Category: Sermons

“Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising /
Thou understandest my thoughts from afar”

The year runs out with the themes of judgment and mercy. There is the sense of apocalypse. The Gospel for today is sometimes called the “Matthaean Apocalypse”. That section of his gospel deals with the sense of the end-time and the theme of judgment. We are also, in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, reading from those books which take their place between the Old Testament and the New Testament sometimes called collectively the Apocrypha. These writings contain various forms of apocalyptic literature. The term “apocrypha” literally means “things hidden away”; the words “apocalyptic” and “apocalypse”, on the other hand, refer to what is revealed or uncovered. They call us to reflection, to a kind of remembering upon which all our thinking depends, namely, the wisdom of God in moral teachings and in the order of creation.

In general, what we confront is the uncovering of all things from the standpoint of God, a consideration of how things stand in the sight of God’s all-knowing, absolute and total judgment. In particular, what we confront is the unveiling of our souls and lives in the light of God’s truth revealed in Jesus Christ.

There is nothing soft and sentimental about any of this. Quite the contrary, it may seem terribly harsh and perfectly dreadful. We all cringe at the idea of death and judgment. But that is to miss the point. The judgment is itself the mercy. We are reminded – strongly reminded – that our lives are lived in the sight of God “from whom no secrets are hid”, as we say at every mass. It is, too, the very point which the psalmist makes: “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising/Thou understandest my thoughts from afar”. Nothing falls outside of God’s eternal knowing and loving.

We are reminded that who we are is altogether bound up in his Word and Will for us. “Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God, and so we are”, as St. John puts it in the Epistle for this day. The question is, will we resist and deny, or will we accept and follow? Will we acknowledge the struggle and allow ourselves to be called to account?

The judgment is not something external and arbitrary. It has altogether to do with the truth of our thoughts and actions, the unveiling, as it were, of our true intentions. That, of course, can be most terrifying if we are simply left with the terror of our own knowledge of our own intentions. Our hearts are exposed by God’s truth. We stand convicted of all manner of evil intent, all manner of angry, dark, malicious, lustful, and hurtful thoughts, not to mention deeds and actions.

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Fr. David Curry delivered this sermon at the baptism of his granddaughter Jeanne at St. Bartholomew’s Church, Toronto.

“And he took them up in his arms, put his hand upon them, and blessed them”

My thanks to Fr. Hannam for the privilege of being here tonight to baptise our granddaughter, Jeanne. The service, as he rightly says, speaks for itself about the power and meaning of what we are doing. Let me add only a few footnotes.

“That time of year”, as Shakespeare puts it, “when yellow leaves or none or few do hang/ upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”. Yet in the dying of nature’s year, in the season of scattered leaves, and in the culture of scattered souls, we meet for a gathering. The gathering is the occasion of Jeanne’s baptism which is about her being gathered into the Communion of Saints, the spiritual gathering of redeemed humanity which signals the home and end of our lives. This evening she is enrolled in that heavenly city having been “made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven”.

Her baptism is a reminder to all of us of our being born anew, of our being born upward into the things of God through our own baptisms. Something happens. Something is done. What is done is by grace, the grace of God which seeks our good and perfection. Last Saturday was All Souls’ Day within the Octave of All Saints’, a poignant reminder of our common mortality but also a reminder of the golden thread of the life of Christ which runs through our common grave and death to gather us into his infinite life. Death and resurrection. Through baptism we are incorporated into the death and resurrection of Christ. Baptism signals the restoration of our humanity to its truth as imago dei, imago Christi, imago Trinitas – they are all the same reality. Jeanne is named in God’s own naming of himself as Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

The point is that we are more though not less than the experiences and circumstances of our lives. Baptism restores us to our created identity in God and to our life with God in Christ. The Beatitudes, read on All Saints’, are the qualities of grace bestowed upon us that properly define us in the dignity and grace of our humanity. They are all the forms of the kingdom of heaven made alive in us. They provide us with a way to face the uncertainties and disorders of ourselves and of our world and day, the things which belong to sin and evil. Simply put we are gathered to God in his infinite goodness and mercy. “Grace is everywhere”, as George Bernanos puts it; mercy, we might say, is everything.

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“For our citizenship is in heaven”

“For our citizenship is in heaven”, Paul writes. “Whose is this image and superscription?” Jesus asks the Pharisees who sought to “entangle him in his talk”. These readings complement wonderfully the readings for All Saints’, both the image of heaven from Revelation as “a great multitude” beyond all number of “all nations and kindreds, and people, and tongues” united in the praise of God the Trinity and the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel. How? Because they reveal the summum bonum, the highest good for our humanity as restored to our being in the image of God. They set before us what belongs to the radical truth and dignity of our humanity.

Christ’s question to the Pharisees is really his question to us: in whose image are we and what is written over us? Questions and claims about the images of the self proliferate and abound in our culture. That we are imago dei or imago Christi or imago Trinitatis speak to the deeper reality of our being with God and in God, to our heavenly citizenship even in and through the tribulations of our lives. We are reminded of our blessedness. “His banner over me was love”, as the Song of Songs puts it.

The Beatitudes show us what it means to be in the image of God or Christ or the Trinity – they are all the same reality – and speak to the ultimate or highest good for our humanity. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics says that happiness is our greatest good. The word he uses is eudaemonia. What he means by happiness is not what we might assume. Happiness for us is mostly subjective and personal, passive and accidental; in short, something existential. For Aristotle happiness is objective and substantial; in short, living in accord with virtue. It is the activity of the rational soul acting in accord with the qualities of human excellence. While the treatise focuses on the moral practices that belong to that activity, in the ebb and flow, the ups and downs, of practical life, he argues that the highest activity or form of happiness is contemplation; moral activities are secondary. Contemplation is about what is the highest in us, the life of the mind, because it seeks what is everlasting and complete as distinct from what is passing and incomplete. The highest form of happiness approximates the life of the gods because the highest power in us, in his view, is the mind.

He says that “we ought, so far as in us lies, to put on immortality”, words which sound like Paul, to “do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest in us”, which is the life of the intellect. This kind of intellectualism may seem off-putting but it speaks, I think, to the deeper understanding that today’s readings in the context of All Saints’ provide. He says that “the life of the gods is altogether happy, and that of man is happy in so far as it contains something that resembles the divine activity”. The word he uses here is not eudaemonia but makarios, meaning blessed. It is the very word which Jesus uses nine times in the twelve verses of the Beatitudes.

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“You all are partakers of my grace”

The Morning Prayers readings from Wisdom 11 and from Luke 13 complement rather wonderfully this morning’s eucharistic readings from Paul’s letter to the Philippians and Matthew’s Gospel. The Gospel reading might seem rather forbidding and dark and yet it illustrates the deeper meaning of the prayer of Paul “that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement”. The parable of the unforgiving servant shows the meaning of not acting out of the infinite mercy and forgiveness of God, in effect negating the very mercy which he himself has received.

Forgive even as you have been forgiven. In complete contrast to the unrighteous servant who was paradoxically the example of acting with prudence, as you may recall, the unforgiving servant shows the true meaning of human wickedness to illustrate what we should not do. With the words of the forgiveness for which he had asked still ringing in his ears, he refuses to forgive another of much smaller debt, as one of the Fathers, John Chyrsostom, I think, noted. The parable is told in response to Peter’s question about the limits of forgiveness. How often shall I forgive the one who has sinned against me? Is there a number? Can forgiveness be quantified?

This speaks to our age which mistakes data and information for knowledge and understanding. This is to focus on the finite and limited, the quantitative, at the expense of the forms of our participation in what is infinite and eternal, namely, the wisdom and grace of God, the substantial. This is where the lessons from such texts as Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus in the Apocrypha help to deepen our understanding of the infinite mercy of God. To be made aware of this is all our joy; to negate it is all our misery. “Thou art merciful to all”, Wisdom tells us, “for thou canst do all things, and thou dost overlook men’s sins, that they may repent, for thou lovest all things that exist, and hast loathing for none of the things that thou hast made”.

This is a wonderful affirmation of the essential goodness of creation and of our humanity even in its disorders. “Thou sparest all things, for they are thine, O Lord who lovest the living”. With great insight, the reading from Wisdom concludes: “For thy immortal spirit is in all things. Therefore thou dost correct little by little those who trespass, and dost remind and warn them of the things wherein they sin, that they may be freed from wickedness and put their trust in thee, O Lord”. Is it not in this spirit that we may best understand the Gospel story of the unforgiving servant? It is told for our correction, for our good, to remind us of the freedom and love of acting out of the mercies and forgivenesses which we have received. It is told to awaken us to the infinite mercy of God which knows no limits. God is all good and his goodness is for all. But it means that we have to act in the likeness of God’s acts of mercy. It is what we pray.

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“With thee is wisdom”

Wisdom belongs to God. It is a strong statement which speaks to what belongs to the Scriptures and philosophy, a strong reminder of what comes from God as the principle of our being and knowing. Ultimately, it is the underlying principle that belongs to the healing and restoration of our humanity, too, as the eucharistic Gospel from John today shows us about the nobleman who comes to Jesus seeking the healing of his son “sick at Capernaum”.

“Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”, Jesus says. “Come down, ere my child die,” the nobleman tehn says, to which Jesus replies, “Go thy way, thy son liveth.” “The man believed the word that Jesus had spoken and he went his way” only to learn from his servants that his son “liveth” and “began to amend at the same hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth.” As John tells us, it was “the second sign that Jesus did”; A sign which points to the real truth and meaning of what is signified, namely, the power and wisdom of God. “Both we are and our words are in his hand”, Wisdom tells us, “as are all understanding and skill in crafts” (Wisdom 7. 16,17).

This point is captured in the prayer for Universities, Colleges, and Schools: “Almighty God, of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding” (BCP, p. 45). We have, I think, forgotten this which is perhaps why it is good to hear Solomon’s prayer for wisdom this morning from The Book of Wisdom. There is a sense in which the long and profoundly reflective Trinity season runs out in the themes of wisdom and mercy. We begin today in the Sunday Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer to read from the Apocrypha, books which stand between the periods of the Old Testament and the New Testament. They have a special status, expressed in the sixth article of our Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. The Articles belong themselves, I think, to the essential catholicism of the Anglican understanding, and so too with respect to the place of these books within that larger understanding.

The sixth article does not actually give a generic term for these books, such as ‘Apocrypha’, ‘Intertestamental’, or ‘Deuterocanonical’. It simply refers to them as “other books” before actually naming them individually; it doesn’t even clearly state that they are or are not canonical. The term ‘apocrypha’ means that which is hidden away; yet becomes revealed or known. They contribute, I think, to a deeper understanding of the relation between the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures, on the one hand, and to the profound relation between philosophy and religion, on the other hand, in terms of language and ideas.

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“Go thy way, thy Son liveth”

The demand in the Gospel, it seems, is that Jesus should be physically present for an act of healing to be effective. “Come down ere my child die”, the nobleman asks Jesus, having already “besought him that we would come down and heal his son; for he was at the point of death”. Something divine is at once recognised and denied in the request. For where the Word is made captive to our desires and demands, then the sovereign freedom of the Word can have no play upon our understanding. To acknowledge the sovereign freedom of the Word, on the other hand, means that our understanding is made captive to the Word of God, not the Word to the immediacy of our desires. Such is faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” It has its play primarily upon our understanding and not upon our senses.

The captivity of our understanding to the Word gives meaning and purpose to our desires without which they are essentially nothing. For where our understanding is captive to the Word, there the Word is allowed to shape our desires. In contrast to the all-absorbing tyranny of the self, they are shaped “according to thy word”. It is “thy will be done” and my will only as it is found in God’s will. Our wills find their place in God’s will through the resonance of that Word in us, that Word taking shape in us according to its sovereign freedom. That means more than “signs and wonders”, namely, what they properly signify: the very nature and wisdom of God himself. “Go thy way, thy son liveth”, Jesus tells him in response to his request. What then? Here is the express interest of John’s Gospel: “The man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way.” What is that except his acting upon what he has heard? He gives his understanding over to the Word and places his desire under its power and truth.

“Thy son liveth” stands upon the condition of God having his way with us and not the other way around. The phrase is repeated in the Gospel when the nobleman learns that his son was alive and “began to amend” exactly “at the same hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth”. God has his way with us through our wills finding their place in God’s will. It happens through the play of his Word upon our understanding. The desire for his son’s healing is simply placed with God.

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“While he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven”

The Gospel reading for the Feast of St. Luke is the very end of his Gospel. It ends not with the resurrection appearences of Jesus as in Matthew, Mark, and John, but with the Ascension, though that has been, at the very least, prepared for us in John’s Gospel, too. The ending of Luke’s Gospel is somewhat elaborated upon in the opening chapter of Acts, also attributed to Luke. Yet rather than emphasizing the problematic of Jesus’ going from us, as John in particular explains as ultimately being expedient or good for us, despite the sense of loss and grief, Luke sees the Ascension of Christ as the cause of great joy. The disciples, he says, “returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God.” Luke shows us that Christ’s going from us is the condition of his being with us and of our being with him.

Such is “the work of an evangelist”, Paul suggests in 2 Timothy, the Epistle reading for the Feast, already intuiting what the Church Fathers will say about the Ascension as “the exaltation of our humanity”. While the Collect speaks about the healing of “all the diseases of our souls” by the wholesome medicines of Luke’s doctrine or teaching, there is more to the good news of his Gospel than healing. He shows us our end in God, our ultimate restoration to unity with God in his eternity. The point is that we participate in this now because time has been gathered into eternity.

Luke’s feast day belongs to the autumnal pageant which will bring us to All Saints’. What we are given to think is the Ascension of Christ as signifying our end with God and in God now and forever. But how? It is, I think, by attending to what Luke and Luke alone has Jesus ask us. “What is written? How readest thou”. In a way, his Gospel is particularly emphatic about how Jesus opens our understanding by providing a way of interpreting the Scriptures about Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, about repentance and forgiveness of sins, about the promise of the Father in the coming of the Holy Spirit wonderfully presented in Acts, and here about Christ’s Ascension.

Luke points us to our end in Christ by way of attending to his Word and its radical meaning about the quality of our life in Christ. Luke is the spiritual director of the Church throughout the Trinity Season especially. More Gospel readings come from Luke than from any other Evangelist, readings that move our hearts and illuminate our minds. As Dante so concisely puts it, Luke is scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the Scribe of the gentleness of Christ, and perhaps nowhere more wonderfully than in the readings for his feast day. Only Luke is with me, Paul says, with just a hint that this is almost enough though wanting the books and parchments that belong to the understanding of Christ. Luke shows us Jesus as opening our understanding about our end and life in Christ. This is our blessing and the reason for our gathering in the temple in great joy, “praising and blessing God”.

“While he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Luke, 2024

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“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save only this stranger”

Thanksgiving is a strong reminder of our identity with God. Somehow pumpkins and zucchini, apples and gourds, wheat and grapes, remind us of our being spiritual creatures who are precisely not defined by the things of this world. But neither are we in flight from the world. Harvest Thanksgiving honours the whole created order as spiritually given. Somehow all the elements of our natural, social, and political lives are gathered up into the primacy of our spiritual relationship with God in God and to God. Theology is all about the prepositions! Everything is gathered into thanksgiving.

The Fall is the season of gathering, the season of thanksgiving. And yet, it is the time of nature’s slow and graceful dying. Here in the Maritimes, it is a glorious death and spectacularly so this year. The bright and gentle array of the Fall colours in the clear, soft brightness of the October air will give way to the sombre greyness of November in the dying of the year. The paint brush of God’s palette has never seemed more vivid and intense than this year, it seems to me. And yet, we are in the midst of death and life.

But the Fall is more than the annual cycle of nature’s death and hoped-for rising and our reflections must be more than that awareness of the cycles of death and rebirth. No. The Fall is the season of spiritual harvest. It is really all about the idea of gathering, of everything each in its special creaturely distinction and character being gathered to God in whom and with whom and by whom each and everything has its truth and being.

There is the harvest festival, if you will, of all Angels in The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels at the end of September. It celebrates the community of spiritual and intellectual beings of which we, too, are a part. And in the passing of this month, what do we come to except the great harvest festivals of spiritual life in The Feast of All Saints’ and in the sombre Solemnity of All Souls’? Yet in between, juxtaposed, as it were, between the Angels and the Saints, is our thanksgiving in the land, the festival of Harvest Thanksgiving. But this, too, is profoundly spiritual.

They are all communal events. They are all the celebrations of the different moments of our spiritual lives in the Company of All Angels and the Communion of All Saints even in and through the grave of the common death of All Souls. They are the celebrations of our spiritual identity with God and in God and for God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. His death and resurrection is the greater death and resurrection into which we have been privileged to enter. At the heart of his sacrifice is thanksgiving. The thanksgiving of the Son to the Father is offered on the Cross in the midst of our death and dying, in the midst of the greater desolations of sin and sorrow.

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“Be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”

Today’s Epistle reading sums up wonderfully the whole pageant of sanctification in what belongs to the qualities of Christ in us and what God seeks for the redemption and restoration of our humanity. It is very much about what we learn from Christ and about our life in Christ. The Gospel illustrates what God wants us to learn and know. “That ye may know”, Jesus says, “that the Son of man hath power to forgive sins.”

The healing miracle of the Gospel is about the radical nature of human redemption. Jesus wants us to know that he is the forgiveness of sins. That is our restoration and the moving principle of our sanctification. It is something which has to be learned. How? By our being awakened to self-consciousness, to the awareness of who we are in God. In a way, these lessons concentrate for us the whole pageant of human redemption and restoration.

The question about self-consciousness is perhaps the defining question for modernity in and through all the confusions and contradictions about identity and freedom, in and through the various forms of our certainties and uncertainties, our fears and anxieties. And yet, it belongs to the much larger story of human redemption as revealed in the Scriptures and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the questions of God to our humanity that come to a kind of clarity in today’s Gospel. Here Jesus’s question – “wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?” – articulates a constant theme of God’s questions to us in the pageant of the Scriptures. They are questions that call us to account and to a deeper understanding of ourselves, questions that perhaps, just perhaps, speak to us in our current perplexities.

The first question in Genesis is the question of the serpent to the woman in the Garden of Eden. It follows directly upon the accounts of creation as an orderly whole and of our place within the order of creation that emphasise the inherent and absolute goodness of creation, and our humanity as made in the image of God and as the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. The story of the Fall undertakes two things: first, the question of sin and evil, and secondly, the form of our awakening to self-consciousness. As we saw last week at Michaelmas, sin and evil are only possible through the relation of intellectual and spiritual beings to God as their principle. Sin and evil belong to the contradiction and denial of the very conditions of our being and knowing; yet they also belong paradoxically to the awakening of ourselves as selves through our separation from God. But that is what launches the whole pageant of redemption through the questions of God to our humanity that recall us to the truth of ourselves in God.

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“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

We dance in the company of angels today and always. “Prayer the churches banquet, Angels age”, as George Herbert puts it. This captures something of the meaning of the angels in the order of creation and their connection to us that God’s question to Job highlights so wonderfully about the joy of creation and redemption.

Michaelmas is the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. It signals the larger dimensions of creation as spiritual and intellectual and of our humanity as spiritual creatures within that order. Our liturgy is emphatic on this point. “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name”, we sing as we prepare to enter into the eucharistic sacrifice of Christ. We are in the company of angels.

We cannot see them. We can only think them. The most important things in life are the things we cannot see. The angels belong to the deeper sense of creation and redemption. They are pure, spiritual and intellectual beings, the very thoughts of God in motion, the thoughts that gather us to God. Angelic thinking offers an important corrective and critique to the confusions of our times.

Ludwig Feuerbach, a 19th century German theologian, claimed that “the old world made spirit parent of matter; the new world makes matter parent of spirit.” This influenced Marx to a considerable extent, leading to dialectical materialism and the various forms of material determinism, the legacy of which still remains with us in the forms of technocratic determinism. The dominance of a kind of instrumental reason leads to the illusions of power and control over nature and ourselves and to the ideology of progress, the religion of science or scientism, on the one hand, and the reactions against this kind of reductionism in the flights of fantasy into the abstractions and confusions about the self, on the other hand, what Michel Henry called sociologism. Such are some of our current confusions.

Charles Taylor, Canada’s pre-eminent philosopher, in a recent book, Cosmic Connections, undertakes an intriguing survey of English and German romanticism in the 18th and 19th centuries to show the strong desire for a deeper sense of connection to the larger dimensions of creation or the cosmos; reality, if you will. But this book like others is premised in part on the idea of disenchantment. The claim is that modernity for the last five hundred years is disconnected from the natural world. Our disenchantment is really about the dominance of a practical and instrumental relation to the world which is ultimately destructive of both the world and ourselves. This is certainly part of the story but is it the whole story or is this also part of ‘the myth of disenchantment’? The Angels, it seems to me, have always been with us and belong to the imaginary of our spiritual and intellectual culture in every age and period including modernity, whatever is meant by that term.

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