Category: Sermons

“These things write we unto you, that your joy may be full”

Nowhere is the doctrinal paradox and meaning of Christmas more wonderfully and clearly stated than on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist. He is the theologian par excellence as the early Church recognized. Like the eyes of an eagle soaring high into the sun, John sees most deeply into the mystery of God. We largely see through the eyes of John. His Gospel symbol is the eagle, just as in many of our Churches, the Scriptures are read from an eagle lectern.

His witness and writings enlightened the Church’s understanding of “the light of [God’s] truth” that the Church “walk[ing] in the light of thy truth … may at length attain to the light of everlasting life,” as the Collect puts it. Life and light, just as we heard on Christmas Eve from the Prologue of his Gospel for “in him was life, and the life was the light of men.” This morning we read from his 1st Epistle and from the last Chapter of his Gospel. Beginnings and endings even as the Revelation of St. John the Divine, which might also be reasonably attributed to him, proclaims Jesus as Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending. It is really all about our being gathered into the life and light of God.

What that means for us is signalled in these readings. What is it? It is our joy, the joy of our fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ in the bond of the Holy Spirit. It is from John especially that we learn the meaning of the Incarnation and the Trinity. John teaches us the most about Jesus as the Son of the Father and about the Holy Spirit, sent from the Father in the name of the Son (Jn. 14.26), and sent by the Son from the Father to us (Jn. 15.26). He who is the eternally and only-begotten of the Father, comes from the Father into the world and leaves the world and goes to the Father (Jn 16.28). This exitus, going forth, and reditus, returning, is our joy and our salvation, not the “conversion of the Godhead into flesh,” thus ceasing to be God, but “by taking of manhood into God” (Athanasian Creed, BCP, p. 697). Such is the doctrinal paradox of the Incarnation that Christ is true God and true man.

Something of these deeper theological truths, born out of the writings of John, are signalled to us in these readings this morning. The Uncontainable becomes contained, the uncreated Creator becomes a created being but without the annihilation of either. The distinction of Creator and created, of God and Man is held together in the unity and truth of God. The Epistle emphasizes the very truth of the Word made flesh: “that which was from the beginning” – from the eternity of God – “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled” is nothing less than “the Word of life” to which “we have seen and bear witness,” John says. That life which was manifested, made known, is “eternal life,” made known for our fellowship in that eternal life of the Trinity. That life is light for “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” for this is “the light [that] shineth in darkness, and the darkness overcame it not.”

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“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

The three holy days of Christmas illuminate the deeper mystery of Christmas in striking ways. The Feast of St. Stephen today celebrates the protomartyr or first martyr of the Christian Church, Stephen, whose life and death mirror the life and death of Christ, especially the idea of loving sacrifice and forgiveness. Stephen, one of the first deacons of the emerging Church, is stoned to death because he followed what was at first known only as The Way. Like Christ, as the Collect puts it, he “prayed for his murderers to thee, O blessed Jesus.” His words, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge,” as Acts puts it, echo Christ’s first word from the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” perhaps the most gentle and yet most compelling rebuke of our sinful humanity in the whole of the Scriptures. And, perhaps, the only feature of St. Stephen’s Day readings which connect to the more usual sentiments and feelings of the Christmas season which otherwise this feast counters and challenges.

Yet the feast of Stephen is embedded in our Western Christian imaginary more likely through the 19th century hymn by the English priest John Mason Neale. It is based on a poem by the Czech poet Vaclav Svaboda’s retelling of a 10th century legend about Wenceslaus, the Duke of Bohemia (not a king!). The hymn is set to a tune Tempest Adest Floridum found in a 16th century collection of 74 medieval Latin songs that were popular in Scandinavia, a collection known in its abbreviation as Piae Cantiones. Wenceslaus, at once an historical and mythological figure, is the only medieval ruler to be mentioned in any of the carols of Christmas and as obscure as he and Bohemia might seem to us, the carol has captured the Christian imagination. Strange to say, it is one of the better known carols. It is probably the only way that people even know about the Feast of Stephen rather than Boxing Day!

What John Mason Neale does with the poem and story is to extend the idea of Stephen’s Christian witness to the idea of sacrifice in service. In this case, Good King Wenceslaus looks out the window of his palace and sees a poor man “gath’ring winter fuel” and undertakes to help him by bringing him food and wine. All on the Feast of Stephen. Wenceslaus and his page or servant make the arduous journey to his dwelling near St. Agnes’ fountain despite “the rude wind’s wild lament and the bitter weather.” His page finds the going hard and thinks he “can go no longer.” Wenceslaus bids him tread in his own footsteps. He is determined to help the poor and needy. Wenceslaus is himself, of course, walking in the steps of Christ even as Stephen’s life and death mirror the way of Christ. Lovely images and associations.

There is even more to the symbolic significance of St. Stephen’s Day for our deeper understanding of the wonder and mystery of Christ’s birth. It is captured in T.S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral. There the 12th century Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket, caught up in what is known as the Investiture Controversy about the relation and respective powers of Church and State, was someone King Henry II saw as a ‘troublesome priest’. “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” He is supposed to have said. Some of his knights, hearing this, took it upon themselves to murder the Archbishop at the altar in Canterbury.

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“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord”

In the Christian imaginary, Bethlehem is a crowded scene of symbolic significance. How much, we might say, is imagined and created out of what seems so little in terms of detail and information? There is not much data about Bethlehem but so much more in the way of symbol and significance. “This shall be a sign unto you,” the Angel says to the Shepherds and to us in the quiet of Christmas Morn. The sign of the birth of “a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord” is the babe “wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger,” born this day in the city of David, Bethlehem.

Luke uses the word manger three times in this chapter. Along with the fact that “there was no room for them in the inn,” the word manger contributes to the classical and traditional imagery of the nativity scene. But there is a deeper theological point that we hear only on Christmas Eve from John’s Prologue: “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” It signals the theme of our rejection or denial of the good.

The story of Christ’s birth in the humble circumstances of a manger or stall, meaning “a long open box or trough in a stable for horses or cattle to eat from” (OED), makes no mention of a stable or barn nor any direct mention of animals. But the word manager, (οατνη), in contrast to an inn or lodging (καταλυμα), points to the humble and lowly circumstances of Christ’s birth and thus to the realities of our finite world of limitations and hardships, of sin and evil. His birth embraces the conditions of our humanity in its various forms of brokenness or incompleteness. He does not come in power and with great glory understood in terms of worldly expectations. He comes as Saviour to redeem our finite and fallen world.

The point is that Christ’s birth confounds all our human expectations even as it reveals the deeper wisdom of the Scriptures in their interplay and interconnection about God’s purpose for our humanity. The animals associated in holy imagination with the Bethlehem scene come from the Angelic message to the Shepherds who will make their way to “see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.” From that will come a whole menagerie of animals and angels along with, finally, the Magi-Kings; all of which symbolize the whole of humanity and creation as gathered to God. What is that really all about except a profound sense of Bethlehem as paradise restored, an image of the hope of heaven, of salvation which is not a flight from the world or creation but its redemption and restoration? We make the mistake, as Flannery O’Connor has put it, of “domesticating divinity,” conforming God to ourselves and our comforts and expectations, as if Christ’s incarnation is little more than an affirmation of ourselves in our various identities and existential anxieties. We get it backwards. “Be ye not conformed to the world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds” on the things of God revealed to us in the witness of the Scriptures and by our reasoning upon them. Christ comes to redeem us from ourselves and to restore us to the truth of ourselves as known in God’s eternal knowing and loving of us.

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“In him was life, and the life was the light of men”

What does it mean to celebrate Christmas in a post-Christian culture? Is it simply nostalgia? Is it our longing for an imaginary golden age which, of course, never was? Is it our holding to traditions and customs simply out of sentiment and feeling? George Steiner’s 1974 Massey Lecture, Nostalgia for the Absolute, points to a deeper kind of longing, one which belongs more profoundly to the mystery of Christmas. It is the human longing for God in whom is the life and the light of our humanity.

He examines three nineteenth century substitutes for the Christian religion in terms of Freudian psychology, Marxist economics, and the social anthropology of Claude Leví-Strauss, all of which sought to take the place of religion, especially the Christian religion, as the overarching narrative or story that embraces and explains our lives. All failed, he notes, but left in their wake a vacuum into which all manner of fancies and fantasies have rushed in. Their legacy is very much with us in the various pseudo-religions of contemporary secular culture, even within and without the churches, despite the postmodernist claim of “incredulity towards all metanarratives”(Lyotard). They are all the parodies of true religion and liturgy, especially of the Christian liturgy, and belong to the competing claims and confusions about the self. But as parodies, they point us to the deeper mystery of Christmas which they presuppose.

Dame P.D. James, the great British mystery writer, in her novel The Children of Men, written in 1992, speaks with great insight about our current world. The novel is set in the future; 2021, in fact, and thus speaks very much to our present. “Western science has been our God,” she notes. This we know only too well in our techno-utopian optimism which thinks that salvation lies in technology and in our technocratic culture, utterly unaware of how this way of thinking is itself a problem. In the novel, this dominant scientific outlook finds itself utterly confounded by a barren world of universal infertility. There are no children, no prospect of life, only a world of the terminally ill. Such is the culture of death, a culture which is anti-life. Our culture.

The entire novel touches upon almost every moral and social issue of our time: from reproductive technology to euthanasia, from immigration to health care. The impotence of the human race humiliates “the very heart of our faith in ourselves.” Confidence in science and belief in the endless progress of humanity is shattered by the encounter with the stark reality of an absolute limit; mortality in the form of the empty womb. The womb has become a tomb. But the real barrenness is the emptiness of our souls.

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“I am not the Christ”

The season and doctrine of Advent reaches a crescendo of intensity and expectation on the Fourth Sunday in Advent and illumines already for us the radical meaning of the Advent of God coming to us in Christ. It does so by the dance of negation and affirmation at once about ourselves and about God.

The Epistle reading from Philippians is at once an affirmation of what comes to us: “the Lord is at hand;” but it is also a negation of our anxieties and fears and worries as we scuttle around busily trying to do more with less in our preparations for Christmas. “In nothing be anxious,” Paul bids us, calling us to moderation or temperance in a time of excess and to prayer with thanksgiving “in everything,” highlighting the radical meaning of Christ’s coming as “the peace of God which passeth all understanding,” for it is not and cannot be of our making, nor is it about what is coming so much as it is about what has already happened and which is the absolute cause and reason of our rejoicing, regardless of the circumstances and events in our world of darkness and despair, of the distress of nations and the sorrows of so many broken hearts. Here is the peace and the healing of God: “Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, rejoice.” The Advent of God to us is the Lord himself; Christ Jesus is Saviour. That and that alone is the counter to our fears and anxieties. It is the greater affirmation that overthrows the empty nothingness of our hearts and world. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

The Gospel makes this wonderfully clear in the dance of negation and affirmation in terms of the figure of John the Baptist. We don’t pay enough attention to this Gospel known as the witness of John. Yet it heightens the deeper meaning of the mystery of Christmas, transforming the emotions and sentiments of this time of year into a deeper understanding. “The Jews,” John the Evangelist, the theologian par excellence as the early Church recognized and which we forget, tells us “sent Priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou?” It is the first time in John’s Gospel that Jerusalem is mentioned, alerting us already to the trajectory of Christian contemplation around the two centers of Bethlehem and Jerusalem in a kind of ellipse. There is, it seems, a questioning, a seeking among the world of Israel, that focuses here on the strange and compelling figure of John the Baptist. It is as if they have a sense of something important and impending that sends them out of the city and into the wilderness in a kind of holy questioning.

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“Art thou he that should come?”

The voice of one crying in the wilderness cries out from the wilderness of prison. It is the voice of John the Baptist, identified in the Gospel and the Collect as the messenger sent by God to prepare the way of Christ before him. He is, as Jesus says, a prophet and yet more than a prophet. His ministry signals the nature of the ministry of the Christian Church as belonging to the Advent of God and to the radical meaning of God’s coming to us. The ministry, too, belongs to the doctrine and the season of Advent.

What is that ministry? The task and vocation of “the ministers and stewards of the mysteries of Christ” is to prepare and make ready his way in us. How? By “turn[ing] the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just.” And that is exactly why John is in prison. Both Matthew and Mark give us the fuller story elsewhere in their Gospels about why John in prison sends two of his disciples to ask Jesus the great Advent question, “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” “Who is this?” all the city of Jerusalem asked as we heard on the first Sunday in Advent in the Gospel reading inserted into our Canadian Prayer Book. The questions of Advent belong to the doctrine of Advent. It is about nothing less and nothing more than our awakening and being opened to what comes from God to us.

Advent is our watching and waiting upon the motions of God’s love coming to us in a variety of registers: there is God’s Word coming in Law and Prophecy, in judgement and mercy, in mente and in carne, in mind and in flesh. It is all about what comes from God to us, on the one hand, and our being awakened to its meaning, on the other hand. What is that awakening in us? It is the awareness of our need for something more than ourselves, our awareness of the sin and darkness in us that stands in the way of the good which we rightly seek but do not have of ourselves. This is all part and parcel of what will be known as “the witness of John” whose ministry is essential to the life and mission of the Church as nothing less and nothing more than the body of Christ and to the possibilities of his life in us. Repentance and rejoicing go together on this day, sometimes known as Gaudete Sunday. The term, “rejoice,” refers to the ancient introit of the Mass taken from Philippians which is the Epistle reading for next Sunday.

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“My words shall not pass away”

“We have here no continuing city,” Hebrews reminds us, “but we seek one to come.” In a litany of figures from the history of Israel, that is what “those who died in faith,” he says, looked for but did not receive, though trusting in the promises of God. What they ultimately looked for was not simply a return to the promised land after exile, he suggests, for “now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly.” I have been thinking about these words in relation to today’s readings because they belong to the strong doctrine of the Scriptures and to a way of thinking the Scriptures, a way of reasoning through the signs to the things signified.

The Scriptures are what Paul here identifies as “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” He is actually speaking about the Hebrew Scriptures but the idea extends to the whole of the Scriptures, to what Christians understood several centuries later as the Old Testament and the New Testament, or simply the Bible. The Bible is really a library of books written over a vast range of years and centuries by many different hands and in many different voices. What gives the Hebrew Scriptures a kind of unity? Even more, what gives the Bible in its various forms a unity? I think Paul’s sensibility is deeply true, “they were written for our learning,” literally for teaching in the Greek, for our doctrine in the Latin.

What thunders forth to us on the Second Sunday in Advent is the profound idea, first, that things are written for a purpose, and, second, that the purpose is our learning. It is the idea of things being made known that are capable in some sense or other of being grasped by us. Therein lies the challenge and the necessity of thinking the Scriptures, pondering the images through which we enter into an understanding of the things of God. What thunders forth in today’s Gospel is the powerful idea that the words of God “shall not pass away.” They are eternal. What does that mean except that through the passing forms of human thought and experience, through the ups and downs of history, something everlasting and universal is known for thought? “That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.”

The theology of the Epistle and Gospel is captured in Cranmer’s Collect. It expresses a fundamental truth not only for Anglicans but for orthodox Christians in every age. It speaks to the centrality of the Scriptures for the understanding of the Faith and for the hope that the Scriptures open to us, “the blessed hope of everlasting life,” the idea that we are made “partakers of the divine nature,” citizens of “an heavenly city” all the while we are “strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” It articulates an essential attitude of approach to the reading of the Scriptures: “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.”

The Scriptures have come down to us through traditions of interpretation which are based upon this principle of the centrality of the Scriptures. But insofar as they are for thought, there is the necessity of our engagement with them. What is that engagement? It is our seeking to enter into the meaning of what is written and proclaimed. That doesn’t mean that the Scriptures are simply there for us to interpret in any way we might choose, as if, proverbially, the Scriptures were but a nose of wax to be twisted and turned in whatever fashion at any time. Or to put it in modern parlance, there is ‘your truth’ and there is ‘my truth,’ and hence no truth, or the reduction of the Scriptures to ‘this is what it means to me.’ That leads really to a kind of meaninglessness.

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Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, Meek and sitting upon an ass

This Advent Gospel challenges all our assumptions about Advent. It is the story familiar to you from Palm Sunday, the story of Christ’s ‘triumphant’ entry into Jerusalem. Yet it signals the deeper meaning of Advent, not just as the season of penitential adoration and preparation for Christmas, which it certainly is, but even more in terms of the doctrine of Advent as the Revelation that holds all things together in the mind and heart of God.

Jesus comes as King, stepping into the expectations of Zechariah’s joyous prophecy about the coming of a Messiah, the anointed one, the Christ. He comes as King but what a strange kind of kingship! He comes without any of the trappings of military and worldly power. He comes, gentle and meek, sitting upon an ass, and the colt the foal of an ass. He does not come in worldly pomp and glory, but in the gentle humility of Zechariah’s vision and hope.

And yet as Zechariah goes on to say, he comes to “command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea”, the motto of Canada, we might note. But what is this kingship and peace, what is this dominion? It completely overturns all our assumptions about power and might and authority. Yet this Gospel inaugurates Advent. It highlights the more radical meaning of Advent as the constant coming of God to us, the Word of God in Law and Prophecy, in Gospel and Service. He comes as Light and Life, and ultimately, as “the Word made flesh”. It is all about what comes to us in the darkness of our world and day. Advent quite simply is God’s Word and very Person who is always coming to us. We can only enter into the meaning of what we see and hear. Advent recalls us to the truth of our lives as found in God.

This is the great joy of this scene. The multitudes sense that something special is happening even if they are unclear about what it means. Hosannas are sung. Branches are cut down from the trees and spread in the way. A procession, to be sure, but hardly much in the way of something regal and astounding, not much in the way of all that jazz.

Yet “all the city was moved, saying, who is this?” It seems that some of the people of Israel pick up on Zechariah’s imagery but not everyone. Here is the first of the great Advent questions that belong to Advent as Revelation. “The multitude said, This is Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth of Galilee”. Bethlehem and Nazareth are all part of the Christmas story, to be sure, which includes references to Jerusalem, but the Jesus who comes as “Thy King” is the King of all Creation. He is God of God and God with us; something which we can only come to know by attending to the pageant of the everlasting Advent of God coming towards us.

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“Where dwellest thou?”

Endings and beginnings are times of transition. We come to the end of the Trinity season and thus to the beginning of a new Church year in Advent. The title for this day with its collection of prepositions highlights this: The Sunday Next Before Advent. But the transition is not simply about going from one thing to another in a kind of linear progression or as trapped in an endless and futile cycle like squirrels in a cage. While this transition maps onto the changes in the natural world, at least for us in the western hemisphere in the twilight of nature’s year, there is something more that we behold. It speaks to the constant conversion of our souls, to the fundamental activities of our life in Christ in terms of the interplay of paradise and wilderness that shapes the meaning of the Christian pilgrimage.

“The way up and the way down are one and the same”, Heraclitus states. What that means for us by way of another metaphor is a constant circling around the principle of all life and light, God. This is the radical meaning of repentance, our “turning back to find, in the end what is really our beginning”. In this sense it is a return to paradise but in that return something changes because we come to know it for the first time. It is equally our end, “to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time”, as T.S. Eliot beautifully puts it. That is to know our beginning as our end, and thus as something more. It means a new change in us; in melius renovabimur, as Augustine says, “we shall be changed into something better.”

Eliot’s East Coker poem in the Four Quartets begins with the phrase, “in my beginning is my end” and concludes with the phrase, “in my end is my beginning”. It is a wonderful reflection upon this idea of the interplay of beginnings and endings. And it is not by accident that the Matins Old Testament reading for today is from Ecclesiastes: “the end of the matter; all has been heard, Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccles. 12. 13).

The wilderness is the place of law, of learning. The Epistle reading from Jeremiah highlights the theme of justification, of what is learned in the wilderness both by way of reference to the Exodus and to the Babylonian Exile. Yet in both cases there is a looking to paradise. In the wilderness journey there are those moments when wilderness is transformed into paradise such as the manna from on high and the stricken rock out of which pours the healing water; wilderness as paradise.

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“An attentive ear is the wise man’s desire”

It is, as Shakespeare puts it, “that time of year when yellow leaves or few or none do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”. His words are suggestive and belong to one of the most important and yet most neglected aspects of our humanity, remembering. November is the grey month of our remembering, a remembering of our end in God in the Communion of Saints; in short, our vocation as the children of God. Yet this includes our remembering too of the harsh and hard realities of sin and evil, of war and destruction signalled by Remembrance Day last Monday. It is really a kind of secular All Souls’ day.

“Bare ruin’d choirs”. It could be a metaphor for what T.S. Eliot called the Waste Land, the waste land of modernity following upon the carnage of the First World and its legacy of death and destruction that continues to haunt us. Shakespeare may be alluding to the literal ruins of the choirs of the English monasteries through their dissolution by Henry VIII between 1536 and 1541, the confiscation of church properties by the State. But he is also reflecting on the passage of time, of aging, of the personal realities of dying and death. Momento mori, a remembering of our common mortality is an important feature of what belongs to our humanity. It is not simply morbid and negative but reflective in the sense that it opens us out to something more and something greater. At least that is the kind of holy remembering that is set before us in this time of endings and beginnings. They recall us to what is eternal and abiding even in the face of the sins and evils of ourselves and our world. A remembering which is ultimately restorative and healing.

“But remember – for that’s my business to you”, Ariel says in a famous scene in The Tempest that seeks to convict the consciences of “ye three men of sin”: Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian. They are meant to remember how they sought the harm of Prospero and Miranda, having usurped Prospero’s dukedom of Milan. Yet, as Ariel indicates, this remembering which is a calling to account is “nothing but heart’s sorrow”, meaning repentance, “and a clear life ensuing”. In the judgement there is mercy and truth, grace and hope through the greater power of forgiveness. This is the same point that Luke is making in this morning’s second lesson.

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