Category: Sermons

“You have received a spirit of sonship”

It is a theological truism to say that God wants what is best for us. So do we, of course, but unfortunately we do not always know what is best for ourselves or for one another. There is a darkness within us, in our own self-knowledge. We see, as St. Paul famously put it “in a glass darkly.” Louise Penny in her Canadian detective fiction novel Still Life captures this dilemma brilliantly. A young police officer looks in the mirror at the house of a suspect and notices a little note on the mirror which says, “you are looking at the problem.” She “immediately began searching behind her, the area reflected in the mirror”! She has missed the point completely. In a mirror we see ourselves. We are the problem. This carries over into our knowledge of others.

There are limitations not just to what we know about ourselves but also about one another. We grasp at shadows and images and mistake them for eternal truth. We catch at falling stars and fall with them in a burst of glory or ignominy. We do not know as we ought.

Yet, if that were not bad enough, there is an even deeper darkness in all of us. There is the darkness of our wills, the darkness of our refusals to act upon the truth and the good which we do know. We deny the light which is given to us to see and without which we cannot love. We see, albeit “in a glass darkly,” but we do not always act upon what we see.

This is the human condition. The grace of God is the answer to the human predicament, to the contradictions in which we find ourselves, whether in its ancient or its modern form.

For the developed cultures of antiquity, the Truth is the Law or the Good which is necessarily above us and beyond us but compelling us to live in accord with it. It is what we want but cannot have. The truth which we see we cannot reach. It is too high for us and yet it is what we most want. This can only leave us endlessly frustrated.

Modernity, on the other hand, presumes that we are each altogether complete. We are simply ends in ourselves without reference to anything outside ourselves, certainly without reference to the absolute otherness of God. We are, in this view, gods without God, only to find ourselves in a similar situation of despair because we have ceased to hope for anything more. There is nothing to hope for. Despair, both ancient and modern, is the denial of our desire for God.

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“Go to my brethren, and say unto them,
I ascend to my Father, and your Father; and to my God and your God.”

It is part of the remarkable exchange between Mary Magdalene and Jesus at the garden tomb after the horrifying events of the Crucifixion. She came full of grief and sorrow in the quiet of the early morning. She came looking for a corpse, the body of Jesus. She encounters the utterly unexpected reality of the Resurrection.

Jesus meets her at the empty tomb with the question of the angels, “Woman, why weepest thou?” and adds, “Whom seekest thou?” Mistaking him for the gardener, she repeats her request for the body of Jesus. Jesus’ response is to call her by name, “Mary,” to which she replies with a simple word of recognition, “Rabboni,” meaning master or teacher. This leads to the first command to her by the Risen Christ, a most curious command, “Touch me not,” he says, followed by the second command, her mission and his message. “I am not yet ascended to my Father,” Jesus prefaces his direction to her, “but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend to my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.”

Occasionally, a major saints’ day, meaning in our Anglican understanding, a New Testament figure or event, coincides with a Sunday. Every Sunday is by definition a celebration of the Resurrection in relation to which particular themes or teachings of Christ are set before us. The major saints’ day serve to complement this fundamental emphasis, even more so with Mary Magdalene who is the first witness to the Resurrection and the first to proclaim the Resurrection. She is “the apostle to the apostles,” as the Fathers of the early church put it, the one who is sent by Jesus to those whom Jesus will send out into the world as the emissaries of his word and will of human redemption. The Church is nothing if not apostolic; that is to say, rooted and grounded in the word and will of Jesus authoritatively passed on to the apostles by the author of our redemption, Jesus himself. Mary cannot be ignored in relation to that idea.

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“Love your enemies”

I have had occasion to ponder the mystery of this Gospel. It is, to be sure, a melancholy object to contemplate the meanness and the mindlessness of our institutional culture and our individual dealings with one another at times. Hatred and death, love and life, are often on full display and not always in equal proportion and not just in the world of war and politics. This Gospel is really about ourselves in the division of our hearts.

“Love your enemies,” Jesus says. It seems impossible and it is and yet, it goes to the heart of the Christian understanding. Life and death, love and hate are totally intertwined in human experience. What we are being commanded here belongs to our Christian identity. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful,” Jesus says, and beyond mere words, the whole life of Jesus is about mercy. “While we were yet sinners,” that is to say, while we were the enemies of God, “Christ died for us.” Such is his love. His love is love in the face of our enmity.

But we do not want to hear this. It seems so negative. Yet, it is the amazing grace of the Gospel. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” – loved us. The Cross shows us the real meaning of mercy and love. We see on the Cross what Jesus is saying about God: “for he is kind unto the unthankful, and to the evil.” It is an old biblical view. The sun shines upon the just and the unjust. To be sure. And while it seems grotesquely unfair, the wicked do sometimes seem to “flourish like green bay tree,” as the Psalmist puts it, and not just on Bay Street or Wall Street or the City (London). And there is the deeper philosophical question of Plato in The Republic, hinted at in myriad of ways in the Scriptures, the question about whether it is better to appear just while being unjust or to be just regardless of how you appear in the eyes of others.

This is where this Gospel passage comes into its own and shows us its real power. (more…)

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“Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing;
nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net”

Simon Peter’s words capture elegantly and poignantly the reality of Christian experience and faith especially in contemporary times. There is the haunting sense of nothingness, the fear that what we have been doing all the years of our lives is really worth nothing. And yet, as Simon Peter says, “at thy word I will let down the net.” We press on not just with a sense of stoic futility, not just because, but “at thy word.” That changes everything and makes all our doings something worth and something understood. It is really about the Providence of God which rules and moves in and through our lives.

The Collect prays “that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by thy governance, that thy Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness.” The Epistle reading, too, from First Peter (the role and place of Peter are suggested in these readings which belong to the early part of the Trinity season and in close proximity to the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul) exhorts us to a certain outlook and behavior regardless of the material outcome and regardless of the realities of suffering. It concludes by bidding us to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.”

The idea of Providence is a rich and important theological concept. It is not unique to Christianity, of course, but it takes on a certain colour and hue in the Christian understanding because of the figure of Jesus Christ. The three great Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all word-centered, we might say, but in different ways. For Christians, Jesus Christ is “the Word made flesh” and that gives special meaning and poignancy to what Peter says here: “nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.” In the face of the emptiness of human experience, in the dark night of suffering and sorrow, too, I would add, there is this strong affirmation of the goodness of God who alone can bring good out of evil, and light out of darkness, the God who is no stranger to the darkness of human sin experienced as suffering and death, emptiness and loss.

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“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church”

The Church does not own this text; this text owns the Church. It is Jesus’ statement about Peter (whose name means rock) in response to Peter’s confession about Christ: “thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” It is a powerful and yet poignant exchange between Peter and Jesus. What Peter has said, Jesus says, is heavenly knowledge: “for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” The Church is built upon Revelation, upon what is engraven upon rock, as it were, the refined petroglyphs of salvation, we might say.

The Petrine primacy, as it sometimes called, meaning that Peter has a kind of place of first-standing among the apostles, belongs to the life and history of the Church, to the debates and discussions about what it means to be the Church, and especially to the conflicts and controversies between different churches within the idea of the universal church, the catholic church. But this text cannot be relegated simply to church politics and polities. It speaks rather to the catholicity of the Christian confession of Faith.

Peter’s confession must be our confession. And so Jesus’ response to Peter speaks to the very ground of our faith and life in the community of confessing Christians; namely, those who confess Christ as the Son of the living God.

There is in this confession more than mere assent to a proposition, far more than taking sides in the issues du jour, far more than mere opinion. It is about the truth of a living faith. It means the Church but it means the Church as defined by this confession. Remove that from the picture and there is no church, no faith.

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“And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest”

Summertime! The Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist signals the beginnings of summer, falling as it always does near the summer solstice. For Canadians, too, the Nativity of St. John the Baptist is significant. On this day in 1497, John Cabot landed in Newfoundland. It marks, we might say, the beginning of the Christian encounter with this northern land we have come to know as Canada. John the Baptist has become the Patron Saint of Canada.

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“And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest”

“Sumer is icumen in”, as the Middle English round or madrigal of 13^th century origin puts it, perhaps one of the earliest forms of musical counterpoint. It somehow speaks to our celebration this morning. For “summer is a coming in” as the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist reminds us since it always coincides with the week of the summer solstice. There is almost a double counterpoint about this feast, counterpoint referring to a set of opposing contrasts in musical terms which bring out a deeper resonance and harmony of sound. For we begin and we end the summer, especially the maritime summer, with the birth and death of the intriguing figure of John the Baptist. And, of course, the nativity of John the Baptist in the week of the summer solstice equally points us to the nativity of Christ in the week of the winter solstice; there is just that kind of complementary contrast between the week of the longest day and the week of the longest night, a kind of counterpoint of light and dark, we might say.

Such suggestive contrasts belong to the reflective richness of the Christian story, to the back and forth of light and dark, the interplay of birth and death, of nature and grace. Somehow we can only think in counterpoint, we might almost say. Each moment and story has its own integrity and yet illumines another and greater story.

There are only two nativities that the Christian Church celebrates on the basis of scriptural witness: the nativity of Christ and the nativity of John the Baptist. They are not equal. The whole point of the story of the nativity of John the Baptist is how it is preparatory for the birth of Christ. John the Baptist is the great and intriguingly complex figure who in a way sums up the whole of prophecy and points us to the new reality of Christ. “Art thou Elijah,” the Priests and Levites from Jerusalem ask him, to which he replied that he was “not the Christ,” nor the Prophet Elijah, but simply “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as saith the prophet Isaiah” and the one who points out to us the one who comes, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world.”

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“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart,
and knoweth all things”

What does this signify? Only that God knows us better than we do ourselves, however much we deceive ourselves. In a way, the Epistle and Gospel reading this morning not only complement each other but provide a pretty strong encouragement to enter into what has been made known to us in Jesus Christ. Or to put it in another way, our excuses are absolutely nothing worth when it comes to the heavenly banquet, itself an image of the soul’s enjoyment and fellowship with God. Our relationship with God cannot be simply what and when and if we please. What kind of God would that be? A God of our own devising, which is to say, no God.

Our excuses do not excuse us. This is a tough but obvious truth. Worship simply has priority. It is as simple as that. And yet to say it misses the greater point. Worship cannot be coerced; it cannot be forced. It is about more than mere duty. It is about what we love. It is about our love of God. In the long end of the day, if we don’t want to be here we shouldn’t be here because we have missed the whole point of being here. You can’t sell the Gospel. It isn’t a market commodity. God is not for sale.

But you can and have to proclaim the Gospel. The proclamation of the Gospel is the repeated invitation to enter into a life with God. Today’s Gospel story is about the invitation to the kingdom of God’s blessedness. What launches the parable about our excuses is the proclamation: “blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” It is, to be sure, a blessing and not a right. The refusal of the invitation is a refusal of the blessing.

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“I have called you friends.”

In the quiet beauty of an evening in June, we meet to celebrate the Feast of St. Barnabas, the Apostle. Barnabas means ‘son of consolation’ or ‘encouragement’. I can think of no greater encouragement or consolation for us in difficult times than to be reminded that Christ has made us his friends! At the same time, it must be admitted, we are most confused about the power and form of friendship in our contemporary world. What does Jesus mean to say that “I have called you friends”?

He is speaking to us about the divine charity which is the formative and foundational principle of our lives in faith, a life that binds us in the bonds of charity, the bonds of heavenly love, the basis of all and every form of true friendship. He is talking about nothing less than the dynamic of charity that makes us one in Christ and without which we have no life and no community and certainly no church.

How wonderful, too, that this gospel is accompanied by the lesson from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles which reminds us that the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch, where Barnabas had been sent from Jerusalem. How wonderful, indeed! To think of being Christians precisely in terms of being made the friends of Christ, and, by holy and theological extension, the friends of God. That is the meaning of Christ’s friendship with us. He has gathered us into his fellowship with the Father and the Holy Ghost.

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