Category: Sermons

“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart
and knoweth all things”

It is, I think, a great comfort. St. John in his epistle-treatise on love seeks to settle us upon “the one thing needful”, our contemplation of the love of God that dwells in us and the necessity of acting out of that love in our love for one another. Yet, while it is comforting in the biblical and theological sense of strengthening, it is also convicting. It challenges and convicts our hearts.

For where are our hearts? Everywhere except with God because of our excuses. The Gospel story from St. Luke illustrates how our hearts condemn us. There is the invitation to love and there are our refusals of that love.

Excuses, excuses. We all make them. What are they about? Simply our capacity to turn away from God. How? By our turning towards the everyday and the practical, so-called, which is always about our own immediate interests; by our turning, quite literally, to the ground rather than to God. The problem here is not with the world, with the everyday realities of our lives, with the practical necessities of life. No. The problem is with our wills. The question is about our attachments. We are too attached to the wrong things or in the wrong way.

This is a function of the disarray of our hearts. The whole project of the Trinity season and, indeed, of the pilgrimage of our lives in faith is about “setting our loves in order”. We all stand convicted by the Epistle and the Gospel of the forms of our disordered souls. The theological insight here is our experiential reality. Just consider.

If I were to ask you, as I sometimes ask the students in Chapel, how many of you have said to a brother or a sister, a husband or a wife, a mother or a father, or any figure in authority, “I hate you” or, “I kill you” the chances are pretty good that most of you, if you were honest, would have to raise your hands. Even more, if were to ask how many of you have ever thought such things! I argue that we all stand convicted. And what is John telling us? “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.” Guess what, at least in thought and often in word, we are all murderers! If looks and words could kill we would all be dead; even worse, we would all be murderers.

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“God is love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him.”

It is the manifesto of the Trinity Season, and, indeed, of the Christian religion itself. We know it more familiarly, perhaps, in Tyndale’s translation which also remains in the Prayer Book in the sentences for Morning and Evening Prayer. “God is love and he that abideth in love, abideth in God and God in him.” Abiding and dwelling. Same idea.

Well, it must seem that we have gone from Heaven to Hell in short order! Just think, last Sunday we had that marvelous vision of Heaven in the celebration of God as Trinity. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven” and we were allowed to enter into what we were given to see and hear. What was that? A vision of heaven, a vision of worship. The four and twenty elders, symbolic of the witness of the Old Testament to God, and the four living creatures, symbolic of the witness of the four gospels of the New Testament to God in Christ, worship the Trisagion, the thrice-holy God. There is a unity of the Old and the New in the worship of Trinity. How do we know God as Trinity? Through Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son, “the Word made flesh [who] dwelt among us”. There is that word again.

We are to be what we behold. It means being born anew, born into that vision of divine love, the community of the Trinity.

But what do we have in this morning’s gospel? Luke’s powerful parable of Dives and Lazarus juxtaposed with the lessons about love in The First Epistle of St. John. It is a kind of treatise on love. So what is this all about?

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“How can these things be?”

“How can these things be?” asks Nicodemus, not “what’s in it for me.” Therein lies all the difference, the difference between idolatry and true religion. Trinity Sunday is the great counter to all our idolatries, our idolatries of experience, of the practical and of our minds and imaginations.

There is really something quite wonderful about Nicodemus’ question. “How can these things be?” he asks. It is a real question, not unlike Mary’s question, “how shall this be seeing I know not a man?” A question about the Incarnation, Nicodemus’ question belongs to the Trinity. The two are inseparable; they go together, as John’s marvellous gospel reading makes clear.

What is wonderful about Nicodemus’s question is that he is open to the wonder and the marvel of the revelation of God. He is a learned rabbi in Israel. He comes, not openly, but secretly, by night to Jesus to ask him about the meaning of what he has heard and seen about Jesus. What can it possibly mean to be born again, he wonders? Can a man who is old be born again, literally as it were, from his mother’s womb. His initial perplexity has all of the characteristics of a kind of literalism. Jesus response is really quite wonderful. It is about opening out to him the meaning of the spiritual reality of the living God. Such, we might say, is precisely the mystery of the Trinity.

God is Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the holy and blessed Trinity. It is the central and most fundamental teaching of the Christian faith. Not just one doctrine among many, it is the central doctrine which gives coherence and credence to all of the other doctrines of the faith, expressed in the Creed.

What makes Nicodemus’s question so powerful is that it is not a subjective question primarily. He is open to the objective reality of Jesus Christ and to the living God who confronts him in Jesus Christ. It is precisely in this way that Trinity Sunday in the classical readings for this day confronts our modern idolatries of experience, of the practical and of the intellectual.

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“There came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind …
and cloven tongues, like as of fire…”

Pentecost. What does it mean? The fiftieth day after Passover, after Easter. What does it signify? In the Christian understanding, it signifies the Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples to give birth to the Church.

What? Was there no Church before Pentecost? Yes and no. The Church is present yet hidden in the history of Israel as “the People of God,” a people defined by the Law, the Old Testament or Covenant. The Church is present, too, in the Incarnate Christ of the New Testament. But now, at Pentecost, the Church is present and empowered in a new way. How? By the Descent of the Holy Ghost or Spirit, sent from the Father by the Son, sent by the Father in Jesus’ name. A powerful pedigree and a moving and powerful scene. No Trinity. No Church.

Luke tells us about the event of Pentecost. At once exhilarating and strange, we all catch, I think, something of the ecstatic and experiential wonder of the event. “A sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind,” and “cloven tongues, like as of fire,” lighting and resting upon each of the disciples, inspiring them, it seems, for “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues,” the Spirit giving “them utterance,” it seems. A curious, yet awe-inspiring event. Everyone speaking in other tongues – other languages – but all singing from the same song-sheet, all singing “the wonderful works of God.” Somehow the confused babble of the nations has been converted into a unity of praise. That surely is a marvel. But what, really, are we to make of it? At the time, some thought they were drunk!

Peter, in the passage which immediately follows this morning’s lesson, is quick to respond. “These men are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day;” it‘s a long time before happy hour, after all! Yet, it is a curious scene. It seems, well, rather unsettling, and, yet, John tells us in the Gospel that this unsettling Spirit is God the Holy Ghost, the Comforter. Is this what we should expect will happen to us at Pentecost? What does it all mean? What kind of birthday of the Church is this?

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“The end of all things is at hand.”

This might seem rather stern and threatening. The Gospel reading, too, talks about hard things, like persecution and death. But it also tells us about the coming of the Comforter. Somehow, the sense of “the end[ing] of all things” is not just frightening judgement but joy and mercy. Comforting, somehow.

We meet in the Ascension of Christ. I am struck by how relevant and powerful the fundamental creedal principles of the Christian Faith often are with respect to the issues of our post-Christian and post-secular culture. It shouldn’t be surprising, of course, because what we have before us is precisely a way of thinking that empowers and informs a way of living. That is the important insight of the ‘perennial philosophy’ expressed in one way or another in all of the great religions of the world.

In the Christian understanding, the doctrine of the Ascension is especially suggestive and important about our understanding of our humanity and our world. The Ascension signals the completion of the mission of Jesus Christ. He has come forth from the Father and has come into the world and now he leaves the world and returns to the Father. In those motions, we see the comings and goings of God in which there is both revelation and redemption. These comings and goings open out to us a spiritual and intellectual understanding of human life and of the world in which we find ourselves. Christ is not some will ‘o the wisp who comes and goes without reason or purpose.

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“He ascended into heaven”

A creedal teaching, the Ascension of Christ is one of the most overlooked feasts in the life of the Christian Church. Its meaning, however, is quite radical. In a way, it brings to a kind of completion the radical meaning of Christ’s resurrection.

Death and resurrection constitute the fundamental pattern of Christian life but without the Ascension to say that is to say very little. What the Ascension reminds us is our home with God. The Ascension of Christ is about the homecoming of the Son to the Father which establishes our homeland of the spirit. The Fathers of the early Church grasped this point ever so strongly. The Ascension, as Leo the Great puts it, is “the exaltation of our humanity.” In Christ’s Ascension, the heaven of God becomes our homeland.

The Ascension marks the culmination of the Easter Season. It inaugurates a new spiritual outlook, but one which forever remains grounded in the pattern of death and resurrection. We have an end with God and that homeland of the spirit is something which we participate in now through prayer and praise and through the sacraments.

We ascend in the Ascension of Christ. Somehow we are caught up into that heavenly motion. How? Through prayer, the very thing that has brought us to the Ascension of Christ. “We ascend in the ascension of our hearts,“ as Augustine remarks. The Ascension signals the purpose and meaning of Christ’s being with us. Nothing need stand between us and God except the barriers which we create ourselves. Prayer as the lifting up of our hearts places us in the divine will for our humanity and world. He has the whole world in his hands; never more so than at the Ascension when the Son returns to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to the redemption of the world.

It is in prayer and praise that participate in that work of cosmic redemption and are gathered into the heavenly community. We ascend in the Ascension of Christ.

“He ascended into heaven”

Fr. David Curry
Ascension 2011

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“In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world”

Jesus’ words are strong and wonderful words. They capture an important feature of the Christian understanding, one which, perhaps, we have forgotten. The Resurrection changes how we look on the world and on our experiences in the world. The Resurrection is cosmic in scope. The celebration of human redemption equally embraces the idea of the redemption of the world. That is really what is meant by the term ‘overcoming’.

Today is, or was, commonly called Rogation Sunday. Rogation is about asking. Prayer, in its most basic sense, is about asking. To ask for something recognizes that you don’t have something which you need or would like to have. The idea of asking is itself a kind of reality check on the human situation. It recognizes that we are incomplete. Asking means looking to another for what we do not have but want and need. The ultimate Other is God. Asking is a fundamental feature of prayer. And of the possibilities of education, of learning, too. The passionate desire (eros) to know means recognising that you do not know.

Asking is complemented by another fundamental feature of prayer, namely, praise. Prayer and praise are important features of Rogationtide. Prayer is to be understood in a much bigger and broader sense than what we might ordinarily think. Prayer is large in its scope. As Richard Hooker puts it, “prayer signifies all the service we ever do unto God.” In other words, prayer in its largest sense embraces the whole of our lives. Our lives are to be understood as lives of prayer and praise.

The liberating factor is that prayer and praise place us with God. Nothing need stand between us and God. Why not? Because of Christ’s death and resurrection. We are, you might say, freed to God. Prayer and praise are about that freedom.

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“What mean ye by this service?”

It was the Exodus text that framed our Holy Week reflections. But it extends, I think, into our Eastertide meditations, particularly today. What do we mean by this service of Morning Prayer, I wonder?

So much is set before us in the readings and the canticles, the hymns and the prayers. In the ten-second sound bite culture of our consumer world and day, it must seem to be altogether too much. So I want to try to help you understand a little bit of what we are doing in this service and to see if we can’t begin to appreciate what God is doing for us and with us in this service. It is really all about our life with God in the mercies of Jesus Christ.

St. James, in the epistle reading at Holy Communion for today, exhorts us to “receive with meekness the implanted word.” Meekness or humility is about our openness to God’s word. The psalmist notes that “blessed are all they that fear the Lord and walk in his ways” (Ps. 128, vs.1). Fear, of course, means holding God in awe and wonder because God is God, we might say, and far more than we can desire or imagine. In the Scriptural view of things, there is something wonderful about God making himself known to us, about God’s revealing his will and presence to us.  Our first lesson this morning from The Book of Exodus reminds us of both. At issue is whether we are open to his word and will and presence.

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