mystery.

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“She shall bring forth a Son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS.”

The readings for the Sunday after Christmas provide an extended commentary on the radical meaning of the Incarnation. It is at once the redemption of our humanity and its restoration. Isaiah’s prophecy quoted in the Gospel about the Son born of the Virgin being named, “Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us,” finds its fullest meaning in Jesus as saviour. Note the emphasis – JESUS is printed in capital letters twice in this Gospel passage from St. Matthew.

The Gospel complements Paul’s theological reflection on the birth of Jesus Christ. While the Gospel gives the circumstances of his birth as being “on this wise,” particularly emphasizing Joseph’s dilemma and its solution, the Epistle offers a theological account of its meaning and purpose. It is “when the fulness of the time was come, [that] God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law.” These are the two makings that illuminate the meaning of Christmas about the divinity and humanity of Jesus. “‘God sent His Son” – there His divine [nature]; ‘made of a woman’- here His human nature”… “That from the bosom of His Father before all worlds; this, from that womb of His mother in the world” (Lancelot Andrewes, Xmas 1609). The Son of God is not made of a Spirit but made of a creature, made of a woman, “made very man of the substance of the Virgin Mary his mother; and that without spot of sin” (BCP, p.79).

As Irenaeus so wonderfully puts it, Christ is “that pure one, opening purely that pure womb [meaning Mary], which regenerates our humanity unto God and which he himself made pure” (Adv. Haer. IV. 33.11). His conception and birth which are about his being with us in the truth of our humanity is through the purity of Mary, the emblem of our true humanity considered simply qua human. That purity of our humanity belongs to the sinlessness of Christ. It is “but ex muliere, and no more; of the Virgin alone by the power of the Holy Ghost, without mixture of fleshly generation. By virtue whereof no original sin was in Him, just born He was, … and no law could touch Him”(Andrewes). In her we were never the better for factum ex muliere, for his being made of a woman, made of the pure substance of Mary. The classical and orthodox teaching is repeatedly and constantly that Christ is like us in all respects save sin. All this belongs to the first making, made of a woman.

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“These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth”

The Christmas Feast of Holy Innocents operates on at least three levels. There is, first of all, the overarching and controlling concept that the Holy Innocents are “the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb” of the redemption of our humanity. There is, secondly, the purported event of Herod’s fear of a rival to his political power that leads to the slaughter of “all the children that were in Bethlehem” – the harming and destruction of those who can do no harm, hence the innocent – understood as the precipitating event of the flight into Egypt of the Holy Family and as fulfilling Jeremiah’s prophecy about mourning and loss, on the one hand, and Hosea’s prophecy about the God’s love and compassion that delivers Israel, on the other hand. This aspect highlights the theme of loss and mourning as leading to redemption and restoration. And, thirdly, there is the moral application of the whole event in the Collect in which “babes and sucklings” who are weak and helpless are strengthened by God and, though infants, who are by definition unspeaking, nonetheless, “glorify God by their deaths.” This becomes the basis of the moral charge to us about “mortifying and killing all vices” in ourselves so that being “strengthened by grace, the innocency of our lives and the constancy of our faith, even unto death,” we, too, “may glorify thy holy Name.”

In one way, it is all rather complex, a bit complicated, and profoundly troubling. It offers a reflection on a way of understanding the interplay of scriptural passages, particularly between the Hebrew Scriptures and the emerging Christian writings. It is, a rather disturbing and disquieting story that challenges our thinking about the radical meaning of Christmas. It is meant to be troubling and yet realistic about the forms of human suffering, especially of the little ones, the ones who can do no harm and yet are harmed by others, subject to agendas and purposes in relation to which they are simply collateral damage and regarded as disposable, as nothing worth.

This is the theological challenge of Holy Innocents Day. It points us to the radical meaning of human redemption. It suggests in no uncertain terms that the little ones, whether born or the unborn, are the children of God, creatures of a loving Creator in spite of the evil of others, socially and politically. A 15th century Latin carol found once again in the 16th century Scandinavian collection known as the Piae Cantiones, memorably recalls this story, making reference to Herod in his fear and fury: “all the little boys he killed/ at Bethlem in his fury.”

That this should be an essential part of Christmas shatters all our assumptions about Christmas. It teaches us about the deeper meaning of Christ’s sacrifice for the redemption of the whole of humanity. It means the radical overcoming of all our evil and folly. It teaches that “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus,” imaged here as the Lamb of God, on the one hand, and the Son of God who comes out of the Egypt of ancient captivity to liberate us from all evil, on the other hand. That is meant to provide comfort and strength for us in the face of the heart-rending losses of children and infants for whatever reason in the disorders of our day.

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