Category: Sermons

“I saw a light above the brightness of the sun”

Saul, the Persecutor of the Way – it wasn’t even known as Christianity at this point – becomes Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. As with the idea of the Epiphany itself, the Gospel goes viral through Paul’s conversion; it becomes for all peoples everywhere. The Conversion of St. Paul is a signal moment in the break-out of the Gospel to the whole world.

With the Conversion of St. Paul, the Gospel of Jesus Christ first captures the world’s attention, for he will take it to Caesar, as it were; second, it captures the world’s imagination, for his writings form not only such a large part of what we call the New Testament but also provide much of the impetus towards the possibility of a Canon of Sacred Texts; and third, it captures the hearts of the world’s people for all times and in all places. Something of the Conversion of St. Paul moves in the conversion of the nations, in the conversion of souls in every age, and even more, in that re-consecration of heart and soul to the things of Christ at times of reform and renewal.

Paul tells us about his conversion, not just once, not even twice, but actually three times. But before we complain that seems somewhat excessive, let us remember that we find these accounts, not in his hand, but in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, from the hand of another, probably Luke. The poet/preacher John Donne reminds us of the observation of Chrysostom and Jerome that “the Book is called the Acts of the Apostles; but…it might be called the Acts of St. Paul, so much more is it conversant about him, then [sic] all the rest”.

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“They found him in the Temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors,
both hearing them, and asking them questions.”

Epiphany is, par excellence, the season of teaching. It begins with the Magi-Kings bearing gifts to the Child Christ, gifts that primarily teach; “sacred gifts of mystic meaning,” as one of the hymns puts it. And then, there is this Gospel story, the only Gospel story about the boyhood of Jesus. He is found in the Temple in Jerusalem by his parents. He is with the doctors, the teachers of the Law. He is both listening and asking questions and providing answers. He is at once both student, humanly speaking, and teacher, divinely speaking. Epiphany is about what God makes known to us through the humanity of Jesus Christ.

This Gospel story challenges us about education. It does so from within the meaning of the story of the Epiphany itself which is primarily about adoration, a concept which we have, perhaps, lost or forgotten in our contemporary culture and which then affects how we think about education, about teaching. Education, too, is often described as a kind of journey, an adventure in learning, and so forth. But what kind of journey?

There is a journey to be sure, the journey to and from Bethlehem by the Magi-Kings. And there is a journey to Jerusalem and, ultimately, back to Nazareth in the Gospel story of Christ teaching in the Temple.

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“Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof,
but speak the word only and my servant shall be healed.”

Mean thoughts, mean words and mean deeds result in a mean world of mean people. How great the contrast with healing words and deeds that arise from healing thoughts?

Words can make or break our day. A word spoken in kindness and truth can build us up and encourage us. A word spoken in disdain and hate can unsettle and disturb us.

Here is an Epiphany story of two miracles. It is simply about the power and the truth of the Divine Word which challenges us about our thoughts, our words and our deeds.

Two miracles. Miracles, we have suggested are part of the teaching programme of the Epiphany season. They belong to God’s will and purpose for our humanity, to our being able to take delight and find joy in one another and in God’s world. All the healing miracles of the Gospel point to that picture of the restoration and perfection of our humanity. They signal the idea of creation redeemed and sanctified. But only through the encounter with Christ. Only through the manifestations of his essential divinity communicated through his perfect humanity.

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“This beginning of signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee
and manifested forth his glory and his disciples believed on him.”

Epiphany is the season of teaching, we have said. It is, also, it seems the season of miracles. Epiphany abounds with the miracles of Jesus. Is there a connection? Yes. The miracles teach. They belong to what is being made manifest, to what is being made known to us about who Jesus is and what he means for us. Importantly, the miracles reveal God’s will and purpose for our humanity.

Yet, miracles may trouble us. Some have thought of them as being little more than the stuff of superstition and nonsense. Thomas Jefferson, for example, in the almost typical exuberance and arrogance of the reason of the Enlightenment, took his scissors to the New Testament and cut out of it all the miracles, leaving merely a kind of core of moral teaching as he thought. But this, I am afraid, to have missed the whole point of the miracles. Without them we miss the greater story of God’s will and purpose for our humanity and our world. After all, as theologians like Augustine pointed out long ago, the great miracle is the miracle of creation itself to which the miracles recall us in one way or another.

The miracle stories of the New Testament open us out to the truth of God as Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier and, perhaps, nowhere do we see that more clearly and more profoundly in this Gospel story of the Wedding Feast at Cana of Galilee where Jesus turned the water into wine. John tells us, and it is something he is at pains to tell us, that this was “the beginning of signs” which Jesus did, the first of the miracles as it were. I think he wants us to appreciate how much this Gospel story makes manifest – there is that Epiphany word again – the true meaning of all the miracle stories.

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“They found him in the Temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors,
both hearing them, and asking them questions.”

Epiphany is, par excellence, the season of teaching. It begins with the Magi-Kings bearing gifts to the Child Christ, gifts that primarily teach; “sacred gifts of mystic meaning,” as one of the hymns puts it. And then, on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, we have this Gospel story, the only Gospel story about the boyhood of Jesus. He is found in the Temple in Jerusalem by his parents. He is with the doctors, the teachers of the Law. He is both listening and asking questions and providing answers. He is at once both student, humanly speaking, and teacher, divinely speaking. Epiphany is about what God makes known to us through the things of humanity.

This Gospel story challenges us about education. It does so from within the meaning of the story of the Epiphany itself which is primarily about adoration, a concept which we have, perhaps, lost or forgotten in our contemporary culture and which then effects how we think about education, about the teaching. T.S. Eliot’s marvelous poem, The Journey of the Magi, begins with an arresting quote from the 17^th century preacher and divine, Lancelot Andrewes.

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long  journey;
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.

Eliot goes on to reflect on the nature of the journey, talking about the hardships of the way, “the camels galled, sore-footed and refractory,” though the biblical account makes no mention of any camels, about the recalcitrance and uncertainty of the servants, and about the unfriendly reception in the towns and cities along the way; in short, “a hard time we had of it,” referring to the journey. About that journey, he says,

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?…

He reflects on the ambiguities of life and death that somehow belong to the uncertainties of the journey. Birth and Death. Our lives, too, are often described and spoken about as being a kind of journey. But what kind of journey? Education, too, is often described as a kind of journey, an adventure in learning, and so forth. But, again, what kind of journey?

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“They presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh”

The tradition of giving gifts at Christmas time originates with the coming of the Magi to the Child Christ in Bethlehem. From the three gifts comes the idea of the three magi from the East, from Anatolia. They are the proverbial come-from-aways. They are the original truth-seekers. They come having followed a star. They have come seeking the light of truth and led by that light they have come to Christ.

But they have not come empty-handed. They have come bearing gifts to the one who is the greatest gift of all. Love, suggests Aquinas, is in the nature of a first gift through which all other gifts are given. But what about the gifts of the Magi?

These are gifts which teach us about the nature of gift-giving. They are not exactly useful gifts – like socks and mittens, scarves and mufflers or like the useful gifts at a baby shower, diapers and wipes, soft blankets and towels. Beyond the useful gifts that we give to one another there are the useless gifts, the gifts that honour the one to whom they are given. In a way, the three gifts of the Magi are really useless gifts, gifts that essentially teach us about the meaning of the One to whom they are given.

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“But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”

I love this passage from St. Luke’s gospel. Not just at Christmas but as a maxim for the life of the Church, year in and year out. And how wonderful that it is heard, year in and year out, on New Year’s Day, at the ending of one civil year and the beginning of another! How perplexing though that what is kept and pondered in the heart of Mary is connected with what must seem to be a most arcane and disturbing event, the circumcision of Christ.

The rite is associated with what it means to be Jewish. In the context of the Gospel, it is intended to be understood in terms of Christ’s submission to the Law, the Torah, in its particular forms. An allegiance and loyalty to what is transcendent and utterly beyond the phenomenal world is signaled in the flesh, in what is simply most, well, there is no getting around it, most male. Intriguingly, in more modern times, until very recently, the medical profession, especially in North America, tried to provide medical reasons for the practice.

This misses the point historically and religiously from the standpoint of ancient Israel and contributes very little to the metaphorical transformation that circumcision undergoes via the New Testament, especially through Paul. The circumcision of the heart, he argues, is what is necessary for our true commitment to God, not simply some questionable surgical procedure, about which there continues to be debate within and without Judaism, a debate which is only heightened by the disturbing and hideous matter of female genital mutilation in Arabic countries closely associated with the aspects of African tribalism. There is simply no getting around these things in the contemporary culture. There is, instead, the need to think through them and beyond them but in a way that does complete justice to the foundational principles of Christianity and Judaism and Islam.

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“These were redeemed from among men,
being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb”

It is a compelling and yet a most disturbing Christmas story but, like the other festal days of Christmas, it reflects upon the deeper meaning of Christ’s holy birth. Unlike the commemorations of St. Stephen and St. John, however, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, as this day has come to be called, actually belongs to the narratives of the nativity.

Like so many biblical passages, the story is multi-layered. It is, on the one hand, an account of the fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy about the Messiah. “Out of Egypt have I called my son,” locating the Flight into Egypt in terms of a New Testament riff on the Exodus story of Pharaoh’s policy of infanticide as a way of controlling the minority worker population of the Hebrews within Egypt. Here it takes on a further political aspect: Herod’s fear of a child-king who would be a rival to his throne.

Joseph takes Mary and the child Christ into Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath and fury but “out of Egypt” Jesus the Son will return to Nazareth and beyond to bring redemption to all people just as Moses led the people of the Hebrews out of the Pharonic captivity and into the wilderness to become the people of God, the people of the Law. On that score alone it is a powerful narrative and unfolds before our eyes something of the Christian understanding of divine Providence at work in and through the Scriptures.

It is, on the other hand, a powerful story about the meaning of redemption in the face of the most horrible sufferings and loss that is imaginable; the slaughter of little children. The Collect takes our breath away with its incredible insight that “thou madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths.” It is for many utterly unthinkable, a most disturbing claim that unsettles us and makes us most uncomfortable. I fear that for some this story and the theological idea expressed in the Collect is so revolting that they become atheists. The scene, even as told in the restrained language of Matthew, is such an affront to our conceptions of justice, especially divine justice. How revolting and impossible to say, at least at first glance, that children were made to die for Christ’s glory!

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“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you”

No one more fully conveys the deep wonder and mystery of Christmas than John the Evangelist commemorated on the second day after Christmas. The Prologue of his Gospel has been the great Christmas gospel for more than a millennium and a half; his epistles, too, provide the most theological apologia for the essential doctrine that Christmas celebrates, namely, the doctrine of the Incarnation.

From the blood-soaked ground of Stephen’s martyrdom we rise on eagles’ wings to the contemplative vision of John. It is his insight into what we see and hear that makes the Christmas mystery. The theological insight of John informs most profoundly what comes to be the Church’s creedal proclamation. This child is “the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light; Very God of Very God; Begotten not made.” Such creedal statements echo the words of John at Christmas. Without doubt such statements are the fruit of a theological reflection upon John’s witness. “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you,” he says. And that which has been seen and declared to us is “that which was from the beginning,” a phrase which captures at once the opening phrase of his Gospel, itself a commentary on the opening statement of The Book of Genesis. “In the beginning God”… “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

In the epistle reading for his Christmas feast day, “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life” is the essential revelation of the Word made flesh. And like the Christmas gospel, the purpose of this holy understanding is also revealed, namely, “that ye also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” The essential Christmas message is about God with us.

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“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. … Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.”

Nothing concentrates the meaning of Christmas more directly and more disturbingly, perhaps, than the Feast of St. Stephen celebrated on the day after Christmas. He is commemorated as the first martyr, the proto-martyr, whose witness, for that is the proper meaning of martyr, namely, witness, is the prototype, the model of all martyrdom. As the lesson from The Book of the Acts of the Apostles makes abundantly clear, Stephen achieves his eponymous crown (stephanos in Greek means crown) by losing his life not simply at the stone-throwing hands of a vicious mob but by losing himself in Jesus Christ. He has taken the Christ whose holy birth we have just celebrated as the model of life itself, the life of forgiveness. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit… Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” Suddenly, the Christmas mystery illumines the mystery of the Passion of Christ and vice versa.

Following Christ is our Christian vocation. The Feast of Stephen opens out to us the radical nature of that following. It is to let the life of Christ define your outlook and being. More poignantly, it is to let the essential element of sacrifice and forgiveness have complete rule and sway. The Feast of Stephen is one of the three holy days of Christmas that open out to us the radical meaning of Christ’s holy birth. Human redemption comes with a price, the heart-blood of the Son of God become the Son of Man. Our witness, too, necessarily means sacrifice … and forgiveness.

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