Category: Sermons

“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.

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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

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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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.

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“They have no wine”

After the celebrated fullness of Christmas, it must seem suddenly strange to find ourselves utterly empty. “They have no wine,” Mary says to Jesus. Not just the post-Christmas mantra of the Deep Dark Woods’ song “All the money I had is gone”, but we have no wine! Empty wine-skins and empty pockets, it seems. And, of course, we may find ourselves empty, too, with grief and dismay at the terrible destruction of the earthquake in poverty-stricken Haiti; a natural catastrophe magnified by human poverty. There, too, it must seem there is no wine, no joy. And, of course, there are those who point the finger of blame at God because of the realities of human suffering. That, too, is part of our emptiness.

And yet, this gospel story speaks powerfully to the human predicament. We are empty in ourselves of all that has purpose and meaning, of all that has joy and delight. We are just so many broken pots and empty cups. We confront emptiness and loss. Mary’s words are really quite profound. She speaks of an emptiness that is about something more than money, more than even wine physically and materially considered. We lack the wine of divinity.

We meet in the season of the Epiphany. The gospel story of the marriage feast at Cana of Galilee is one of the outstanding stories of the Epiphany season. It is an epiphany. Why? Because it calls our attention to the making known of the essential divinity of Christ as critical to the understanding of him as the Redeemer of our humanity. One of the most poignant stories of the Epiphany, it manifests the power of the one who seeks our good, the one who brings redemption and salvation to a world of empty souls.

“This beginning of signs,” John tells us, is the first miracle and it gives us an insight into the meaning and truth of all the miracles of the gospel and an insight into the redemption of our humanity.

In the background to Mary’s remark is an old Jewish saying that “without wine there is no joy.” We lack the joy of divinity which graces our humanity. Left to ourselves, our joys and our happinesses are incomplete and empty. We need the wine of divinity. This is what God wants to give us precisely in our awareness of what we lack. God seeks the perfection of our humanity which is found in him. Out of the six jars of water comes the wine, the good wine, which restores the joy of the party and signifies the social joys of our humanity. They are found in God. They are found by our paying attention to the creative and redemptive word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ.

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“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds”

With the coming of the Magi to Bethlehem, Christmas goes global. It becomes omni populo, for all people, simply by the journeying to and from Bethlehem by those who are simply called the Magi from Anatolia, the wise ones from the east. We know next to nothing about them; only their gifts, their “sacred gifts of mystic meaning” as an ancient hymn puts it, point to the larger dimension of the reality and the universality of the Incarnation. The one before whom they kneel in adoration is signified in the gifts they bring as nothing less than King and God and Sacrifice.

The gifts teach. Epiphany emphasises the fundamental feature of all revealed religion. God teaches. God makes something of himself known to us and in so doing reveals something of ourselves to us as well, both the good and the bad.

The idea of Revelation honours our humanity; the theological assumption contained in the idea of Revelation is that we are capax dei, capable of God, not by virtue of any presumption on our part, of course, but by the grace of Revelation itself. For Christians Revelation has its fullest expression in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. What greater honour could be bestowed upon our humanity than the divine condescension to enter into the very fabric of our humanity? “Thou didst not abhor the virgin’s womb” as the Te Deum wonderfully puts it. An honour and a dignity have been bestowed upon us. To what end? To teach and to redeem so that our humanity which is capax dei can also participate in the divine life opened to view in Jesus Christ; “he in us and we in him”, as our liturgy puts it.  We are meant to be changed by what we are given to see. In a way, it is as simple as that.

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“They saw…they came…they worshipped”

It may be, as someone recently remarked to me, that had the wise men been women, they would have gotten there on time and presented more practical gifts! Yet the gifts of the Magi have another purpose. They are profoundly symbolic: “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, as one of our hymns puts it. In short, they are gifts that teach. Both the gifts of the Magi and the journey of the Magi wonderfully illustrate something of the nature of the Epiphany.

Epiphany marks at once the beginning and the end of Christmas. With the story of the coming of the wise men from the east who brought gifts to the child Christ, it seems, thereby breaking-in to Bethlehem, Christmas is omni populo, for all people – and so there is the beginning of Christmas for the whole world. But with the break-out from Bethlehem which Epiphany also signifies, there is a new and different focus. There is a journey, both a journeying to Bethlehem and a journeying from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. And yet, the deeper meaning and significance of God with us is the critical lesson in the journeying from Bethlehem. Something of Bethlehem continues with us.

The mystery of God with us is the mystery revealed, the mystery made manifest. Epiphany is more than a day and a season. It signals a doctrine – a teaching. Indeed, the teaching that it signals is the teaching of God – God making himself known to us through the conditions of our humanity; God teaching us something about what he wants and seeks for us. We are opened out to the mystery of God with us. We are taught something about what belongs to the truth of our humanity from within the conditions of our brokenness. We learn, it seems, even from the little ones.

Christ is God’s “great little one” to whom the great of the earth – kings in their power and the wise in their wisdom – “come and worship”. The mystery of Christmas cannot stay hidden in some remote corner of the world; it must needs break out from the confines of little Bethlehem. In the coming of the Magi from afar (they are the prototypical come-from-aways!) the whole world in its desiring to know is understood to have its place and its fulfillment in this story.

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

There is a rich fullness to Christmas, to be sure. We have had, perhaps, our fill of Christmas in too much eating, too much drinking, too much feasting, too much partying, too much snow, too much everything; even, it may seem, too much Church! (And, perhaps, for some both near and far, too much Curry!) There is, indeed, a rich fullness to Christmas.

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, they are our poor attempt to capture something of the rich fullness of the Mystery of Christmas.

There is but one poor, humble scene of Christmas. It is the stable of Bethlehem. And yet, 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”. 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.

There is the Christmas of the Shepherds, the Christmas of the Angels, the Christmas of Mary and Joseph and Christ’s holy birth, the Christmas, too, of Christ’s heavenly, eternal birth for “there was not when he was not”. And, shortly, there shall be the Christmas of the Gentiles in the coming of the Magi, without which, too, we would not have Christmas. For in their coming Christmas is “omni populo”, for all people. With the coming of the Magi, it is Christmas still and yet again. Christmas is more Christmas, not less, a richer fullness than ever we had envisioned. All come to Bethlehem.

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