Category: Sermons

“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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“He proclaimed Jesus, saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’”

We are in the presence of wonderful mysteries, the mysteries of God and man. The great creedal mysteries of the Christian Faith are wonderfully set before us in the Athanasian Creed, one of the three catholic creeds of the universal church, but one which, I fear, is little known, and, I am afraid, little used. Tucked away in the back of the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer, it must appear to some of you as a very odd thing, a curiosity, something to peruse while suffering through an insufferable sermon, perhaps!

Yet, there was a time in our Anglican history when the Athanasian Creed was appointed to be used thirteen times a year, once a month and on Trinity Sunday. And I can think of at least one literary work which refers to the Athanasian Creed, interestingly being used at Mattins on Christmas morning, an intriguing concept; Charles Williams’ novel, Greater Trumps. In that novel, the Athanasian Creed is sung to an antiphonal setting which emphasizes precisely the counterpoint of contrasting and yet complementary ideas about God as ‘this’ and ‘not this’, the back-and-forth of negative and positive theology, and about the union of God and man in Jesus Christ. In the novel, the Creed of St. Athanasius, so-called, signals the dynamic of love, human and divine. The phrase “not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, / but by taking of Manhood into God” was one of Charles Williams’ favourite passages.

The three Creeds of catholic Christianity are the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. Three Creeds and yet really one, a point made very clearly by one of the outstanding divines of the 17^th Century, Archbishop John Bramhall, whose sensibility about the interplay of Scripture and Creed and about the unity of the Creeds contribute to his wonderful epithet, Athanasius Hibernicus, the Athanasius of Ireland. Athanasius is the father of orthodoxy whose steadfast witness to the essential divinity of Christ resulted in the Creed which we know as the Nicene Creed, though properly called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, in reference to two of the Great Ecumenical Councils from which it came to birth in the fourth century. As Bramhall observes, “The Nicene, Constantinopolitan, Ephesian, Chalcedonian and Athanasian Creeds, are but explications of the Creed of the Apostles, and are still called the Apostles’ Creed.”

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“We love him because he first loved us.”

The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus illustrates powerfully the Christian concept of love, the love which we neglect at our peril. The love of God is the animating principle that drives the love of neighbour. If we are deaf and blind to what is seen and heard about the love of God as revealed in the witness of the Scriptures and which lies at the heart of the Christian Faith, then we shall find ourselves at a great remove from God and from one another; “a great gulf fixed” between where we are and where we would want to be.

Lazarus is lying at our feet. In ignoring him, the parable suggests, we are denying God. The love of God and the love of neighbour are intimately connected. How so? Because of the Incarnation and the Trinity without which there can be no human redemption.

The parable offers a remarkable reversal of situation. The poor man, Lazarus, dies and finds himself in the bosom of Abraham, a lovely image of the intimacy of Heaven itself, while the rich man dies and finds himself tormented in Hell. It is not simply that one was rich and the other poor as if the material circumstances of simply being poor or rich are the conditions of Heaven and Hell. No. At issue is our attitude and approach to one another. “The poor you have with you always,” Jesus says, “you can do for them what you will.” What do we will? Do we step over them and ignore them? Despise and decry them? Blame them for existing and/or pretend that they aren’t there? Have them removed from our sight like some inconvenient heap of rubbish? Nuke them till they glow? How do we treat one another?

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“If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not; how shall ye believe,
if I tell you of heavenly things?”

It is Jesus’s question to Nicodemus who had asked, “how can these things be?” “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” Jesus had said. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven” and “immediately,” John the Divine tells us, “I was in the Spirit.”

Great mysteries are before our very eyes. Trinity Sunday celebrates the great and distinctive teaching of the Christian Faith. It does not celebrate an event. Nor is it about some moral lesson for us to act upon in our lives. It celebrates simply and clearly the mystery of God revealed. That is the great wonder that underlies the whole of reality and the whole meaning of our lives, morally and spiritually, intellectually and practically.

Our Church and culture is dead when it is no longer alive to the mystery of the Trinity. God’s relation to everything else is founded in God himself. We cannot not think the Trinity; to think it is our greatest challenge. The to-and-fro of questions between Nicodemus and Jesus signal the nature of that thinking. It is in the truest sense analogical thinking, thinking upwards, thinking into what has been shown to us, which are not simply earthly things but heavenly things. Being born again is not the monopoly of the charismatic and Pentecostal forms of Christian faith; it is the truth of the Christian faith. We are defined by what God reveals to us: himself, from which everything else derives. Religion is as dead as a door-nail when we think of it in terms of what pleases us or what is useful to us. Our instrumental reason betrays us when we attempt to turn everything into ways and means and deny what has intrinsic worth and value.

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“His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.”

Pentecost marks the birthday of the Christian Church. It inaugurates a new and ever-renewing spiritual community that is born out of the witness of the Scriptures in their fullness. There is the gathering up of the Old Israel into the meaning and reality of the New Israel, the Christian Church.

But what is the meaning of this new creation, this spiritual community? Formed by the coming down of the Holy Spirit, it is guided and directed by the Spirit of God and reminds us of the spiritual nature of all reality, and of ourselves as spiritual creatures who live in a spiritual community and, importantly, of the qualities of our participation in that spiritual community. But what does that mean? It means our active participation in the life of God in the power of God’s spirit.

Our second lesson this evening was once very familiar to everyone because of its being read at times in the Burial Office. Our first lesson, however, may be a little less known and yet is quite profound about the meaning of our lives in the Spirit. Isaiah’s text is the source of the concept of the seven gifts of the Spirit, gifts which have a strong and close connection to the Incarnation, to “the shoot which comes forth from the stump of Jesse,” an image of Christ in the Christian understanding of things, since Jesse is the grand-father of King David, the human lineage from which Jesus’s humanity is understood to be derived. The Spirit of the Lord was anticipated as descending upon the Messiah, the promised one of God.

But what are those gifts of the spirit? Those who were listening carefully and are especially enumerate might have counted only six gifts, there being, it seems, a repetition of “the fear of the Lord.” The Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate traditions use “piety” along with “the fear of the Lord”. The seven gifts of the Spirit are wisdom and understanding, counsel and might (or fortitude), knowledge and piety, and the fear of the Lord.

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

Pentecost celebrates the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples in Jerusalem to give birth to the Christian Church. An event, to be sure, of mystery and wonder, it is also more than an event. It is a teaching, a doctrine, and one which gives rise to our life in the spirit, our life in communion with God.

A Greek word, Pentecost simply signifies the fiftieth day after Easter and commemorates the promise of the Ascension, the coming down of the Holy Spirit, designated as the Comforter or Strengthener. It communicates to us a profound and special reality. The descent of the Holy Spirit gives birth to the Church. That is the special reality, the reality of the spiritual community in which we “live and move and have our being.” We have forgotten, I fear, the radical nature of the Church as a spiritual body and communion. To recover this sensibility and understanding is the constant task but most especially at a time when the meaning and the reality of the Church has been so completely discredited and dismissed by those within and without the churches because it is looked at largely in sociological and political terms. Pentecost teaches us the profound truth that the human community has no unity in itself but only in God, and no truth in itself apart from God.

The story of Pentecost is the story of the redemption of the human community. In ways that deliberately recall the ancient Genesis story of the Tower of Babel, a story understood to be about human presumption as well as a just-so story about the different languages of our humanity, Pentecost celebrates the diversity of tongues and cultures and peoples by making them one. Through the diversity of tongues one thing is heard and understood by all. There is unity in and through diversity. They are one in the praise of God. “We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” Pentecost reverses Babel. One thing is heard in and through the diversity of tongues and cultures; it is the praise of God. Rather than a project of our devising, Pentecost is God’s work. And unlike the work of Creation and Redemption, Pentecost is visible and tangible to us. There is something heard and something seen, “a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind” and “cloven tongues, like as of fire” and wondrous words that are spoken in the things that Jesus says about the Holy Spirit. Nothing is hidden. And we are made very much part of the story. This is all part of its special wonder.

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