Category: Sermons

“O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

There is a wonderful devotional prayer in our Prayer Book Communion Liturgy that is known as The Prayer of Humble Access. I won’t go into how it has been mocked and derided by the literalism of some liturgical scholars, who being tone deaf to the nuances and beauty of poetry, suppose that the last phrases attribute one power to the Body of Christ and another to the Blood of Christ with respect to our bodies and our souls, having forgotten the doctrine of concomitance, it seems, namely, that the sacrament is whole in each of its parts. The prayer works doctrinally as well as devotionally. It is profoundly sacramental.

The prayer says it all, however:

We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord; Trusting in our own righteousness, But in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy So much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, Whose property is always to have mercy…

We pray this as a necessary part of our preparation and approach to the Sacrament. The prayer echoes explicitly the Gospel for this day, the story of the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus so resolutely, so determinedly and yet so humbly.

Two words stand here in a complementary relation. They are the words “humble” and “access.” Humility is the condition of our access to God. What the prayer expresses is a fundamental attitude of Faith. It is not our presumption, our “trusting in our own righteousness,” but our humility, our trusting in the “manifold and great mercies” of God. Against everything that is thrown at her, she has a hold of this one thing, namely, the mercies of God in Christ Jesus. To have a hold of that is humility. She presumes upon nothing else and it is this that gains her access to the heart of Christ.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God,
And him only shalt thou serve”

For centuries upon centuries, the story of the temptations of Christ has been read on the First Sunday in Lent. But what are the temptations of Christ? They are our temptations brought to clarity in Jesus Christ. We are inclined, perhaps, to have a negative view of temptation. But in truth, there is something altogether positive about the fact of temptations. They are a necessary feature of our humanity. At issue is how we understand and respond to the temptations.

The temptations of Christ are about two things: the naming of the three forms of temptation which embrace every temptation; and the threefold overcoming of temptation. The critical lesson for us, in the Christian understanding, is that temptation is properly named and overcome only by Christ and by Christ in us; the grace that is given is not given in vain provided we act upon it.

In the Gospels, the account of the temptations of Christ follows the baptism of Christ. The baptism of Christ is an epiphany – a making known of his essential divine identity: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” What immediately follows is that Christ is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. Mark’s word ‘driven’ is more intense than the word ‘led’ used by Matthew and Luke; it, literally, is about being cast out or thrown into the wilderness and suggests the alienating and violent aspects of sin as well as the divine determination to achieve our reconciliation; after all, it is the Holy Spirit who drives or leads Jesus into the wilderness. The temptations belong to the intensity of the pageant of Christ’s passion.

The wilderness is the place of spiritual combat. It is also the place of spiritual refreshment and renewal. There is a struggle, a conflict, an agone that is more intense than the Olympics. The conflict is within. It is the conflict of wills within us. We are divided against ourselves in every temptation. It is a question about our fundamental identity. What really defines us?

(more…)

Print this entry

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God”

“If music be the food of love, play on” (Twelfth Night). And no doubt, we shall! “Dance me to the end of love.” Music, food, & dance, it seems, all come together tonight. But how? Through love. The question is not about what kind of music, whether Mozart or Villa-Lobos, not about what kind of food, whether Iberian or Brazilian, not about what kind of dance, whether minuet or samba, but about love. What kind of love?

What? Isn’t love, well, love? A little word pressed into the service of many and great things, I fear. Yet we cannot not think about love. It is the challenge of this day and a challenge for our culture. Nothing speaks more profoundly to our assumptions about love than the Scripture readings for this day and this season.

Our assumptions about love? Hey, isn’t it Valentine’s day? Isn’t love romantic and sensual, sexual and emotional? It is not something to think about. Feel the love! Yet:

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
(not, perhaps, the best of opening lines for Romeos and Juliets!)
But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted,
(this is not getting any better, is it?)
Nor tender feelings to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone.

There’s a challenge. Somehow love might be something more than the sensual and the physical, something more than just the erotic. Yes, but, note, neither less nor other than the sensual and the erotic, perhaps, and certainly not without romance.
(more…)

Print this entry

“Set love in order in me”

It is a wonderful phrase from that great love-song of the Old Testament, the Song of Songs. It serves as a governing principle for the season of Lent. Today is Quinquagesima Sunday. We have already had occasion to talk about these curious names which adorn the three Sundays before Lent. Quinquagesima Sunday, is also commonly known as Love Sunday. It brings us to the very threshold of the season of Lent, to that concentration of the pilgrimage of our lives into the space of forty days. Lent, above all else, is the pilgrimage of love. Love’s journeying ways shape us in love and bring us to love’s end, to the peace and joy and blessedness of Jerusalem redeemed.

Quinquagesima is called Love Sunday principally because of today’s Epistle reading at Communion. It is St. Paul’s great love-song: “If I have not love I am nothing worth…and now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity”, love. The theme is captured wonderfully in the Collect, but its profounder meaning is presented in the Eucharistic Gospel in the words of Jesus to the disciples that “we go up to Jerusalem.”

This day illustrates the business of Lent; the business, if you will, of setting love in order in us, both individually and collectively. All the readings on this day illuminate the path of our Lenten journey. It is the pilgrimage of love.

(more…)

Print this entry

“If I have not love, I am nothing”

Love is everything and without it we are nothing. Tough love, it seems. What is this love? Quite simply, it is the love of God, the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves.

But isn’t love, love? Love of what, in what way and for what end, we have to ask. Love is not static but dynamic. It is the desire or the eros of our souls, “the still more excellent way” that transcends and transforms our human attempts at justice and right.

Divine charity perfects human charity. In the divine fellowship, the true desire of our souls for the unity that unites all differences is accomplished and concluded. Such love cannot be an indifferent love, a love that is indifferent to the realities of our lives and the lives of others around us. Love indifferent is not love. The love that is sung in this Hymn of Love is the divine love which seeks our good, individually and collectively.

(more…)

Print this entry

Dust and ashes

Ash Wednesday reminds us with words that we are dust while ashes are placed on our foreheads. The dust recalls us to our creation as the dust into which God has breathed his life-giving spirit. The ashes are the ashes of repentance because of our having turned away from God in sin. They turn us to redemption.

The ashes are made from burning last years’ palm crosses. Fire ends in ashes. But these ashes mark a new beginning, a renewal in love. Lent is the pilgrimage of love. That love is the perfecting grace of Christ, the divine love incarnate who goes the way of our imperfect loves to make perfect our loves. There must be in us the continual purgation and purification of our loves. They are purged and purified in the passion of Christ, in the pilgrimage of his perfect love for us. That is the intent of Lent and the significance of beginning in ashes.

We are called to repentance. This requires an awareness of our imperfect loves. The ashes mark a beginning with a twofold emphasis. There is conversion from sin and there is contrition for sin. Fire ends in ashes but God’s love is the greater fire which makes something out of the ashes of our lives. We are to arise from the ashes in the renewal of faith, hope and love.

It is the joy of renewing love. There is the joy of knowing that we have a gracious God to whom we may return, yet again. Repentance is the gracious stirring of his love in us recalling us to the truth of ourselves as found in him.

The ashes placed on our foreheads signify at once the rational faculty by which we are made in God’s image and the misuse of that divine image in us by our willful disobedience. The ashes are placed on our foreheads with the words that recall the dust of our origins but also our end, namely, dust dignified with divinity.

Lent is the season of renewal in love. The fire of Christ’s love is “that most burning love for the crucified” (St. Bonaventure). It does not end in ashes.

Fr. David Curry

Print this entry

“Now the parable is this: the seed is the word of God”

Dust and dirt? Not again?! These are hardly appealing images for thinking about the nature of our humanity in its relation to God. But that is exactly what we are being asked to consider this morning, learning to trust not “in any thing that we do” or in our own power and strength but actually learning to “glory even in the things which concern [our] infirmities,” as Paul says, and thinking about what kind of ground we are, in which God’s word is being sown, as the parable from Luke’s Gospel suggests. Somehow the turn to dust and dirt on this Sexagesima Sunday is critical for our understanding of the redemption of our humanity in Jesus Christ. Hardly appealing, it might seem, but divinely necessary.

Apparently, it takes courage and humility. Apparently, it takes prudence and humility. What Paul is talking about in his Second Letter to the Corinthians takes courage and is courage, one of the four cardinal virtues. It is about standing fast and firm inwardly in the face of every imaginable form of hardship, both natural disasters and human violence, in perils and in prisons; not to mention that other burden, “the care of all the churches.” And it is also about the virtue of prudence, another one of the four cardinal virtues, as shown in the parable of the sower and the seed. What kind of ground we are has to do with how we order our lives with respect to God’s word; “the good ground” is the metaphor for “the good heart” that “hearing the word, keep[s] it, and bring[s] forth fruit with patience.” That is prudence, practical wisdom with respect to the things of God.

Humility provides the connection. It connects us to the ground at the same time as it signals our openness to God. Only by virtue of the first, our connection to the ground, can there be the second, our openness to God. Once again, this is why the story of Creation is so important and so necessary for our thinking about human redemption. Redemption, after all, completes and perfects our creation out of the wandering ways of our waywardness in the wilderness of the world. The word humility, too, connects us directly to the humus, to the ground of our createdness. Adam, referring to humanity, literally means formed from the ground.

(more…)

Print this entry

“My soul cleaveth to the dust:
O quicken thou me, according to thy word”
(Psalm 119, pt 4, vs 25)

Dust and dirt? Quite a change from the emphasis of the Epiphany season on the essential divinity of Christ, it might seem. To be sure, with Septuagesima Sunday we mark a new beginning. We begin at the beginning. And that means, beginning, too, with dust and dirt, with the ground of creation, quite literally.

At Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, we begin reading from The Book of Genesis. In so doing, we enter into an ancient tradition. The tradition conveys ancient wisdom, namely, a profound reflection upon the mystery of Creation within the Revelation of God as Trinity.

We begin with Genesis only to find ourselves in the midst of the vineyard of creation in today’s gospel. But we begin with Genesis. It is, at once, a difficult and a necessary starting point. It is difficult because of the contemporary tendency to view the Book of Genesis in one of two ways, both of which are false. The first way is to read Genesis as a kind of scientific treatise, which it isn’t (this is the folly of creationism: bad science and bad religion). The second way is to read Genesis as a haphazard collection of fables and myths, which it isn’t.

The Book of Genesis does not propose a discovery of God; it begins with God. “In the beginning, God.” There is the proclamation of God as the absolute beginning after which everything else is secondary, after which everything else is derivative, after which everything else is a product. And while something of the Mind of the Maker, to use a famous phrase, is made known in what he makes, the Creator is not simply equated with what he makes. He is known as beyond and in control. It is his creation. The distinction between the Creator and the created is absolutely crucial.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Speak the word only”

Before I begin, let me thank Fr. Harris for the kindness of his invitation to preach this morning here at St. Peter’s. I bring you greetings from Windsor, Nova Scotia, from Christ Church and, on behalf of the Headmaster, Mr. Joe Seagram, and our assistant Headmaster, Mr. Darcy Walsh, who is also here with us this morning, I bring you greetings from King’s-Edgehill School. It is wonderful, too, that Canon Tuck, an old boy of the School, is assisting with the liturgy this morning. All these wonderful Maritime connections!

Along with my colleague, Mr. Kevin Lakes, and our Junior Boys Basketball Team consisting of Christian, Zachary, Devon, Sam, Fernando, Ryan, Ben and Tom, we have been delighted to come and play on your island and now to be able to come and pray on your island, especially here in this wonderful and holy place.

Everything is “charged with the grandeur of God,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests. But, then, there is the misery, too, the misery of suffering and death in Haiti, for instance. The grandeur and the misery. The grandeur of God meets the misery of man in the Epiphany season; “signs and wonders” abound in that meeting.

(more…)

Print this entry

Teaching is Feeding: “Thou hast the words of eternal life”

The sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel is known as “the Bread of Life Discourse.” It concerns our Lord’s teaching about himself and about the means of our abiding in him. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him” (vs.56). “The words which I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (vs.63). The last sections of this chapter (vs.41ff), which we heard this morning, indicate how hard and yet how necessary the teachings of Christ are. As Amos puts it, “they abhor him who speaks the truth” (Amos 5.10).

God teaches us about himself and about our life in him. But these are hard teachings. The Jews murmur against Jesus because of the identity they perceive he makes between himself and God, “calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5.18). They murmur against him here “because he said, I am the bread of life which came down from heaven” (John 6.41). This conflicts with what they think they know about him. “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” (vs.42). Their sense of his earthly identity gets in the way of what he would teach them. What he would teach them is an heavenly knowledge conveyed through earthly signs. It is a kind of epiphany.

He recalls the point of the prophets, “they shall all be taught by God” (Is.54.13, Jer.31.33,34), and centers it upon himself, “everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me”(vs.45). They murmured because in saying “I am the bread which came down from heaven” (vs.41), he identifies himself with the Father as the one who is “from God” (vs.46). That is the meaning of his being the Son, the Son of God become the Son of man.

(more…)

Print this entry