Category: Sermons

“And the Lord showed him all the land” (Deut.34.1)

Sometimes the smell of the land can be quite overpowering! You know what I mean – the odour of ordure, the smell of manure. It is a reminder of the realities of the land in a farming community. Perhaps, today that pungent aroma will be offset by the bouquets of Mother’s Day flowers! Yet, apart from the secular observance of Mother’s Day, this is the Fifth Sunday after Easter, commonly known as Rogation Day.

The days of rogation are days of asking, days of prayer, but with a particular emphasis upon the land. Rogation Sunday would remind us of the redemption of creation itself and our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The resurrection is cosmic in scope. It concerns the whole world – the world as ordered to God.

Prayer is an activity of redeemed humanity. We make our prayers in the land where we have been placed. Our places in the land are to be the places of grace. How? By prayer. Rogationtide embraces the world in prayer. The world is comprehended in the relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Nowhere is that more clearly signaled than in today’s Gospel where Jesus speaks of his going forth from the Father into the world and his return to the Father out of the world. The redemption of the world is captured in those words. What is “overcome” is sin, which is the world as turned away from God and as turned against God, the world as infected and stained by our sinfulness, by the forgetfulness of our place and so of ourselves in the landscape of creation redeemed. The consequences are our disrespect for the land and the sea, for the world in which we have been placed. We make a mess of it. We forget the place of creation in the will of God; we forget about the redemption of creation.

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“Sing ye praises with understanding”

O sing praises, sing praises unto our God; / O sing praises, sing praises unto our King. /For God is the King of all the earth:/Sing ye praises with understanding (Psalm 47.6,7). So the psalmist teaches us. We have had a splendid illustration of what it means to sing with the understanding with the King’s College Chapel Choir tonight under the direction of Paul Halley. Welcome to Christ Church and please, please come again!

“Though we but stammer with the lips of men, yet chant we the high things of God,” one of the early Fathers of the Church says. We sing the high praises of God. It is our freedom, perhaps our highest freedom. But as the Psalmist suggests, our praises are not praises except they be through the understanding. Indeed, it cannot be our freedom unless it be through the understanding – the understanding of the revealed nature of God. For our praises are not projections but proclamations – an acknowledging of what has been given to us to know. We can only proclaim what has been made known to us and, in so doing, we enter more fully into the understanding of what we proclaim. But how is it our freedom?

God alone is praiseworthy precisely because in the freedom of his eternal being he does not need our praises. The proclamation of the Trinity – the highest of the high things of God, the mystery that is shown, what is revealed, not concealed – is the acknowledgement of the perfect self-sufficiency of God upon which everything else depends. Yet in singing God’s praises, the Church is also most free. The God who does not need our praises is freely praised. However much humanity needs to praise God, our praises are not praises if they are forced.

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“Because I go to my Father”

“Elvis has left the building,” it is famously said, indicating that there would be no more encores. Well, here, I hope, Jesus has not left the building! But the question for our culture and day is whether we have left him in our indifference, if not our outright hostility to Christian doctrine and life.

There is a paradox in the last three Sundays of Easter that is captured in the recurring refrain signaled in the Gospels for those Sundays. The recurring refrain is “because I go to my Father.” Jesus prepares the disciples for his going away which is the condition of his being with us in his body, the Church. It is the so-called “farewell discourse” of Jesus in St. John’s Gospel.

The Gospel engages the world. That is not the same thing as being collapsed into the world or being conformed to the world. Nor is it about making accommodations to the world with respect to the agendas and issues of our day. There have always been such tendencies and temptations. They can be, perhaps, the occasion for the discovery or recovery of the deeper truths of the Gospel. “The Spirit of truth,” it is said in today’s gospel, “will guide you into all truth.”

But what is that truth? Is it simply something which we happen to agree upon today only to change our minds tomorrow? Is the truth simply our acquiescence to the loudest voices drumming their mantras of social and political correctness into our heads? Is truth simply the will of those in power? Is it simply our feelings and opinions? No. Complementary to this statement about “the Spirit of truth,” is the equally important statement that we will hear at Pentecost, namely, that the Holy Spirit “shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you.” Somehow truth is found in the divine relations between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; in short, in the divine life opened to view through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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“Woman, behold thy Son…then to the disciple, behold thy Mother”

Christ crucified beholds us in his love for the Father. At one point he looks down from the cross. He looks down upon us and bids us look upon one another. It is the third word from the cross: “Woman, behold thy Son; and then, to the disciple, behold thy Mother.” These are, we may say, the words of the Good Shepherd. They are the words of his care for us.

The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He does not flee like the hireling – the wage slave – in the face of danger. No. The Good Shepherd endures the danger and overcomes it. His endurance means his suffering and death. His victory means his resurrection and life. He lays down his life for the sheep so that his life might live in us. That life is the life of the resurrection. It flows out in his care for us through the Church.

We hear talk all the time about “caring communities”. But I wonder if we know what it really means. We forget, I think, the lessons of the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Ultimately, there can be no true caring without the care of Christ. The crucifixion and the resurrection reconstitute the human community and give it life and meaning.

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“They were afraid”

It is known as the short ending to The Gospel according to St. Mark because some of the earliest texts of St. Mark’s Gospel end at verse eight of the sixteenth chapter rather than with the accounts of the resurrection that take us to verse twenty. To be sure, the canonical gospel, the gospel that is authoritative for orthodox Christians, includes those additional twelve verses. The shorter ending does not mean that Mark does not believe in the doctrine of the resurrection or that the additional verses are somehow unrelated and disconnected to the rest of his gospel and unfaithful to it. Quite the contrary.

But what are we to make of that shorter ending? From a literary point of view, I think, it is powerful and poignant ending, and serves to make the doctrinal point about the resurrection even more strongly. After all, it is only in the light of the resurrection that the story of Jesus makes any sense at all. The resurrection captures the imaginations of the gospel writers and compels them to see things in a new light without which they would never have written what they have written about Jesus at all.

The additional verses serve as an epilogue and as a further point of confirmation, whether as added by Mark or by someone else later on is entirely uncertain and unknowable, and, I might add, quite irrelevant to our understanding of the Christian Faith.

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“This is the victory that overcometh the world; even our faith”

Peace and forgiveness flow from the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. They are the first-fruits of his resurrection in us, it seems, at least as this is signaled in John’s Gospel. Jesus appears behind closed doors where the disciples are huddled in fear. He proclaims peace and forgiveness. He institutes the means by which his peace and his forgiveness continue with us – through the Holy Spirit breathed upon the disciples who will be the apostles of his church. They are sent forth to bestow the peace and the forgiveness of God to a fearful and an uncertain world, a world of darkness and deceit, a cruel and dangerous world, “as everybody knows”. “Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosoever sins ye retain, they are retained”.

What an awesome charge! And, yet, how little understood. Sometimes known as ‘the power of the keys’, the proclamation of God’s forgiveness through the ordained ministry to his penitent people effects what it signifies. If we truly confess our sins and truly seek God’s forgiveness, then we receive the grace of forgiveness objectively proclaimed in the words of absolution pronounced by the priest and signified in the sign of the cross. We are forgiven. That is the grace which extends from the Upper Room “the same day at evening”, the day of the resurrection of Christ. It is as if we are there in that very moment and in that very room, as if time has stopped and we are caught up into eternity.

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“Christ is risen from the dead”

The truth of this day is that we are, actually, absolutely dead; dead in ourselves, that is to say. Why? Because we only live when we live for one another. And, yet, how can we live for one another? It is one of the great questions for our age.

The great insight of Holy Week is that our humanity, collectively and individually speaking, is dead when it lives only for itself. It is dead in the world’s conflicting demands; dead in the unceasing contradictions of all our souls; dead in its pretensions and follies; dead in its antagonisms and enmities. The pageant of Holy Week has shown this in all its fullness. “All is vanity,” an empty nothingness, as Ecclesiastes put it so long ago.  We have, of course, all felt this at one time or another. Yet, all this is nothing new, as “everybody knows.”

The further point is that we can’t live for one another unless we live for God. We are only alive in him. This goes down hard in our world and day and yet it is almost, we might say, an empirical statement. We do hurt those whom we love the most, and, no, we don’t always do what is even in our own best interest. To pretend that “it’s the end of the world and I feel fine” (with thanks and apologies to Great Big Sea) is just that, a pretense. We don’t feel fine whether it is or is not the end of the world.

If we are honest, we know that things are not altogether as we would like them to be, let alone what they should be from almost any kind of ethical consideration. If it isn’t scandals in the Church, both sexual and other forms of abuse, such as the abuse of power, all of which suggest a “lack of credibility,” it is scandals everywhere else. As the Leonard Cohen song suggests, there is nothing new about this. “Everybody knows that’s the way it goes,” the world’s way of deceit and betrayal, the way of self-interest and denial, whether in society or, sadly, in the Church. Yet precisely against this deadly cynicism stands something radically new. It is simply this.

We only live when we live to God. This is the burden of our teaching, for then, and only then, we live beyond ourselves, beyond the death of ourselves, beyond the death of the human community and beyond the death of the world. We live simply (and only!) in the unending life of God. Such is the teaching of the resurrection. We can only begin to learn what it means by running with the Word of the Risen One in the glory of the resurrection.

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“Consummatum est – It is finished.”

Is it over yet? Perhaps I shouldn’t ask. But here is John’s last word from the Cross which says, “it is finished.” And yet we do more, you and I. After Christ dies, there is one final act of outrage, it seems, yet one more act. It belongs to our good on this day we call Good Friday to contemplate the ‘something more’ of our sinfulness and the even greater ‘something more’ of God’s love.

The dead Christ, having given up his spirit, still hangs upon the Cross; no longer dying but dead. The dead Christ is, then, pierced by the soldier’s spear. We have more to do, it seems, than just crucify him. We have more to do than just to kill him. It is, of course, perhaps, the customary procedure or test to see if he is dead but is it not also yet another gratuitous act of violence?

Yet God has far, far more than the more of our sins, something far, far more than the acts of our violence. And it begins here in this word of consummation, this word of finishing and ending. The great blessing of the Resurrection, Christ’s grand finale, we might say, already begins to flow out from the body of the broken-hearted Christ. Water and blood come forth from that stricken rock. It is the teaching of the Fathers that the sacraments of the Church flow out of the pierced side of the Crucified. Water and blood, the symbols of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist, flow out of the side of Christ crucified. There is at once the ‘something more’ of our sins – a final and unnecessary act, a violation of the sacred body – and the ‘something more’ of the act of God whose nature it is always to make something out of nothing. Creation and Recreation.

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