Category: Sermons

“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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“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”

In the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering. In the greyness of the year comes Christ the King striding across the barren fields of our humanity to gather us into glory (with apologies to T.S. Eliot). It is the glory of the Communion of Saints.

All Saints’ Day recalls us to the vocation of our humanity. We are not called to heroic pretension and presumption but to holiness. We are called to the Communion of Saints. An article of Faith, the lovely vision of the City of God is nothing less than a vision of our redeemed humanity. It signals what God seeks and wills for us and reminds us that our life in Faith always places us in a community. But what kind of community?

The Gospel reading for All Saints shows us. It is a spiritual community defined by blessedness, the blessedness that comes from God to us and is about nothing less than the grace of God at work in human hearts. There is at once diversity and unity to our life in the Communion of Saints. Nowhere is that signaled more profoundly perhaps than in the Sermon on the Mount, in what is known as well as the Beatitudes.

The Beatitudes are counter-culture both with respect to the ancient and the contemporary world. They counter our self-absorption, the narcissism and the nihilism that surround us and defeat us. They challenge us precisely because the Beatitudes place our lives upon the foundation of heavenly grace. They do so in the awareness of the limits of human life and experience considered simply in itself.

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“I do as the Father has commanded me,
so that the world may know that I love the Father”

It is surely a kind of wonderful providence that our second lesson should encompass this morning’s Gospel at Holy Communion. A wonderful providence that confirms the essential point that the Holy Spirit “shall teach [us] all things and bring all things to [our] remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you,” Jesus says. Somehow that point is brought home to us in the collocation of these lessons. But are we listening?

Or shall we discover our unbelief and our disdain and dismissal of the “righteous man” whom we have afflicted, scorned and derided only to discover that “it was we who strayed from the way of truth, and the light of righteousness did not shine on us, and the sun did not rise upon us?” Such have we heard in our first lesson from Wisdom this evening. To hear that would be a saving knowledge, to be sure, but how much better to let God’s Word have its resonance in us and in our lives? For that is the point.

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“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

Seeing is believing, it is commonly said, but here is the story of someone who having heard believed and having heard again, believed yet again – all without seeing. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us since “faith cometh by hearing” except that what is heard and believed stands in such stark contrast to what is wanted to be seen. “Except ye see signs and wonders,” Jesus says, “ye will not believe.” He names our expectation and its consequence – our unbelief. For where God is wanted to be tangibly present – immediately there for us, subject to us, as it were – faith has no meaning. The Word has no resonance in us.

In the Gospel, the demand is that Jesus should be physically present for an act of healing to be effective: “Come down ere my child die”. Something divine in Jesus is at once acknowledged and denied in the request. For where the Word is made captive to our desires, there the sovereign freedom of the Word can have no play upon our understanding. To acknowledge the sovereign freedom of the Word, on the other hand, means that our understanding is made captive to the Word and not the Word to the immediacy of our desires. Such acknowledgement is faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen”. It has its play primarily upon our understanding and not upon our senses.

The captivity of our understanding to the Word gives meaning and purpose to our desires without which they are essentially nothing. (more…)

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“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you.”

It is a powerful passage and one which takes us back to the Sundays of Easter leading to Pentecost, to the coming down of the Holy Spirit, hence the liturgical colour of red which connects the Holy Spirit with the Apostles who are sent in Jesus’ name. In other words, this powerful passage from the Gospel of St. John places us in the very heart of the Trinity; in short, in the communion of God who is the basis of our communion and fellowship with one another. We live only when we live with God.

That must seem a hard saying or at least a puzzling statement and yet it lies at the very heart of the Christian understanding of our life with God. Through the witness of the Scriptures, Jesus, who is the Word of God, has made known to us the things which God wants us to know and live. His word becomes the very basis of our life in his body, the Church. The Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude reminds us of the apostolic fellowship to which we belong precisely because of the power of the Holy Spirit “teach[ing us] all things and bring[ing] all things to [our] remembrance,” all the things which Jesus has said to us.

At first glance, such ideas might seem merely dogmatic and authoritative. But upon consideration, perhaps, you can begin to see their wisdom. Left to ourselves, it can be said, we are destructive monsters – the whole of the biblical witness bears testimony to this idea, an idea which is equally confirmed by experience itself.  We live in the midst of a bloody, violent and uncertain world, a world of our own making, to be sure. And yet, the Scripture readings of this day remind us of another kingdom, the kingdom of God, another city, the heavenly city, the City of God. They remind us of the apostolic fellowship of the Church which, if it is to be the Church, must stand upon the authority of God’s Word.

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“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you.”

It is a powerful passage and one which takes us back to the Sundays of Easter leading to Pentecost, to the coming down of the Holy Spirit, hence the liturgical colour of red which connects the Holy Spirit with the Apostles who are sent in Jesus’ name. In other words, this powerful passage from the Gospel of St. John places us in the very heart of the Trinity; in short, in the communion of God who is the basis of our communion and fellowship with one another. We live only when we live with God.

That must seem a hard saying or at least a puzzling statement and yet it lies at the very heart of the Christian understanding of our life with God. Through the witness of the Scriptures, Jesus, who is the Word of God, has made known to us the things which God wants us to know and live. His word becomes the very basis of our life in his body, the Church. The Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude reminds us of the apostolic fellowship to which we belong precisely because of the power of the Holy Spirit “teach[ing us] all things and bring[ing] all things to [our] remembrance,” all the things which Jesus has said to us.

(more…)

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