Category: Sermons

The Psalms of David are the Prayer Book and Hymnal of both Jews and Christians alike. Classified in the Jewish understanding as one of the Writings, as distinct from the Law and the Prophets, the Psalms embrace a wide range of poetic forms of expression. The Psalter serves as a way of praying the Scriptures.

Among the many treatises of Augustine, one of the most charming and instructive devotionally is his Enarrations or Expositions on the Book of Psalms. For the English reader, it was only translated in the 19^th century as part of the project of recovering the Patristic heritage of the Church, an interest both in England and on the continent. E.B. Pusey, one of the outstanding figures of the Oxford Movement, provided in December of 1857 an advertisement for the translation into English of Augustine’s work on the Psalms. As he remarks,

St. Augustin was so impressed with the sense of the depth of Holy Scripture, that when it seems to him, on the surface, plainest, then he is the more assured of its hidden depth. True to this belief, St. Augustin pressed out word by word of Holy Scripture, and that, always in dependence on the inward teaching of God the Holy Ghost who wrote it, until he had extracted some fullness of meaning from it. More also, perhaps, than any other work of St. Augustin, this commentary abounds in those condensed statements of doctrinal and practical truth which are so instructive, because at once so comprehensive and so accurate.

This doctrinal and practical sensibility about the Psalms means, of course, that they are read in the light of a certain theology of Revelation. They are not read as a mine of historical information and they are not read ‘critically’ as that term has become to be used by the schools of biblical and historical criticism, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are read with a certain insight into the nature of Scriptural Revelation. In Augustine’s case, they are read entirely from a Christian perspective as bearing constant testimony to Jesus as the fulfilling of the Law.

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“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.”

There is an ancient advent tradition about preaching on the Four Last Things: Death and Judgment, Hell and Heaven. The doctrine of the Last Things is called Eschatology. It is a part of the creedal understanding of the Christian Faith. At first glance, it may seem a rather dark and gloomy set of concepts; things that perhaps we would rather not think about at all.

The theme of judgment certainly appears in this Sunday’s gospel and certainly there is a disturbing aspect to it. “Signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars;” Jesus says, “and upon earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.” Such words are apocalyptic, cosmic and cataclysmic and such words are a feature of the advent of Christ. “Then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.” This is, we might say, Luke’s Apocalypse. Yet what is at issue is not simply the idea of the end times or the idea of a cosmic judgment but our attitude and approach to judgment.

The strong message of this Sunday in Advent is that we can look upon these things with hope because of what is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures. Apocalypse means the unveiling of what lies hidden; in short, revelation. The very last book of the New Testament is the Book of the Revelation – the Apocalypse– of St. John the Divine. And far from being a book of predictions about when the end times will come, an interest which has fascinated people down throughout the ages and led to no end of prophecies about days and dates which, of course, as Jesus says, “no one can know,” we are offered an imaginative and brilliant way of thinking things from the perspective of eternity. In a way, that is what is being opened out to view.

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“Their sound went out into all the earth,
and their words unto the end of the world.”

Andrew is the Advent saint. Sometimes his feast day anticipates Advent and at other times, it falls within the first week of Advent, as it does this year. In either case, he begins the cycle of the Church’s commemoration of the Saints throughout the course of the year. And, as always, there is something rich and significant about beginnings.

Andrew is recognized as the patron saint of Scotland and, therefore, of New Scotland, Nova Scotia, as well. Scotland, not to mention Nova Scotia, is a long ways from the land of the New Testament, a long ways from the setting of the story of the calling of the brothers Simon Peter and Andrew, and the brothers Zebedee, James and John, a long ways from the sea of Galilee. It reminds us of the missionary impulse of the Christian faith. Which is not to say that Andrew ever laid eyes on either!

Yet, the spiritual point is clear. Those who follow Jesus become the ones who proclaim Jesus and make him known even “unto the ends of the world.” For much of the first millennium or more, Scotland must often to have seemed to be the very end of the world. Perhaps, too, the same might be said of Nova Scotia. And yet, the word has gone forth on the wings of the saints and carried forward by their witness to Jesus Christ. Critical to that witness, as the readings on this feast day reminds us, is the Scripture. The Feast of Andrew belongs to that pageant of Word and Song which is part and parcel of the Advent of Christ.

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“This man came to Jesus by night”

It is a most intriguing scene. Nicodemus, a learned Pharisee, “a teacher of Israel,” comes to Jesus by night. He is perplexed about who Jesus is. He calls him “Rabbi,” and says that Jesus is “a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him.” There is something compelling about Jesus, about what he does and what he says. And yet, there is something mysterious and perplexing.

At this point in John’s Gospel, there has been really only “the first of the signs which Jesus did,” namely, the miracle at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, the turning of the water into wine. That story is followed by John’s account of the cleansing of the temple which we also heard this morning from Matthew’s Gospel. In John’s Gospel, the story of the cleansing of the temple leads to a discourse about the temple, about its “being destroyed and raised in three days,” meaning, as John says, “the temple of his body,” a reference to the death and resurrection of Christ. John tells us that “many believed in his name when they saw the signs which he did.” It is in that context that Nicodemus then comes to him by night.

The dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus is all about the light in the darkness, the light of God’s truth and the darkness of human hearts. The light, as John makes clear, is judgment, too. “The light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” Yet in the darkness Jesus confronts Nicodemus with the idea of being “born anew,” being born from above, being born upwards into the light of God coming towards us in Jesus. What he is talking about are “heavenly things.” They belong to the challenge of Revelation. Spiritual and heavenly things are made known to us in the pageant of God’s Word and Son. The light of God comes down to lift us up into the light of divine understanding.

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“Then Jesus turned”

Advent Sunday marks a time of renewal, a time of endings and beginnings. There is the Christian tradition of reflecting in the season of Advent on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven. And there is the idea of God’s coming to us in Jesus Christ, which marks the beginning of a new year of grace. The great Advent Collect or prayer captures both these sensibilities: Jesus’ coming , ”visit[ing] us in [the] great humility” of his humble birth in Bethlehem; and Jesus’ “com[ing] again in his glorious Majesty” as Judge and Redeemer.

These endings and beginnings all turn upon one thing: our life in Christ. “Come and see,” Jesus says in the first chapter of John’s Gospel, as part of the dialogue of question and answer with two of the disciples of John the Baptist who, as it turns out, are about to make a transition and become the disciples of Jesus. “What do you seek?” Jesus has asked them, having turned to them as they were following him after hearing John the Baptist’s remarkable pronouncement about Jesus as “the Lamb of God.” They had replied, oddly it may seem with another question, “Rabbi – Master, where dwellest thou?”

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“The night is far spent”

For centuries upon centuries upon centuries the Gospel story read on the First Sunday in Advent was from the 21^st chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel ending with “this is Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth of Galilee.” In the 16^th century, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the principle architect of The Book of Common Prayer, added to the reading the scene that follows in Matthew’s Gospel, the scene of Christ’s cleansing of the Temple. It makes for a most compelling beginning to the Advent season.

We are presented with a wonderful contrast between the joy and delight of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem and the disturbing encounter with what he finds in the heart of the holy city, in the Temple. The spiritual lesson is very clear. It is about light and darkness, the light of Christ’s coming, on the one hand, the darkness of our hearts and souls, on the other hand. We are called to be the temples of the God’s Holy Spirit; instead, we are the thieves of his grace and mercy, preoccupied with our own affairs and neglectful of the things and places of God. Christ comes as the light that shines in the darkness and “the darkness overcame it not.” In other words, the light is greater than the darkness, the power of the good greater than the folly of evil.

This does not lessen the reality of sin and evil. Christ’s advent is divine judgment. His coming is the grace that restores us to what we are called to be. It means that the darkness within each of us, the darkness of sin and evil, has to be named and overcome, just like the “over[throwing] of the tables of the money-changers and the seats of them that sold doves.”

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“The night is far spent”

For a millennium or more the Gospel story on the First Sunday in Advent was a reading from the 21^st chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel ending with “this is Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth of Galilee.” In the 16^th century, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the principle architect of The Book of Common Prayer, added to the reading the scene that follows in Matthew’s Gospel, Christ’s cleansing of the Temple. It makes for a most compelling beginning to the Advent season.

We are presented with a wonderful contrast between the joy and delight of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem and the disturbing encounter with what he finds in the heart of the holy city, in the Temple. The spiritual lesson is very clear. It is about light and darkness, the light of Christ’s coming, on the one hand, the darkness of our hearts and souls, on the other hand. We are called to be the temples of the God’s Holy Spirit; instead we are the thieves of his grace and mercy, preoccupied in our own affairs and neglectful of the things and places of God. Christ comes as the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness overcame it not. In other words, the light is greater than the darkness, the power of the good greater than the folly of evil.

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“Then Jesus turned”

The Sunday Next Before Advent – proxima ante. What a lovely conjunction of prepositions, those little words that give direction and position to words and ideas in  their relation to one another! With the word ‘next’, we have a sense of continuity, as in a series where one thing follows upon another, next being what follows in sequence. With the word ‘before’, we are alerted to the beginnings of something new; in this case, the season of Advent. This Sunday, with its double prepositions of next and before, signals a transition. It is a time of endings and beginnings; a time, too, of renewal.

The endings and beginnings all turn upon one thing: our life in Christ. “Come and see,” Jesus says here in the first chapter of John’s Gospel, as part of the dialogue of question and answer with two of the disciples of John the Baptist who, as it turns out, are about to make a transition and become the disciples of Jesus. “What do you seek?” Jesus has asked them, having turned to them as they were following him after hearing John the Baptist’s remarkable pronouncement about Jesus as “the Lamb of God.” They had replied, oddly it may seem with another question, “Rabbi – Master, where dwellest thou?”

Jesus’ question and statement are the first forms of direct speech by Jesus in John’s Gospel. “What seek ye?” “Come and see.” The first question; the first command. There is something profound and wonderful in these words. They speak at once to the whole pageant of our lives in faith – seeking ultimately what God wants for us which is to be found in our coming and seeing but also in our abiding with Jesus. This has been, we might say, the nature and purpose of the Trinity season. Yet, there is the Advent theme, too, signalled here, at once by John the Baptist, who points out Jesus to us, “Behold, the Lamb of God,” and in the simple but profound moment of Jesus turning to the disciples of John to ask them, “what seek ye?” Advent is about our turning back to the center of our lives but only because the center has turned to us. “Then Jesus turned.”

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“For God created man for incorruption, and made him
in the image of his own eternity”

In the narthex of the Church, in the entrance porch above the second set of doors, there is inscribed the following: “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God”. I wonder how many of you have ever noticed it or have ever wondered what it means. It comes from The Book of Ecclesiastes, the most philosophical book of the Old Testament, a book which belongs to a form of ancient literature known as Wisdom Literature.

There are, of course, many things that escape our attention and many things that puzzle and confuse us. They are often things which are set before us for our reflective consideration. It belongs to our wisdom, collectively and individually, to ponder them. Not every thing is simple and self-evident.

November is the grey month of our remembering. There is the remembering of All Saints’, signaling our vocation in the perfection and unity of our humanity in the Trinity of God. There is the remembering of All Souls’ in our common passing, the mortality which confronts us all. There is the secular or civil remembering of all those who gave their lives in the great conflicts of the 20th century, a bloody and terrible century, for the sake of the rational freedoms of our political and social life, if indeed we are worthy of such things.

These remembrances have in them an inescapably contemplative quality. In one way or another, we contemplate our end; our end, that is to say, in the sense of purpose. What are we here for, individually and collectively? This sense of end or purpose appears in the Scripture readings at this time of the year which have a contemplative quality to them. We are reading from books, either within or without the canonical Scriptures, which are generally known as Wisdom Literature.

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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 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.

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