Category: Sermons

“The people which sat in darkness have seen a great light”

Matthew recalls Isaiah’s prophecy about the light that has arisen upon “them which sat in the region and shadow of death.” He does so in the context of Christ’s coming to Capernaum which is on the sea-coast of Galilee in the land of Zebulon and Naphtali. Christ’s coming there occasions the connection in his mind with Isaiah’s prophecy about those same sea-coast lands. Matthew is suggesting the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy in Christ Jesus, the Jesus whose mission of repentance, discipleship, healing and salvation are the very things that belong to the evangelium – the good news that is the meaning of the word, gospel.

The lesson from the Acts of the Apostles echoes that same theme. “The word of God grew and multiplied,” we are told, and we hear of the spreading of that word into Seleucia and Cyprus through Barnabas and Saul; all under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. With the commemoration of St. Patrick, we are taken in an opposite direction, “away in the lovable west,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, to the shores of Ireland but with that same spirit of mission. St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland; the one who brought the good news of the Gospel to those sea-coast islands on the far, far reaches of Europe, the very outposts of civilization and order in the fifth century.

The remarkable spread of Christianity is one of the great mysteries of the world; an undeniable fact that bespeaks a remarkable revolution from pagan darkness to the light of Christ. With the coming of Christ, light and hope triumph over the dismal darkness and despairing fatalisms of the pagan cultures, whether sophisticated and urban or rustic and rural, whether ancient or modern. Patrick lit the paschal fire, the fire of Easter triumph of Christ’s resurrection, on the hill of Tara. It signaled the conversion of the Irish.

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“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”

The story of the Temptations of Christ is read on the First Sunday in Lent. In response to the second temptation, Christ responds with these words: “thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” But, of course, in relation to the idea and the reality of the doctrine of original sin, that is exactly and constantly what we do. We tempt God. We constantly put God to the test, trying to make him accountable and measurable to us. Our task this Lent is to ponder the mystery of our sinfulness, the mystery of original sin.

Original Sin: What is it and why does it matter?

Have you ever wondered, what’s wrong with the world? Have you ever wondered, what’s wrong with me? In other words, have you ever had that sense that nothing is the way it should be either with ourselves or others or our world and day? Has that sense of things not being right ever resulted in asking about evil? Unde hoc malum? Where does evil come from? Or do we persist in saying and thinking that everything is good; just a few bad apples in the pile that spoil everything?

Original sin is the doctrine that there is something radically and inescapably not right about any of us right from the get-go of our being. Very tough stuff. And yet, it seems, this is actually part and parcel of the good news. Original Sin catapults us into the totality of God’s grace and grants utter primacy to God’s will. Our task is to try to understand something about this strange and curious teaching that seems to cause so much consternation. Yet, as G.K. Chesterton observes, it is the most empirical of all Christian teachings, the most provable from experience.

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“Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven”

The land is the place of worship. Abram comes into the land which God has given him and builds there “an altar to the Lord.” Jesus comes to his own city. And there is healing and forgiveness. The land is the place of forgiveness and new life.

This morning’s first lesson is part of a whole theology of the land that unfolds in the witness of the Scriptures. That theology of the land begins first with the story of Creation and the Fall. Creation is the paradise in which God has planted us but has become the wilderness of our disobedience in which we have to learn the truth of God and his will through suffering and work, through the forms of our wilfulness made visible to us, and through the forms of divine love revealed to us.

In way, the Book of Genesis is the story of brothers and of brothers that are often at odds with one another and often about land. There is the story of Cain and Abel, the story of the first murder and one in which “your brother’s blood,” God says to Cain, “is crying to me from the ground,” from the land. It marks the beginning of the blood-soaked ground of our world and day, a world of wars and destruction. There are the stories of Abram and Lot, such as we have this morning in the separating out of who is going to have what land and where. Just as importantly, that story unveils part of the divine covenant for our humanity transacted by God to Abram – the idea of a promised land. What exactly is that promised land remains a much vexed problem politically. But, perhaps, that is to miss the point theologically. Abram builds an altar to the Lord under the oaks of Mamre. It will be the scene for God’s promise to Abram and Sarah of a Son through whom all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, though not without a most grievous and difficult trial of Abram’s faith. Ultimately, the land is the good land where God is acknowledged, where God is honoured and worshipped. “There he built an altar to the Lord.”

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“Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil”

Everything in this gospel must disquiet us. There is, first, the idea of Jesus being led “by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil”; secondly, there is the idea of the wilderness itself, an image which disturbs as much as it attracts.

Wilderness here is the place of temptation but under the guiding force of the Holy Spirit. This implies a kind of necessity about the wilderness in the understanding of the Christian pilgrimage. Somehow there is something good about temptation.

Wilderness. It is an intriguing term. What do we understand by the wilderness? It is an ambiguous concept for ancients and for moderns.

The wilderness can be a place of fearfulness and uncertainty, the wilderness of chaos as in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. Alternatively, we might think of the wilderness as a place of pure nature, unsullied by human activity, a notion, perhaps, best captured in the twentieth century phenomenon of national parks, and now, the idea of wilderness sanctuaries where human intervention is held to a minimum. There is as well the idea of the wilderness as a place of sanctuary and escape; wilderness as a kind of paradise away from the greater wildness of the urban jungle.

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“Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”

Dust and ashes. Hardly an auspicious beginning, we might think. Usually we think of dust and ashes in terms of endings; the fire that ends in a heap of ashes, the dust that is swirls around in the wind, the detritus of the mundane world.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. Dust and ashes are the dominant images of the day. Ashes are a symbol of repentance in the ancient biblical culture. Dust recalls us to the biblical story of creation and is the strong image of our creatureliness. Everything in the physical and material universe is made of dust, we might say. That is an important feature of our creation: we are the God-made dust into which God has breathed his spirit, even sanctified dust.

The two images coalesce in the ritual imposition of ashes on our foreheads, itself another image that signals the special nature of our creatureliness. We are made in the image of God by virtue of our reason and will symbolized in our foreheads. Ashes are imposed with the sign of the cross on our foreheads, and they are placed on our foreheads with the words, “Remember O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” Those words, too, suggest an ending. They seem to sound an ominous and serious note.

And yet, the business of this day is all about a beginning and as such there is something lovely and wonderful, even beautiful about Ash Wednesday. It is, we might say, a somber day of the soul’s rejoicing. Why? Because the operative word and idea of Ash Wednesday is repentance and repentance is great good news for our souls. We get to begin again.

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“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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