Category: Sermons

“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly.”

The Sunday Next Before Advent brings us to the end of the ecclesiastical year and so to the beginning of yet another. It brings us to the end of the Trinity season in a kind of summing up of the whole pageant of grace and it brings us to the beginning of the Advent season when we begin again with the grace of God’s turning and coming to us.

There is something profound and wonderful in these moments of transition, something which suggests the true nature of the dynamic of faith. And yet there is a kind of ambiguity as well. Do we end the year on a note of weariness and exhaustion? Too many books, so little time? “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” after all, whether it be books in print or e-books. Are we frustrated and perplexed with the relentless sameness of yet another year, a year in which, once again, there seems to be no progress, no change from the endless and dismal stories of hardship and struggle? If anything, it might seem that there is more grief and trouble, more sadness and dismay. “Everybody knows, that’s the way it goes”, as Leonard Cohen’s song puts it rather cynically. It may seem that we have been “fed with the bread of tears” and have had “plenteousness of tears to drink” as the psalmist puts it (Ps. 80).

Do we end, as Ecclesiastes seems to suggest, simply with the sombre awareness of death and mortality, the feebleness of old age and the barrenness of winter? “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,” an image which evokes at once old age and ecclesiastical ruins; a pile of holy stones, a Tintern Abbey centuries before Wordsworth.

Do we end, then, weary and worn with the attempts to take the world by storm only to find that the mysteries of life continue to elude us? If so, then we end well, it seems to me. Because to confront the vanities of our pursuits and ambitions is to stand on the brink of a great wisdom, the wisdom of God which alone can redeem and heal our weary souls.

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“Come and see”

Scripture sounds the notes of an ending and a beginning on this day which is called, in a wonderful combination of prepositions, The Sunday Next before Advent. This day both concludes the course of the Son’s life in us, “the Lord our Righteousness” as we hear in the lesson from Jeremiah, and returns us to the beginning of the course he runs for us, “Behold the Lamb of God” as John the Baptist says about Jesus in the Gospel. The righteousness of Christ, the right ordering of our loves and our lives, is what we have sought in the long course of the Trinity season. The course he runs for us is the way of the cross, the way of sacrifice. We travel with him in that way in the pageant of faith from Advent to Trinity. We begin again even as we end in him.

Such times of transition signal occasions of renewal – a renewal of love, a re-awakening of the soul’s desire for holy things, a divine stirring up of our wills, as the Collect for today reminds us. We come to the Advent of Christ. Advent is the season of God’s revelation, the motion of God’s Word and Son towards us for the sake of our knowing. Our text sounds the measure of the season and beyond the season strikes the note of our soul’s salvation. “Come and see”.

In St. John’s Gospel, this is Jesus’ first statement. It comes in response to the disciples’ answer to his very first gospel utterance, a question which he puts to them and to us, “What seek ye?” They answer with a question that has a twofold significance: “Rabbi (which means Teacher), where are you staying?” Here is no question of idle curiosity, but one which is deep and profound. It speaks about the yearning of our hearts and the desiring of our minds. It speaks about the awakened desire of the soul for God. But how is the question twofold? By its address as well as its request.

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The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, delivered this sermon at King’s College, Halifax, on the Feast of Saint Edmund, 2008.

“Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of the sufferings of Christ”

November is the grey month of remembering. It embraces at once the great harvest festivals of All Saints and All Souls as well as the secular remembering of those who gave their lives in the service of their country in the great and defining wars of that most bloody of bloody centuries, the twentieth century. It ends with the spiritual summa of the parade of sanctifying grace on the Sunday Next Before Advent that equally brings us, in turn, to the renewed beginnings of Advent itself, the start of the progress of justifying grace, yet again. In between are a host of minor commemorations which provide a kind of meditative faux bourdon, the sweet middle at an interval of a fourth below the melody, a poignant resonance of individual spiritual lives illustrating in a personal way the grander themes of our spiritual remembering.

Edmund, King and Martyr, is one such November commemoration. Along with Hilda, the remarkably tough-minded Abbess of Whitby, two centuries before, whose commemoration was on Monday, November 17^th, Edmund contributes to an early English interlude in our November reflections on the pageant of glory and grace. Edmund was the King of East Anglia, martyred in 870 at the hands of the Danes, raiders whose incursions and visits to the England and other places wrought great terror in the hearts of all who met them. His life complements and illumines the spiritual scenery of the great epic poem of the English language, The Epic of Beowulf.

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“Whose is this image?”

In the contemporary culture of illusions, questions about image are everything. Whether it is ‘American Idol’ or ‘Canadian Idol’ or ‘So you think you can dance, Canada?’, so much turns on our image of ourselves and our sense of how we would like others to see us. In so many ways, it is a dangerous illusion. The dangers are the narcissistic ‘look-at-me-looking-at-you-looking-at-me’ and the soullessness of it all. What is missing, paradoxically, is the very thing for which we are seeking. We are seeking, I think, for some sense of meaning and purpose, some sense of identity and dignity. Our readings this morning speak wonderfully and directly to those deep and underlying desires.

“Our citizenship is in heaven”, Paul tells us. And Jesus asks those who would entrap him, “Whose is this image and superscription?” His question is really about us and recalls us to the deep and wonderful scriptural teaching that to understand our humanity is to understand that we are made in the image of God. For Christians, that image of God has been further intensified in Jesus Christ. He is the express image of the Father, and he is both God and man. And only so, can Paul claim that “our citizenship is in heaven.”

But what does that mean? The Church is always in one way or another counter-culture. Nowhere is that more clear than in these readings which speak directly and as a counter challenge to the dominant aspects of our culture which can no longer really be said to be a Christian culture in any meaningful sense. What defines us? Will it be our social and political convictions, illusions and commitments? Or will it be something spiritual and intellectual, something theological? In a way, it is as simple as that.

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

The significance of this day should not be lost on any of us. To remember is to be aware about who we really are. That means, paradoxically, to pay attention to others. It is especially hard in the attention deficit culture. Memory is increasingly the lost and neglected faculty of our humanity.

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 freedoms and civic 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. 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 into all that we do at the Altar.

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 a thousand cenotaph in a thousand villages throughout the world. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

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“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God”

In the somber grey of November, in the season of scattered leaves and the culture of scattered souls, God’s Word gathers us and challenges us about the nature of our Christian lives. Should we somehow think that it is enough simply to hear God’s word, then we are rightly and roundly reminded not “to be hearers only” but to be “doers of the word” as well. Likewise, if we should be so foolish and brain-dead as to think that worship and public prayer and all the things belonging to religion are peripheral and really nothing worth, then we are rightly reminded to “receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your souls”.

The point is ever so clear. It is almost a commonplace. We are called to be what we believe and that means both hearing and doing; in short, it means both faith and works. Such is the strength of the message of James. It is a kind of sermon, and, indeed, one which complements beautifully The Sermon on the Mount, the gospel which has been read for more than a thousand years on All Saints’ Day.

To suppose that we can absent ourselves from where the Word of God is proclaimed and celebrated is as absurd as to suppose that we can hear and receive that Word without acting upon it. That is the strong message from The Epistle of St. James. He is calling us to scriptural wisdom. “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God”. For “of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth”. We live from that word of truth.

If anything is lacking from our contemporary world, I fear, it is wisdom. We immerse ourselves in action. We busy ourselves endlessly in the doing of this and that. We are literally afraid to stop and think, to read, let alone to pray. We easily fall prey to the greatest of follies and superstitions. Ours, too, is a most gullible age.

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Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?

Love gives without expectation of return simply because love is its own reward. The Gospels teach us to love for love’s sake. Love is its own reason. What does this mean?

It means that love cannot be a matter of calculation – giving with the expectation of receiving in return. For then we limit love. We put limits and restrictions on our love and the love of others. It is a poor and impoverished kind of love which constrains and restricts the boundless love, the unlimited love, the love-without-counting-the-cost kind of love shown to us in Jesus Christ.

Does this mean that love is crazy, irrational and without reason? No. Love is its own reason and that reason is known and named. “And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, as he gave us commandment.”

Christ’s love draws us into the company of the Trinity and into the Communion of Saints. The love that is without calculation is the infinite love of God. In this Gospel parable, Jesus uses a finite quantity, seventy times seven – you can do the math – to indicate an infinite quality that is beyond counting. The quality of love is something infinite. It is something of God in us. The love that is of God is always with God and with God all things are beyond mere calculation.

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“After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number”

“I believe … in The Communion of Saints”. Do we? And where is that in the Creed which we just said? “And I believe in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church;” that’s where. The Communion of Saints, professed in the Apostles’ Creed, is intimately connected to the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church”, professed in the Nicene Creed. We forget this at our peril.

The Feast of All Saints’ teaches an important lesson, especially for a world fixated on the present and pressing pragmatic and practical concerns that belong to the culture of instrumental reason. It is not that such things don’t matter but that they aren’t everything. The great Feast of All Saints’ reminds us that there is more to reality than meets the eye, that we are part of innumerable company united by one thing, the love of God in Jesus Christ. It is a powerful and important message. It places us in a great company. We are, as The Letter to the Hebrews points out, wonderfully “compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.”

There is more to reality than meets the eye, even in the culture of scattered minds and in the season of scattered leaves. Thank God. But here is the point. We are not alone. We are part of a spiritual fellowship which is not to be defined or confused with the culture of our world and day. For contemporary Christianity, which has been taken captive by the cultures which it itself has produced, this is a salutary and timely reminder.

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“Arise, and go down to the potter’s house”

“Arise, and go down to the potter’s house,” God says to Jeremiah in The Book of Jeremiah, “and there I will let you hear my words.”(Jeremiah 18.1-2)

Jeremiah’s image of the Potter and the Clay is a commentary on the foundational stories of Creation and the Fall in The Book of Genesis. In Jeremiah’s view, God is the Potter and we are the clay. He shapes us and not otherwise. The struggle of our age, perhaps, is to overcome the dogmatic skepticism which refuses to the Potter what belongs to the “rational” clay of our humanity, namely the acknowledgment that we are the creatures whom God has made.

Left by itself, the idea that we are the vessels whom the divine Potter has made and shaped would be an unbearable truth. It would be unbearable because scripture and experience reveal us to ourselves as just so many broken pots – broken through no fault of the Potter but because of ourselves and because of the things which can just ‘happen’ to us. Both are things which belong to the reality of the Fall, the reality that we are not at home in the world and with one another because we are not at one with God.

At this point the image of the Potter and the Clay deepens into mystery. We are broken pots because we have failed to will the intent of the Maker. Something is required of us. We are not simply passive receptacles of God’s will and purpose – unassuming, inert and unmoving clay. No. We have to will the shape that the divine Potter wants for each of us. The quality of our being in Christ, in the Christian understanding of things, is about how the divine Word takes shape in us to his glory and for our endless good.

And yet, that we are but so many broken pots also would remain an uncomfortable and inescapable truth were it not for the grace and mercy of God. A deeper humility, a profounder openness to the Poet/Maker and Shaper of Souls is required of us. Jeremiah hints at this. “The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.”

What is the grace and the mercy? It is the deep and simple truth of God with us, God made man, the Potter who becomes himself the clay.

‘Twas much that man was made like God before, but
that God should be made like man, much more,

as the poet/preacher John Donne puts it. But it is another preacher, John Hackett, who drives the point home even more surely, perhaps.

The Potter may make what vessels do like him best out of his own clay. But how strangely was the wheel turn’d about when the clay did make the Potter; was it not enough to make man after the image of God, but moreover to make God after the image and likeness of man? Was it not enough that the breath of the Lord should be made a living soul for man, but that the eternal word of God should be made flesh…O that as the Word was made flesh, so our stony hearts … may be made flesh.

“How strangely was the wheel turn’d.” The Word made flesh, the clay-shaped Potter, enters into the struggles of our lives and turns the wheel about to shape his redemption for us and in us. He turns us to himself.

We live by the Word of God written and said and by the Word of God made flesh. For then we are in the hands of the Potter who has himself become clay to reshape us “as it seemed good to [him] to do.” Such is the nature of redemption itself.

Our Churches are Potter’s houses, the places where we are being shaped in the things that belong to our lives in Christ. Sunday after Sunday, as it were, we “arise and go down to the potter’s house” where the divine Potter says, “I will let you hear my words,” words which shape our lives and days to his endless glory and praise.

“Arise, and go down to the potter’s house”

Fr. David Curry
AMD Service of the Deaf
Christ Church, Windsor
October 25^th, 2009

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“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth”

“Have you considered my servant Job?” God asks. He has but have we? The Book of Job is a wonderful drama, almost a play, that bids us consider the relation of human suffering to the goodness of the created order and the goodness of God. Job has become proverbial for his sufferings, the so-called patience of Job. His sufferings, we might say, are ‘biblical’ in proportion. He suffers the loss of everything in terms of family and wealth and sits on a dung heap, afflicted by boils, on the one hand, and afflicted, too, it seems to me, by the so-called comforters, on the other hand. They have become as proverbial as Job’s patience.

The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them. There is the question, of course, about what it means to be a good person. For Christians there is no goodness in us apart from the goodness of God declared most fully in Jesus Christ. But the point is that the quality of the times in which we live cannot be the measure of virtue and character. No. It is rather the setting in which virtue is shown and character is proved. The question is whether we will be defined by circumstances or defined by grace. By grace, we mean the highest perfection of human virtue which is God’s work in us, come what may in the world around us.

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