Category: Sermons

“For now we see in a glass darkly.”

Love without truth is empty sentimentality while truth without love is simply death.  Love is not simply an emotion or a feeling. In Paul’s great hymn of love we enter into a tradition of reflection about love which reaches back to Plato and ahead to the theology of amor which shapes Christian culture in its medieval and modern expressions. In a way, Paul’s 13^th chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians is the Christian manifesto about love as the foundational principle of the Christian religion. What he identifies here are the great theological virtues of faith, hope and charity or love. These three, the greatest of which, he says, is love.

They are the trinity of virtues, you might say, that signal God’s grace as the moving force and principle that seeks our good. They are the virtues which belong to the spiritual perfection of our humanity, the virtues that are about our life in Christ. Why is love the greatest of these? Because love joins faith and hope, uniting what is known with what is hoped for.

In a way, love is about our participation now, however imperfectly, in the realities of God’s life of love, the community of the Trinity. That is the truth of our fellowship. Without it we are nothing. “If I have not love,” Paul says, “I am nothing.” The Collect reminds us that this is Jesus’ teaching. “All our doings without charity are nothing worth,” and that charity or love is “the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee.” There is such a thing as being dead right; in other words, right but dead, because love is missing.

For “we see in a glass darkly,” meaning imperfectly and unclearly. Our vision and our understanding is limited; human love, too, on its own terms, is limited and incomplete. Where there is no clarity, there is no charity, too. The challenge of our lives is to see more clearly and to love more dearly. It takes a journey. It is the journey of our souls into the heart of God.

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“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart,
having heard the word, keep it and bring forth fruit with patience.”

The gospel which orders our understanding on this day is the parable of the sower and the seed. It focuses our thoughts on the quality of the ground upon which the Word of God is sown. The cultivation of the ground, however, immediately recalls us to the story of the Fall in this morning’s first lesson. The ground is cursed. Adam, who signifies our humanity collectively and individually speaking, is told “cursed is the ground because of you, in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” The ground is cursed because Adam and Eve succumbed to the beguiling wisdom of the serpent and thus lost the ground of their standing with God (pun intended). The ground of creation becomes the place of our alienation from God.

In a delightful image, the Lord God is said to have “walked in the garden in the cool of the day”, but where were we? We had hidden ourselves from his presence in the fearful beginnings of an awareness of our self-willed separation from him. It is important to understand something of what this means.

The story of the Fall seeks to explain the origin of sin and evil, of suffering and death. It locates the problem not in the material universe but in the disobedience of our humanity. As disobedience, it is an act of the will against what is known as good. Creation as a whole and in its individual parts is emphatically and unambiguously declared to be “good”; in fact, “very good.” The commandment given to us – it is only to humans that a commandment can be given – is also by definition good. It is implicitly known as good.

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“Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you”

The kingdom of heaven is imaged as God’s vineyard – not the Ste. Famille vineyard, not the vineyards of Grand Pré, not your vineyard, not my vineyard but God’s vineyard. It is a nice thought, especially in the bleak, mid-winter, to think of the world, too, not as snow and ice, but as a fruitful vineyard that connects us to the kingdom of heaven. To do so means to exercise our theological imaginations.

The world is the vineyard of creation. To see the world in that way is to be reminded that it is God’s world, a world which reflects God’s will and purpose for our humanity. In a way, this parable is a strong reminder of that significant spiritual truth. In a way, too, this parable recalls us to the justice of the Creator in the good order of his creation. “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?” Now, there’s a thought.

Can’t God just do whatever he likes? Whatever he wills? Such is a voluntarist conception of God which emphasizes the sovereign freedom of God at the expense of the sovereign justice of God. Yet, it is those two things that are joined together here, I think, in this Gospel story. What is being challenged is not God’s justice but our sense of human justice. What is being challenged is our propensity to measure God by our standards, by our wills and desires and expectations, if you will.

The Gospel returns us to a proper relation to God and to the nature of our lives in his vineyard. In a way, it is really all about grace. Grace is the free gift of God but that free gift perfects and does not destroy the created world. Grace corrects and counters but, ultimately, does not override and deny the character of the world and the creatures within it. That is the beauty and the truth of Redemption.

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“I will recount the steadfast love of the Lord”

The great poet of Anglican spirituality, George Herbert, observes that:

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:

In a way, it is a concise summary of natural, moral, political and metaphysical philosophy. But he immediately goes on to say that “there are two vast, spacious things” that are more necessary to measure or know and, “yet few there are,” he says “that sound them,” echoing, I think, the insight of the great medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, about the need for another science, a divine science.

Even as regards those truths about God which human reason could have discovered, it was necessary that man should be taught by a divine revelation; because the truth about God such as reason could discover, would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors.

So there is the need for the science of theology or Sacred Doctrine. What are these “two vast, spacious things” to which Herbert refers? They are “Sinne and Love.”

Something of the vast spaciousness of sin and love are before us in the remarkable readings for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany. Isaiah sings of “the steadfast love of God,” recounting in the strong words of poetry the story of God’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt and their journeys in the wilderness wastes of the Sinai desert, but he also sings of Israel’s faithlessness and rebellion; in short, our sinfulness. “They rebelled and grieved his holy Spirit.” St. Paul, in the concluding chapter of his Letter to the Ephesians, reminds us that we are in a cosmic struggle “against the wiles of the devil,” “against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Strong stuff, indeed, and a struggle in which we are only “able to withstand” and “having done all, to stand” by virtue of “put[ting] on the whole armour of God.”

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“Speak the word only”

The miracles of the Epiphany season are the miracles of the Divine Word. God is the poet-maker of all creation; the poet-maker, too, of our redemption. The Greek verb “to make” is ποιεω  from which we get the words poet and poetry.

God speaks the world into being. “Speak the word only”, says the Centurion to Jesus in one of the great Epiphany gospels. “Speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.” And he is.

The Gospel story for the Third Sunday after Epiphany, read several weeks ago, opens us out to the miracle of God’s Word spoken and proclaimed. It is the Word which effects what it signifies. To grasp that, as the Centurion does, is itself a wonder, a miracle, which Jesus acknowledges. “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel.”

Unlike those about whom it is said, “they hear and do not hear, they see and they do not see,” the Centurion hears and sees. The Word of Christ has its echoing resonance in him and that is a miracle, too. It is, we might say, an epiphany of the understanding in him and for us. “Speak the word only,” we might say, is the miracle of the Epiphany season.

We have lost, perhaps, our faith and confidence in words. We know only too well how words can be used to cheapen and betray and to hurt and destroy. We know only too well, perhaps, the limits and the shortcomings of words. We are skeptical and uncertain about the power of words to convey truth and understanding, about the power of words to create and redeem.

“Human speech”, as Gustave Flaubert avers, “is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.” That view may or may not be exactly what Choir Directors and choristers want to hear, though it may be what they sometimes fear! Our words fall far short of our hopes and aspirations. We have, perhaps, despaired of the power of words to shape communities, especially communities of learning, “Worlds made by Words,” as the scholar, Anthony Grafton, puts it. It is to have despaired of God and his creative and redemptive Word. It is to have forgotten that the real miracle is God’s Word spoken and received.

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“Forbearing one another and forgiving one another”

Paul’s words speak to the quality of our life together in the body of Christ. He reminds us of the necessity of our mutual forebearance and forgiveness of one another. Not exactly himself the easiest person to get along with, Paul understands only too well how hard we can all be to get along with and how hard, too, we can be on ourselves. We are often our own worst enemies.

Today’s Epistle complements and illustrates the Gospel. Wheat and tares, meaning weeds, grow together in the field of the world. Wheat and weeds are there together, both the good and the bad. But who can be sure which is which? Which is the weed and which is the wheat? This is to recognize the limitations of our judgments. “Let them both grow together until harvest”, says the Sower. God is the gardener and God is the judge. Not you and not me. That is itself a great mercy.

This doesn’t simply mean the suspension of our judgment in the abdication of responsibilities. We have the moral obligation to try to discern right from wrong and, and, by God’s grace, to act accordingly. We are bidden to be God’s good wheat in a world of wheat and tares. But it does mean a check upon our judgmentalism. “Forbearing one another and forgiving one another” is the counter to our judgmentalism. Our judgmentalism is our presumption to know what we cannot and do not know about others and even about ourselves. Yet, in our judgmentalism, we would put ourselves in the place of God as judge. We would presume to have a total and absolute view when, in fact, our viewpoint is altogether restricted and limited. We see, at best, “through a glass darkly.” To know this is to be aware of the limits of our knowing. It is the beginning of wisdom. It frees us from the tyranny of ourselves.

We confront the limits of human judgment both with respect to ourselves and to one another. But is all this simply a cautionary tale? Are we being exhorted merely to a posture of skepticism? To a suspension of belief about the possibilities of knowing anything and, therefore, about doing anything? Quite the opposite. What we are presented with counters the cynical and false skepticism of our age which would deny any objective view about what is good and true while asserting as absolute its own relativism. And what we are presented with equally counters the religion of sentimentalism and self-righteousness which makes the Church such a parody of itself and of contemporary culture.

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“Why are ye so fearful?”

“From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire and flood; from plaque, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us”. Thus prays the ancient Litany in The Book of Common Prayer. It offers a wonderful and ordered way of praying all the things that belong to prayer and that belong to our creedal identity in Christ. But do we pray it? Such petitions teach a doctrine that, I fear, we have forgotten.

In our technocratic exuberance, we sometimes think that we can control the elements. We forget that we are creatures, too, and are often subject to the brute forces of nature; we forget that nature does not simply exist for us, for our pleasures and interests. We forget that nature is affected by our disorder; in other words we find ourselves in a world of earthquake, tempest and fire, a world of woes and suffering, a world where nature, if not always “red in tooth and claw”, can be pretty foreboding and pretty threatening.

This used to be a staple of our Canadian identity, namely, the recognition of the awesome and ominous power of nature. Our literary stories are most often the stories of survival and not of conquest. The point is nicely captured in a poem by Alden Nowlan, a celebrated Canadian poet from Stanley, NS, entitled Canadian January Night, written in 1971. He was, by the way, the son of Grace Reese, a parishioner here who passed away last winter and whom I buried in Stanley.

… I, walking backwards in obedience
to the wind, am possessed
of the fearful knowledge
my compatriots share
but almost never utter:
this is a country
where a man can die
simply from being
caught outside.

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“They have no wine”

Mary’s statement describes in a simple phrase our human predicament. We lack the means for our true joy, for our true blessedness. In the background to her remark there is an ancient Jewish saying: “without wine there is no joy”. “They have no wine” means, we may say, they have no joy. But ‘they’ are ‘us’. We have no wine, no joy.

The deeper point is that we have no joy in ourselves. We lack, we might say, the wine of divinity, the source and the occasion of all joy, the wine that truly gladdens and rejoices the heart and soul. To know our lack, however, is saving knowledge. To know our limitations is to be alert to the possibilities of their being overcome – not by us but by the grace of God for us and in us. To know our lack is to be alert to the real presence of divine grace in our midst.

In the Gospel, Mary’s simple statement is made to Christ. Her next, equally simple statement is made to the servants. Yet it extends, really, to all of us: “whatever he tells you, do it.” In between her two simple statements, there is Christ’s rather curious and seemingly dismissive remark: “O woman what is that to thee and to me? mine hour has not yet come.”

What can it mean except that the fulfilling of our needs cannot just be at the dictate of our demands? As if God were some sort of Genie let out of the bottle to do our bidding! As if everything must be done according to our will. To the contrary, it has to be according to the word and will of God, according to the purpose of his coming. In him we find the true measure of our desires. In him we find what is most to be wanted, namely, “thy will be done.” The cost of that is to be found in the meaning of his hour. His hour refers to his death and resurrection, to the miracle of all miracles, of which this miracle at Cana of Galilee is but the “beginning of signs.” The fullness of its meaning is to be found in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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“Speak the word only”

The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday provide the interpretative framework for our understanding of the lessons at Morning and Evening Prayer. Indeed, they are at the heart of the Common Prayer tradition as embodying a creedal or doctrinal reading of Scripture. It is a good devotional practice before each service to pray and study the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for the day, regardless of whether the service is Morning Prayer or Holy Communion. They are at the heart of The Book of Common Prayer, itself the heart of Anglican Spirituality.

I want to make some remarks about the Gospel and to consider briefly this morning’s lessons in its light. The Gospel which orders our thoughts on the Third Sunday after Epiphany is the double healing of the leper and the Centurion’s servant by Jesus Christ. Epiphany season abounds in miracles. They belong to the making visible of the glory of God. A miracle, after all, is a sign of wonder. The healing miracles are a wonder. But what exactly do we see? Only the signs of the glory in the effects of what is said and done. The wonder, really, is the wonder of Christ.

Christ heals a leper and he heals the paralysed servant of the Centurion. He speaks and he acts. There is healing. The healings are within Israel and beyond Israel. “He came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near”, as Paul reminds us. Through the history and meaning of Israel, the glory of God is not only made known to the world but for the whole world, which is Paul’s point later in The Epistle to the Ephesians, namely, that “all might see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God” (Eph. 3.9). The leper is healed within the context of Israel and is held to the requirements of the Law in Israel. With the Centurion’s request, Jesus acknowledges something more: there is the wonder of faith which coming out of Israel transcends Israel. “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel”. For both the leper and the Centurion, Christ is the wonder. There is an epiphany. In a way, too, it complements the extraordinary chapter from Isaiah which actually speaks about Cyrus, the Persian king, who though he did not “know God”, was, nonetheless, the agent and instrument of God’s restoration of Israel from captivity in Babylon to Jerusalem.

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“Speak the word only”

The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday are at the heart of the Common Prayer tradition as embodying a creedal or doctrinal reading of Scripture. It is a good devotional practice before each service to pray and study the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for the day regardless of whether the service is Morning Prayer or Holy Communion. They are at the heart of The Book of Common Prayer, itself the heart of Anglican Spirituality.

The Gospel for today presents us with a double healing, the healing of the leper and the Centurion’s servant by Jesus Christ. Epiphany season abounds in miracles. They belong to the making visible of the glory of God. A miracle, after all, is a sign of wonder. The healing miracles are a wonder. But what exactly do we see? Only the signs of the glory in the effects of what is said and done. The wonder, really, is the wonder of Christ.

Christ heals a leper and he heals the paralysed servant of the Centurion. He speaks and he acts. There is healing. The healings are within Israel and beyond Israel. Through the history and meaning of Israel, the glory of God is not only made known to the world but for the whole world. The leper is healed within the context of Israel and is held to the requirements of the Law in Israel. With the Centurion’s request, Jesus acknowledges something more: there is the wonder of faith which coming out of Israel transcends Israel. “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel”. For both the leper and the Centurion, Christ is the wonder. There is an epiphany.

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