Category: Sermons

“Now these things were our examples”

The Collect captures wonderfully the complementary nature of today’s Epistle and Gospel readings about the practice of Christian life. We pray for “the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful; that we, who cannot do any thing that is good without thee, may by thee be enabled to live according to thy will.”

Our thinking and our doing are intimately related. What we think, what we believe, and what we know are to be realized in what we do. Our actions reveal our intentions. We are to be what we believe. We are pilgrims who know, in some fashion or other, our own incompleteness but acknowledge, too, our completeness in God through Jesus Christ. Our purpose lies in the Son’s love for the Father in the embrace of the Holy Spirit. Such an understanding impels an activity of purpose in our everyday lives. It is the note which the Gospel sounds.

The Gospel exhorts us to be prudent, not unrighteous. To be prudent means to discern the good, “such things as be rightful”, and to pursue it, “living according to thy will”. It means thinking and doing the right thing at the right time in the right way and for the right reason. It is, we may say, a tall order. The challenge is to get all those things together.

The unrighteous steward in the Gospel is simply all of us. We are all stewards – those to whom things are entrusted. It is a profoundly biblical view. Nothing we have is our own. We can only enter into what God has provided for us. Our wills and our actions apart from the will of God are never right. My ways and your ways, considered in themselves, are at best ways of self-righteousness, tinged and coloured by our own agendas and motives whether known or unknown to ourselves and to others. They are always less than the full righteousness of God; in short, they are ways of unrighteousness. I know, it seems so judgmental and negative but in our reformed understanding of things it is actually altogether positive. Why? Because it throws us into the mercies of God’s redemptive grace.

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“By their fruits ye shall know them”

Actions reveal intentions and purposes. Nothing could seem more obvious and more necessary to modern freedom. But is what is revealed good or evil? Are we good or bad? Is it simply fated? The Gospel is very clear that there is often a discrepancy between what is and what seems to be, between appearance and reality. Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing, not to mention “ravening wolves” in shepherd’s cloaks! Such warnings are not just with respect to others but also ourselves. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” In a way, it is what we constantly pray in the Lord’s Prayer: “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Margaret Visser’s 2002 Massey Lecture series was entitled “Beyond Fate”. In it she speaks of modern freedom as freedom from constraint and argues for the ways in which that freedom is increasingly circumscribed in contemporary culture, noting the different metaphors that speak about the forms of the inevitable, to what is somehow fated in our world and day. In the face of the various determinisms that are inherently fatalistic, we need a deeper understanding that sees human freedom as found within the order of creation and the divine will; beyond fate, perhaps, but certainly under Providence. As St. Paul suggests in his Letter to the Romans, human freedom has to do with our spiritual identity as “the children of God” in Christ and through union with him in his sufferings and glory. Who we are is very much about what we are called to be, hence the necessary correlation between the inward and the outward aspects of our lives.

Fate and destiny are not always or necessarily negative terms, terms that limit or determine human action, making us unfree. The recent movie, “Slum Dog Millionaire,” set in an Indian and Muslim context, graphically illustrates the theme of destiny in the touching and disturbing story of Jamal and Latika, a destiny that is worked out through hardship and suffering and certainly not without its dark side of great evil and corruption, cruelty and death. Central to the movie is the sense of destiny, of fate, but in a way that is more positive and not simply negative, not merely fatalistic.

A different word belongs to our meditations today. It is signaled in the Collect: “O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth.” Providence. What do we mean by it? How does it relate to our sense of personal identity and freedom? Is it the same as fate and destiny? Or does the term itself imply something more?

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“A certain man made a great supper, and bade many”

There is more to the Christian religion that mere good manners. And yet good manners have in them more, perhaps, than we realize. More than just an aspect of civilization in the form of considerate behaviour, “manners maketh the man” and reveal something of our intrinsic character and nature; in other words, there is something of the charity of Christ at work in our dealings with one another.

And that is, of course, a central theme in the Trinity season. To put it bluntly, we participate in what is proclaimed. “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him,” as we heard last week from this same Epistle of St. John. There is a necessary, inescapable and intimate relation between the making known of God in Jesus Christ and the form of our life in Christ. St. John, in the Epistle reading for today, drives home a very hard lesson that follows from that understanding. It is about our love towards even our brother towards whom we may feel anything but love and affection, kindliness and concern. There may be things about our brother or sister (let’s not be gender exclusive!) that is quite unlovely, even hateful.

What, then, are we called to love in those whom, quite frankly, we can’t stand? Simply this, we honour their being made in the image of God as we are, howsoever much that image has been obscured, denied and derided, or howsoever much we ourselves may be confused and deluded in our judgment. This provokes the equally salutary thought. Our awareness of our judgmentalism leads to self-judgment. That can be quite destructive; self-condemnation leading to despair. In relation to that, there is the strong teaching that “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” In every way, we are being encouraged, if not actually catapulted into the mystery of God which we have been privileged to hear and receive.

It belongs to the joy of the Trinity season to place us in the intimacy of the Blessed Trinity. Trinity season is about going through the open door or, at the very least, standing on the threshold of that open door of the kingdom of heaven. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, but we don’t always see it, do we? Yet, the realities of the kingdom are here and now, present in our quotidian lives. This Sunday, like last Sunday, we have a parable about the kingdom told by Jesus: “A certain man made a great supper and bade many.”

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“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love”

We are confronted with a challenge and a refusal. There is the challenge to act out of what we have been given to see of the majesty of God. Such is the vision of the Trinity. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” as we heard last Sunday. It is a door, not a window, a door through which we are invited to enter. We are invited into the vision so that the charity of God may shape our lives into holiness.

But then, there is our refusal to will that order and truth, preferring, instead, the vanity of ourselves that blinds us to the real needs and even the very presence of others. We ignore Lazarus at our feet. What has he to do with us? we may think. But in so neglecting Lazarus, we are really neglecting God. We deny the love of God made visible in Jesus Christ. In denying the poor man at our feet, we deny the God in whose image we are all made.

The love that is shown is the love that is to be lived. The Epistle teaches us that love is of God because God is love. That love is manifested in Jesus Christ so that we might live in love through him. The only question is whether we will live the vision.

And so the Epistle sounds the theme and the Gospel gives the crucial illustration about our relationship to the vision of God revealed as Trinity. The Epistle is St. John’s treatise about that love. The Gospel is St. Luke’s powerful story of the Rich Man (Dives) and Lazarus.

What does it come down to? Simply this. The love of God compels us to love one another. This is not a may-be, but a must-be for our salvation. We are commanded and compelled to love out of the vision of love which has been shown to us. When we ignore the stranger in our midst or neglect the beggar at our door, then we deny the God who “became poor for [our] sakes” and who “came into our midst”. When we are consumed by envy at the good fortune of others, when we filled with hatred and wrath for hurts and injuries inflicted upon us, whether real or perceived, then we place ourselves very far from God and do great harm to ourselves. To put it in terms of the parable, there is a great gulf fixed between us and God when we ignore the poor man at our gate, the neighbour close at hand, and, by extension, the stranger far away. Then we place ourselves in torment, the torment of our self-willed distance from God. We create the abyss that separates us from God and from one another.

The problem is not that we don’t know better. The problem is that we do not act upon what we do know. (more…)

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The Rev’d David Curry preached this sermon at the 13th annual Kirkin’ o’ the Tartan, held at The Covenanters’ Church, Grand Pré, on Sunday, 7 June.

“I am the vine, ye are the branches … abide in me”

My thanks to the organizers of this service of the Kirkin’ o’ the Tartans, to Barry & Flo MacDonald, Murdina McCrae and to Rev’d Robyn Brown-Hewitt for the privilege of being the preacher on this occasion in this historic edifice in the beautiful land of Grand Pré. The ironies of history, and what I can only call the humour of God’s Providence, are particularly striking.

That an Anglican Priest, particularly one who is devoted to the Jacobean and Caroline expressions of classical Anglicanism, and who is the Rector of a Parish associated with and Chaplain of a School founded by Charles Inglis, the First Bishop consecrated for an Anglican diocese overseas, should be invited to preach in a Kirk dedicated to the memory of the Covenanters, who were defined precisely by their opposition to Episcopacy, the Prayer Book, and all things English in general, and upon such an occasion as “the kirkin’ o’ the tartans”, which claims to be an 18th century Scottish tradition and ceremony related to the banning of the wearing of the tartans after the rout at Culloden in 1745 of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites (those who were devoted to the cause of the Stuarts against the protestant Hanoverians), but is actually a Scots-American tradition that began in Washington, D.C. in 1941 by the Presbyterian clergyman, Rev’d Peter Marshall, is either testimony to the colossal forgetting of our histories or testimony to Christian ecumenism and the deeper principles of the Gospel which truly define and unite us through our cultural identities. I think it is the latter but I hope that I haven’t begun by mentioning the unmentionables! Fortunately, I realize that I am standing at least ten feet above contradiction!

Our histories are the histories of displaced peoples. We are constantly reminded, it seems to me, about the multi-layered and interconnected aspects of the cultural landscape of the Maritimes, a land shaped by the comings and goings of various ‘come-from-aways’, ‘sent-aways’, ‘returning-back-from-aways’, ‘grab-and-run-aways’, not to mention the native aboriginal ‘never-been-aways’, but who have suffered, as a consequence, in the same sense of dislocation and displacement. The narrative of Ernest Buckler’s classic novel, The Mountain and the Valley, is framed by a hooked rug. It could just as easily be a tartan. In a way, the warp and woof of our historic identities is like the weave of a tartan, each line and colour capturing some feature or other of our heritage.

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“No-one has ever seen God. The only-begotten Son who is in the
bosom of the Father; he has made him known”

We meet together in the glory of the revealed God, the glory of the Trinity. All our beginnings and all our endings have their place of meeting in the Trinity. It is, we may say, the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor.12.3). To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement.

Essential Christianity is Trinitarian. What do I mean? That the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to Christian identity, corporately and individually. You are baptized in the Name of the Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. At Holy Communion, we participate in nothing less than the Son’s Thanksgiving to the Father in the Spirit. Our liturgy is full of the Trinity. And yet, we have the greatest difficulty about the essentials of the Christian Faith. The doctrine of the Trinity is what gives coherence and meaning to the things which are to be believed, the credenda, the things which we say in the Creed, first of all, and then the things which follow from them which belong to the moral and political order of the Church’s life and which shape the agenda, the things that are to be done in our practical lives. Essential things shape action without being reduced to particular issues and agendas.

The problem for the Anglican Communion lies in this confusion.  You see, there are endless numbers of things about which we might have quite legitimate but different opinions. About those things there can be no insistence, no coercion. They cannot be made the essential things of our Anglican and Christian identity. The doctrine of the Trinity, on the other hand, is essential. It is one of the non-negotiables of the Christian Faith. The result of the most intense reflection upon the Scriptures and human experience imaginable, it is at the heart of the consensus fidelium, the consensus of the faith, which we receive. It is not ours to re-invent, re-image or re-define. It is the mystery into which we can only enter and discover the rich fullness of its power and truth.

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“There came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind … and there appeared unto them cloven tongues, like as of fire”

These are wonderful words which capture the Pentecostal experience. More importantly, they are wonderful words which carry us into the mystery of Pentecost itself and into its meaning. They are about something more, though surely not less, than what the experience suggests. The language here is that of metaphor in the form of simile, a sound “as of a rushing mighty wind,” things that appear and are seen, “cloven tongues, like as of fire.” Pentecost, is seems, is all theatre, son et lumière, sound and light. But what a show, what a spectacle!

The language is powerful and instructive. The Holy Spirit, of course, is not wind and fire. Plenty of that about, of course; Synod is over but a provincial election is still underway! And, of course, you may say, there are the usual Rector’s ramblings! All wind, no doubt.

Yet, wind and fire are signs that point us to the presence and truth of the spiritual reality of God. The most elusive things of the natural world, wind and fire, tangible and yet not so tangible – after all, who can see the wind, who can touch the fire? – are used to signify to us the transcendent reality of God precisely in the moment of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity.

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