Category: Sermons

Sermons

Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 10:30 service

“Her sins which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much”

To my mind it is one of the most moving stories in the Gospels. In relation to our first lesson from Ezekiel it challenges us about our hearts: hearts of stone or hearts of flesh? What Ezekiel envisions, it is not too much to say, is what is illustrated in this Gospel story, namely, the hardness of our hearts of stone and whether we can be moved to compassion and seek forgiveness.

Ezekiel is speaking about the condition of Israel, about God’s strengthening and providential presence with his people in the places of their exile, about a change in them by his grace and spirit. One heart and a new spirit; a heart of flesh in contrast to a heart of stone.

There is just that sense of contrast between a hard and inflexible spirit and a forgiving and compassionate spirit that is also brought out ever so personally and powerfully in Luke’s story. It is not about being soft and wimpy; it is about something vital and living that moves in us if we will set aside the empty dogmatisms of our empty lives. In a way, this gospel story challenges us about what really matters and about what kind of hearts are actually in us. It brings us to some of the essential and central teachings of the Christian faith. Of course, that is the real challenge: to acknowledge and name the essential teachings which ultimately shape our lives.

It is this unnamed and unspeaking woman who teaches us so much. Jesus is at pains to show the importance of her action and its meaning. He knows what is moving in her heart. Her act, extravagant and moving, is an act of love in repentance. I cannot stress enough how powerful and important that is. I cannot stress enough the importance of the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins of which this Gospel story is such a compelling witness. Jesus says to her, “your sins are forgiven.”

(more…)

Print this entry

Sermons

Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 8:00am service

“Be not anxious”

I like to think of this as “the anxiety gospel” but that runs the risk of only adding to the problem. “Behold, the fowls of the air,” Jesus says, “consider the lilies of the field” and “Seek ye first the kingdom of God”. Behold, consider, and  seek are strong words  that offer a compelling antidote to our anxieties.

What is Jesus saying here? He wants us to look at the world with new eyes. And it makes a difference for us in our lives. To behold what he wants us to see, to consider what he wants us to ponder, to seek what he wants us to desire counters the paralysis of our fears, the terror of our anxieties and even the anxiety about our anxieties.

Jesus says “be not anxious” and he says it more than once in this gospel. He knows our anxieties and how prone we are to being anxious, quite literally, about “a multitude of things”. It is “The Martha Syndrome” as Jesus diagnoses it elsewhere: “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things” (Luke 10.41). We all have our fears and our worries, our troubles and our concerns, our heart-aches and our despairs. And we can worry ourselves, quite literally, to death about them.

(more…)

Print this entry

Sermons

Meditation for the Feast of the Holy Cross

“And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to me.”

The Cross is the meeting place of lovers. That “strange and uncouth thing”, as the poet George Herbert calls it, reveals the incompleteness of our human loves and the all-sufficiency of divine love. It signals what might be called the erotic liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy shaped and governed by the Cross, the liturgy of eros redeemed, the liturgy of the redemption of desire.

I have often been struck with the coincidence of the late summer with the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14th) and especially with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks so profoundly and yet so paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise in the resumption of studies at our Colleges and Schools. Inventio crucis.

Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem and her so-called discovery of the Holy Cross in the early fourth century as well as the exposition or “Exaltation” of the supposed true cross in the seventh century. Inventio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.

In the Christian understanding of things, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual life that belongs especially to academic communities. The cross is the meeting place of such lovers, too.

(more…)

Print this entry

Sermons

Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger”

He is named, by Jesus, as “this stranger,” the one who is the other, the foreigner, literally, the alien. An outsider, too, we might say, to capture all of the inflections of meaning in this text and story. Luke sheds further light on “this stranger” in the simple phrase “and he was a Samaritan.” He was in the company of nine others sharing with them a further identity of exclusion; they were ten men that were lepers – the rejects and outcasts of ancient society. And on top of that, a Samaritan, the outcasts of the Jewish culture.

What stands out in the story is that “this stranger” is the one who gives thanks and “this stranger” is the one who is not only healed, like the other nine, but more importantly is made whole. Salvation, it seems, is more than just the healing of our physical infirmities.

This is a powerful story about the power and truth and the beauty of a profoundly spiritual activity, the act of giving thanks. A thanksgiving story, it appears in our liturgy in the late summer and early fall as well as being appointed for the Gospel for Thanksgiving Day, meaning our national day of Thanksgiving which in Canada is coincident with the older traditions of Harvest Thanksgiving and often eclipsed by them. It illustrates profoundly, I think, the spiritual nature of all our thanksgivings.

The giving of thanks is a free act, perhaps, the freest act that we can do. And yet, that act of thanksgiving, so central to religious and spiritual life, is not simply about ourselves. It is more about the movements of God’s grace in us; God in us, if you will. This is part of the deep Christian insight that relates to who Jesus is for us. I think this Gospel story provides the Christian understanding that transforms the idea of thanksgiving. It is, ultimately, about our participation in the act of human redemption accomplished by Jesus. His life, and therefore his life in us, is about thanksgiving. His life is his thanksgiving to the Father; the thanksgiving of the whole of redeemed creation has its highest expression in the thanksgiving of the Son to the Father. Like the stranger, in returning and giving thanks we are being made whole.

(more…)

Print this entry

Sermons

Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity

“How readest thou?”

“Walk in the Spirit,” St. Paul exhorts us. “Go and do thou likewise,” Jesus says to the lawyer as the conclusion and application of the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan. There is, it seems, a kind of emphasis on acting and doing. And yet, doing is really only the active expression of our thinking. The key question here is captured in our text. It is Jesus’ question. “What is written in the law? How readest thou?”

How do you read? It is really a way of asking how do you think about things. In this case the context is intriguing. The question, asked by the lawyer to tempt Jesus, that is to say, to put Jesus to the test in an attempt to catch him in a contradiction, was “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ response is to ask him about the law. The answer to his question has to do with how the law is understood. In short, our doings have some kind of intimate relation to our thinking and understanding. By law here Jesus refers to the most important part of the Jewish Scriptures, known as the Law or the Torah. It has pride of place in the Jewish understanding in the same way that the Gospel has a kind of primacy in the New Testament and which is signaled in our liturgy. We are immediately thrown into the important questions about how we read and understand the Scriptures.

This is one of the pressing problems of the contemporary Church. What I find important here is that the practical urge and spirit ultimately turns upon our thinking and understanding.

There are already several levels of thinking at work in this remarkable and rich Gospel story. First, the lawyer’s initial question about eternal life is a concern far later than the Law itself. It is really a question that belongs to late Judaism, though the ideas of eternal life are found in the Psalms. In general, though, the strong Jewish emphasis on the objectivity of the Law as eternal and everlasting is in contrast to the fleeting nature of the passing world and of human life. The idea of immortality is, perhaps, implicit in the recognition of the divinely given Law but only becomes explicit, I think, through the later engagement with Greek thought. Yet, here, the lawyer is directed by Jesus to the Law and to its understanding.

(more…)

Print this entry

Sermons

Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene / Seventh Sunday after Trinity

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

Sermons

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity

“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…)

Print this entry

Sermons

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

Sermons

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry