Category: Sermons

“Of his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace”

The Advent and Christmas season is a busy time with all manner of expectations, all manner of anxieties, all manner of fears and worries. There is a rich fullness, to be sure, to Christmas itself.

It is something which one day cannot presume to capture nor that even twelve days with all the festivities of our social, family and communal gatherings can ever hope to exhaust. Such things belong, to be sure, to the rich fullness of this season, but only as attendant events. They circle about the central scene of Christmas. In a way, the businesses of the Advent and Christmas season are really only our poor attempt to capture something of the rich fullness of the Mystery of Christmas.

In truth, there is but one poor, humble scene of Christmas. It is the stable of Bethlehem. Therein lies all the rich fullness of Christmas. That poor, humble scene contains a great crowd of scenes, a great gathering of Christmasses; in short, it opens to view a rich fullness of grace, even “grace upon grace,” to use John’s arresting phrase. There is more here, we may say, than meets the eye. It is altogether something for the soul. We are bidden to ponder the Mystery of the Word made flesh. The attitude of the Church is an essentially Marian attitude. “Mary kept all these things” – all these wondrous things that were said about the Child Christ by Shepherds and Angels – “and pondered them in her heart.” And only so can they come to birth and live in us.

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“Art thou he that should come?”

Questions upon questions upon questions. Advent is the season of questions, questions that open us out to the majesty and the wonder of God. “How shall this be seeing as I know not a man?” Mary asks, and in this season of questions, everything, we may say, hangs upon her answer, “be it unto me according to thy word.” But to enter into this mystery, the mystery which takes flesh and comes to birth through her at Christmas, we need the figure of John the Baptist as well.

Mary and John. There is a pattern here, we may say, a pattern woven out of the coincidence of names: Mary and John the Baptist in Advent; Mary and John the Beloved Disciple in Lent and, most especially, at the Cross on Good Friday. Two different figures named John but one Mary, the Mother of God. Yet somehow this coincidence of names helps us to appreciate the role of Mary, on the one hand, and the complementary voices of prophecy and discipleship, on the other hand. And such things are very much to the point of the Advent season and especially on the Third Sunday in Advent. They remind us of the dual nature of the ministry of Word and Sacrament.

John the Baptist points us to the one who comes both by his questions – “art thou he that should come or do we look for another?”- and his declaration, “behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.” Question and answer, in a way, even as Mary’s question leads to the response about “the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit” by which “the Lord shall be with thee.” Yet it is only through her answer: “be it unto me according to thy word” that this will be accomplished. Somehow John the Baptist and Mary complement one another to form the delightful and wonderful tableau of the Advent of Christ.

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“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, / and a light unto my path”
(Ps.119. pt. 14, v. 105)

What is the Bible? It is a book, to be sure, even ‘The Book’, as it were, though it was not always a book exactly. Formerly, there were scrolls of parchment as the Bible itself shows us. Jesus, for example, takes up the scroll of Isaiah and reads from it and proclaims the fulfillment of what he reads. But, at any rate, it has become a book, that is to say something enclosed between two covers. It is, moreover, a library of books, a book containing within itself a great number of books, a wide variety of literature, of things written at different times and in different places and by many different hands. Is it just a collection of literary artifacts from times and places long ago and far away? And if so, why read it now? As an historical curiosity? No.

Because it speaks not only to particular cultures but beyond them. Something of the answer to the question ‘what is the Bible?’ is captured in this characteristic. What we call ‘the Bible’ bears witness to this phenomenon of speaking beyond the particular context and circumstance for which or about which a particular text was originally written. It also bears witness to the writing down in one context of what is remembered from another context. For example, the people of Israel wrote down and put together while in exile in Babylon what was remembered of God’s Word to them at the time of the Exodus from Egypt. The prophets, too, are constantly recalling Israel to the Law.

Somehow what is remembered and written down is received as being altogether definitive, as defining the fundamental identity of Israel in quite different political and cultural circumstances. Somehow what is written down cannot be constrained to just one context. It reaches beyond.

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Fr. David Curry preached this sermon at Choral Evensong, Trinity Church, Saint John, New Brunswick, on the occasion of the 225th anniversary of The City of Saint John.

“The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night”

First, let me begin by thanking your Rector, the Rev’d Dr. Ranall Ingalls, for the great privilege of being here this evening and for the honour of speaking to you in the beauty of this Advent Sunday Service and upon the occasion of the celebration of the 225^th anniversary of the Loyalist founding and incorporation of this great Maritime city, the City of Saint John.

“The night is far spent,” St. Paul tells us in this morning’s epistle. Tonight he notes that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” We meet in the quiet darkness of Advent Sunday.

There is the darkness in which we either wait in hope for the light or die in despair. There are degrees of darkness. There is the literal darkness of the night in the twilight of the year. There is the metaphorical darkness of civilisations and cultures in their decay and disarray. There is the social and economic darkness of communities and families in their distress and dismay. There is the darkness of institutions when they betray their foundational and governing principles. There is the darkness of souls in psychological confusion – distraught, anxious, angry and fearful. The “far spent night” is the hour of deepest darkness. There is the darkness of the fear of death.

In one way or another, these darknesses are all forms of spiritual darkness. They all belong to the darkness of sin and doubt, the darkness of death and dying, the darkness of despair. The darkness of despair is the deepest darkness, the darkness of the “far spent night” of the soul, the darkness of darkness itself, as it were. Why? Because it is the darkness of denial. Despair is the denial of desire. It signals the rejection of the possibilities of light, of faith; the rejection of the possibilities of hope, of what is looked for; and the rejection of the possibilities of love, of what is embraced in the knowing delight of what is good and true, of what is holy and beautiful, of what is true and good.

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“Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on
the armour of light”

Advent signals the coming of God towards us. But what is our response? Are we watching and waiting? Are we aware of humanity’s need for the coming of the one who alone can redeem? Are we looking for something more beyond the dull, dark empty loneliness of our anxious and troubled lives? In short, are we prepared for the Advent of Christ to us? That is the challenge of the readings on this day.

So often we think of Advent as simply the season of preparation for Christmas. To be sure, it is, but it is also something more. It is a season and a doctrine which has a real meaning and significance in and of itself. For Advent is the coming. Are we prepared for it or not? The coming is about the challenging presence of God. There is the constant coming of God’s Word to us in proclamation and celebration.

In the great gospel for this day, Christ comes to Jerusalem. He enters the city triumphantly. It is a royal procession. The King has come to his own city. All is light and grace and glory, it seems. “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest,” “the multitudes that went before, and that followed” cry, both those who went before, them, and those that followed, us. But will we not shortly hear at Christmas that “he came unto his own and his own received him not”? The whole city was moved to say in wondering ignorance and in perplexity, “Who is this?” We know the story. The King – God’s own Word and Son – will be rejected. All that is light and life ends in darkness and death, it seems; the darkness of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the darkness of the cross and the grave.

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“Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts; / Show the light
of thy countenance, and we shall be whole”

It is, to my mind, a most intriguing scene. It belongs to the beginning of John’s Gospel and yet we read it at the very end of the Christian year. It is the first scene in his Gospel in which Jesus speaks directly. Quite apart from the miracle of John’s Prologue, which speaks to us from the eternal heights of heaven, as it were, and which we will hear at Christmas, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God”, this is the first scene in which Jesus comes out of the background and into the foreground of the Scriptures. But has he been in the foreground of our lives in this past year of grace?

The prophetic finger of John the Baptist points to Jesus directly. “Behold the Lamb of God,” he says, twice actually. The first time is just before our gospel reading here. It is followed by the Baptist’s profound reflection upon the meaning of the one whom he sees and whom he has pointed out. He is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” something we hear and pray repeatedly in our liturgy. The second time is followed by Jesus stepping out into the centre which he is and around which everything turns. John points him out to us again with the words: “Behold the Lamb of God.” In some sense the ministry of John the Baptist is already fulfilled even as it seems it has only begun. As he says in a related passage, Christ “must increase but I must decrease”(Jn.3.30) He gives place to him who is “the Alpha and the Omega” of our lives and who must have his increase in us.

The witness of John the Baptist is all the more remarkable because it points to the Revelation of God in our very midst. As he says, “I myself did not know him; but for this I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel”(Jn.1.31). And again, “I myself did not know him; but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit” (Jn.1.33).

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“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends”

They are, perhaps, familiar words. They adorn many an empty tomb, a cenotaph, around which we gather on Remembrance Day just past. But what do we remember and how?

Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. The intention of All Souls’ is to remember our common mortality, to commemorate all who have died and to do so within the greater context of All Saints’, the celebration of our common vocation to holiness. The intention of Remembrance Day in the secular aspect of our culture is to remember those who died for the sake of our political and social freedoms .

To say that Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day is not to say that our remembrance is not religious. It is, and profoundly so. It reminds us of the spiritual and, specifically, Christian principles which underlie the modern national states even in their contemporary confusion and disarray. To remember the fallen is to honour what they fought and died for in far away places and in scenes of absolute horror far beyond our imaging, despite the efforts of the film industry and even the purple prose of preachers.

We remind ourselves of the hell of war and of the destruction and evil which we inflict upon one another. The dust of our common humanity is soaked in blood. But if, and ‘if’ is the big, little word here, if we can remember in a spirit of forgiveness, so much the better. For then our remembering will be joined all the more surely to God’s forgiving remembrance of all our follies, all our sufferings and all our griefs. We will be remembering them in the greater sacrifice of Christ for the whole world, a remembering that enters in to all we do in our liturgy.

What we are remembering are the sacrifices for the rational freedoms of our political and social life, to be sure. But what underlies that remembrance is something profoundly spiritual. It is, perhaps, best captured in the scriptural phrase which adorns thousands of cenotaphs throughout the world. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

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“Rejoice with me”

Repentance leads to joy. There is something powerful in that idea. It is splendidly illustrated for us in the second lesson this morning in the parable of the lost sheep and the lost coin.

Repentance is redire ad principium, a kind of circling back to the truth from which we have turned. The idea of turning back to the truth in the awareness of the ways in which we so easily turn away from it, is one of the recurring lessons of the Scriptures. It is an important part of the good news, the good news that results in rejoicing actually.

Ecclesiasticus or the Wisdom of Jesu Ben Sirach, is one of the Books of the Apocrypha. It belongs to an ancient tradition of “wisdom literature” and, indeed, offers many a profound instruction on moral and spiritual ideas. In this morning’s first lesson, we are reminded about the destructive effects of anger and wrath. They are “abominations.” They are possessed by the sinful man and woman and they possess us. The desire for vengeance arises from anger and wrath and is set in explicit opposition to the idea and concept of forgiveness and healing. Ecclesiasticus would recall us to the commandments of God, to their positive force for the good that redeems us from our rage to lash out and destroy.

These are profound lessons and show something of the wisdom of the wisdom literature and how important a place they have in the reading and thinking life of the Church. In many ways, the Books of the Apocrypha, books written between the time of the writing down of the Old Testament and the emergence of the New Testament, anticipate some of the central themes of the Christian Gospel, especially in terms of moral instruction. In this case, the themes of forgiveness and joy are juxtaposed with the destructive forces of anger and wrath.

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“If I may but touch the hem of his garment, I shall be whole”

The year runs out in the themes of compassion and healing. This morning’s gospel provides us with a most poignant and touching scene of healing, a picture of human redemption in its fullness. What is it about? Simply, the radical meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. Next Sunday is the Sunday Next Before Advent. We stand at the end of the Christian year and contemplate the radical meaning of Christ’s turning to us but only so as to begin again. Such is his Advent. In his turning to us, we find healing and wholeness, but only, too, if we are turned to him.

It is a double healing story. The healing of the woman with a long-standing ailment of an issue of blood is a scene within a scene. It captures, in a way, the entire gospel. To steal a cure from him is to be unaware of who Jesus truly is. It shows an incomplete understanding of the divinity and the uniqueness of Christ. And yet what we most want, healing for a broken world and for our own broken selves, is found precisely in the one whom we ignore or deny.

There are, of course, the social implications of the gospel itself. Christ has come into our midst, into the heart of darkness, as it were, to bring light and grace and salvation and that puts real demands and responsibilities upon us who have heard his word. “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me,” Jesus says, for that is crucial to the idea of Revelation and to the nature of the Redemption of our humanity. But he also says “or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves.” Good works are done in faith, implicitly or explicitly. Yet they have their fullest meaning in the name of the one in whose name they are done. Sometimes deeds and actions speak louder than words, to be sure, but they have their radical meaning in the Word made flesh.

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“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends”

Remembrance Sunday ushers us into a week of remembrance culminating in Remembrance Day. Its significance should not be lost on any of us. And yet, how hard it is to remember! In that difficulty, though, we contemplate an important feature of our humanity, namely, the limits of our knowing and our being.

The leaves lie scattered on the wind and the rain. Who can count the leaves? Who can count the dead? Who can name them? November is the grey month of remembering. What does it mean to remember?

To remember is to realize who we really are. That means, paradoxically, to pay attention to others.

Remembrance Day itself is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. The intention of All Souls is to remember our common mortality, to commemorate all who have died and to do so within the greater context of All Saints’, the celebration of the redeemed community of our humanity. The golden thread of the life of Christ in the Saints runs through the common grave of our mortality. The intention of Remembrance Day in the secular aspect of our culture is to remember those who died for the sake of our social and political freedoms and life.

To say that Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day is not to say that our remembrance is not religious. It is, and profoundly so. It reminds us of the spiritual and, specifically, Christian, principles which underlie the modern national states even in their contemporary confusion and disarray; some would say collapse because those principles no longer seem to animate our souls and our institutions. Such is a kind of forgetting. Our November remembrances signal, perhaps, a kind of return. To remember the fallen is to honour what they fought and died for in far away places and in scenes of absolute horror, far beyond our imaging, despite the efforts of the film industry and even the purple prose of preachers.

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