Category: Sermons

“So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth”

There is something quite pleasing and aesthetically delightful about Harvest Thanksgiving. In our rural farming communities, Harvest Thanksgiving serves as a kind of testament to the hard work and labour of those who work on the land. It speaks to a sense of identity and vocation. The fruits of creation and human labour are gathered into the Church in a kind of celebration. How wonderful it is to see the things of the natural world, transformed by human labour and industry, brought into the holy places! We are taught by pumpkins and, perhaps, even by zucchini, that the natural world, and that world as transformed by human endeavour and enterprise, exists for God. Harvest Thanksgiving reminds us of the profoundly spiritual nature of our very existence.

Harvest Thanksgiving is a wonderful counter to our contemporary confusions about our world and day and about ourselves. Are we really supposed to believe, as some evolutionary biologists and physicists (though certainly not all nor many) would have it, that the world and all the things in it are just the result of the random coming together of various bits of matter? In other words, that there is no purpose to nature, just blind chance? And therefore no goodness to nature either? There can be no morality in any meaningful sense in such a view. Each thing just happens to be in the way in which it has come to be. But, then, how to speak of one thing as distinct from another? How does one know what and when something is anything as opposed to being on the way to becoming something else or to mere nothingness? These fruits which you see before you have an extraordinary elusive character to their nature, it seems!

Thanksgiving is a fundamental feature of the great religions of the world, particularly of the religions of the revealed word such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Through the Word revealed, nature and human life are understood to have a purpose, a destiny and a direction. We have an end with God. Harvest Thanksgiving reminds us that pumpkins and squash, cucumbers and gourds, apples and pears, are all part of that spiritual end and purpose that belongs to creation itself. Creation exists for something beyond itself. And our western secular cultures, too, (the idolatry of instrumental reason notwithstanding), retain a strong sense of purpose and direction critical to ideas of the self, even if God has been long forgotten and dismissed.

The proper term is Providence. There can be no Harvest Thanksgiving without the idea of the Providence of God written for us to read in nature and in human lives but, much more clearly and fully, in the Holy Scriptures. (more…)

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“Friend, go up higher”

It is one of my favourite Scripture texts. It’s not about ambition or pretension. It’s about the hope of transformation. It counters completely the dumb-down aspects of an anti-intellectual culture, such as ours, and conveys the sense that we are, indeed, called to something more, that we have a destiny beyond what we know is before us but will not face, namely, the grave and gate of death. And it signals ever so profoundly the necessary condition of soul for the realization of God’s will and purpose for us in our lives. The necessary condition is humility.

Here is a Scripture reading in which the operative words are “friend” and “go up higher”. We have just had a visible demonstration of this in the baptism of Brennan Isaac. He has been made – there is no other word for it – a friend of Jesus. He has just been called up higher but only through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; such is the heart of baptism. We are identified with Jesus in his free-willing identity and sacrifice for us.

Jesus calls us “friends”. He does so not merely by way of a parable but more directly. He calls us friends at the height of his passion, on the night of our betrayal. There is an anticipation of that in the context of this gospel parable where Jesus is being watched critically and being challenged hypocritically by the Lawyers and Pharisees. This is the wondrous thing that passes human understanding. God has made us his friends when we were his enemies! This turns the ancient world on its head. It turns our modern world on its head. We live in a rather hopeless and fearful world. Here is the antidote to our hopelessness and fear. It challenges us so that it can redeem us.

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Dancing with Angels

Have you ever thought about the title of a book that you might like to write? You know, where you say, “I’d like to write a book with this title?” Sometimes certain phrases and ideas catch us that way and you say, “that would be a good title for a book.” Well, for me, one title of one book that strikes me that way would be “Dancing with Angels.”

Dancing with angels is, I think, a way of speaking about what we do every day in our spiritual and intellectual lives whether as students or teachers, priests or parishioners. Angels are very much about the principles of the understanding, the intellectual and spiritual principles that belong to our understanding of the human and the natural world. They remind us that there is more to reality than what meets the eye. They speak, in a kind of way, to that common feature of our humanity, our loneliness, or what Alistair MacLeod calls our “inarticulate loneliness” out of which comes the struggle to articulate and communicate. The angels remind us that we have dance partners in the pursuit of understanding and in the struggle to act rightly and to be good.

In the year 1257, perhaps even what has come to be known as Michaelmas term, at the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, affectionately known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, undertook in the Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, “Disputed Questions on Truth,” the question “Can a man be taught by an Angel?”(Q. 11, art.iii). Angels can teach us, he says, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but as he says, by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding.”

Angels help us to understand the terrible, hard and harsh events of our own world and day. After all, will we really even begin to comprehend the terror of terrorism, for example, merely through the lenses of social and economic determinism? Don’t we need the spiritual wisdom which talks about the struggles between the good and evil which we are afraid to name, the spiritual struggles which the religions of the world in their truth and integrity contemplate and know?

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“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

The great poet, Dante, speaks of Luke as “scriba mansuetudinis Christi”, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. The phrase has always stayed with me. Luke is our primary spiritual director, if you will, during the long green season of the Church year, the Trinity season. By far and away, the largest number of gospel readings are taken from his gospel for what amounts to almost half of the Church year.

Dante, it seems to me, has grasped the signal note of St. Luke’s gospel and perhaps, nowhere is that idea of the gentleness of Christ more wonderfully signaled to us than in today’s gospel.

There are only three times in the New Testament when Christ meets us as mourners. There is the story about the raising of Jairus’ daughter who had just died. There is the story about the calling out of Lazarus’ who had been buried for four days. “Behold he stinketh”, Martha cries out, alerting us to the realities of death and decay and as well to how far gone we are in our sins. And there is this story, the story of the widow of Nain when her only son is being carried to the burying ground. In short, the encounter with the newly dead, the dead and buried and the just about to be buried. But here, in Luke’s gospel, the encounter is with the chief mourner, the widow of Nain, whose only son has died and is being carried out of the city to the place of burying.

In all three scenes, Christ meets us as mourners. We are in the presence of death, after all. He enters into our grief and into the intimacy of our sorrows. But the point of all these encounters is that Jesus is not just another sorry soul, not just another weeping mourner, not just another voice to add the cacophony of our sorrows. No. In each case, where he meets us as mourners, there is a word of saving grace and glory, a word of resurrection in the place and in the face of death.

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“Be not anxious”

What is Jesus saying here? He wants us to look at the world with new eyes. “Behold, the fowls of the air”. “Consider the lilies of the field”. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God”. It makes a difference for us in our lives. To behold what he wants us to behold, to consider what he wants us to consider, to seek what he wants us to seek counters the paralysis of our fears, the terror of our anxieties and even our anxieties about our anxieties.

Jesus says “be not anxious” more than once in this gospel. He knows our anxieties and how prone we are to being anxious, quite literally, about “a multitude of things”. It is what we might call “The Martha Syndrome” as diagnosed elsewhere by Jesus: “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things” (Luke 10.41). We all have our fears and our worries, our troubles and our concerns, our heart-aches and our despairs. And we can worry ourselves, quite literally, to death about them. What are we anxious about? What are our anxieties? Quite simply, they are our cares, the things which, quite literally, occupy our thoughts; indeed, they can actually possess us.

Our anxieties are the cares which choke and oppress us, the cares which give us great anguish of soul. Our problem, it seems, and the cause of our anxiety is that we are often too careful, quite literally, too full of cares about the wrong things and/or in the wrong way. The cares of this world beset us and overwhelm us. Jesus would have us view the world and its cares in a new way.

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“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”

The Cross is the meeting place of lovers. That “strange and uncouth thing”, as the poet George Herbert calls it, reveals the incompleteness of our human loves and the all-sufficiency of divine love. It signals what might be called the erotic liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy which is shaped and governed by the Cross, the liturgy of eros redeemed, the liturgy of the redemption of desire. But what does it mean?

I have often been struck with the coincidence of the early beginning of Fall with the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14^th) and especially with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks so profoundly and yet so paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise. Inventio crucis.

Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem and her so-called discovery of the Holy Cross in the early fourth century as well as the exposition or “Exaltation” of the supposed true cross in the seventh century. Inventio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.

In the Christian understanding of things, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual life. The cross is the meeting place of such lovers, too.

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“[He] fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks”

This is actually a thanksgiving gospel story. It appears twice in our Prayer Book; once as the Gospel for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity (BCP, p. 240), and as the Gospel appointed for Thanksgiving Day (BCP, p. 308). For us in Canada, Thanksgiving day and Harvest Thanksgiving are often observed at the same time; thanksgiving for the fruits of creation and human labour, on the one hand, and thanksgiving for the rational and spiritual freedoms that we have politically, on the other hand. When thanksgiving for the harvest is being emphasized then readings for Harvest Thanksgiving are often used that focus on the harvest gathering of the fruits of creation. But it is instructive to realize that this Gospel plays such an important role in our learning a very hard and necessary thing; the hard and necessary activity of thanksgiving itself.

We learn from this gospel that being grateful is both healthy for you and it makes you whole! Here is the gospel story, we might say, that teaches us most fully about the spiritual nature of the activity of thanksgiving. And once again, it is a Samaritan who provides the telling illustration.

Last week, we heard the parable of the Good Samaritan, so-called, and we commented on how what makes it possible to “go and do likewise”, going and doing good works and reaching out and helping others, is really nothing less than the grace of Christ in us. The grace which comes from God to our humanity is the meaning of our life in the body of Christ; left to ourselves, it seems, we can only “look and pass by,” conflicted and implicated in all of the confusions of our broken and wounded world. The parable, in its context of the unity of the love of God and the love of neighbour, points us strongly to the grace of Christ in his Incarnation. He has “c[o]me to where [we] are”, and the grace of human redemption is signaled in the healing and care of the one whom we have come to call the Good Samaritan. The Good Samaritan, I suggested, is Christ and Christ in us.

Here, too, it is a Samaritan, the one out of the ten lepers, outcasts and rejects standing afar off as Jesus enters a certain village, who returned and gave thanks. What moved him? It is at once the highest freedom of the human soul and the grace of God in him. “When he saw that he was healed, [he] turned back” and then does a most remarkable thing, a strange and extravagant thing. “With a loud voice [he] glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks.” Only at this point does Luke add simply and pointedly, “and he was a Samaritan.” For us, hearing this story after last week’s gospel story of the Good Samaritan, there is a powerful echo effect. Once again, we are presented with the conjunction between the Samaritan, a kind of cultural outsider, and Christ, the God who is utterly other than us who has come near to us. And here, the context is about a further aspect of healing and salvation. It is found in the simple yet powerful activity of being thankful.

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“How readest thou?”

There are several great lines for homilies in this Gospel passage. “Who is my neighbour?” “When he saw him he had compassion on him.” “Go, and do thou likewise.” Powerful stuff and yet, in a way, they all hang upon this rather unique question, a question which Jesus asks, a question which illumines all of the great questions of the Scriptures, the great questions of religion itself. “How do you read?”

We might think that the real question is ‘what do you read?’ Certainly, that is an important question. What we read will, it goes without saying, influence how we think about things. It is not a matter of indifference about what students and children read; what the curriculum is, as it were. And there are, as well, the more disturbing issues of censorship and political correctness that attempt to circumscribe what we read, what we hear and what we say. These obscure the bigger question which is about how we read.

We are too familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan. A powerful story, to be sure, and one which impels us powerfully to good works, what we often overlook is the extraordinary significance of the context in which Jesus tells this story. As such, I think, we miss its deeper meaning. It ends with the precise and positive exhortation to “go and do thou likewise”, but the possibility of that actually depends not on ourselves, but on the movement of God’s grace in us accomplishing what we could not and cannot do on our own. This is the message that we do not want to hear.

We conveniently overlook the faith basis of the action that we bidden to do. The Gospel provides an amazingly radical faith statement. We know it in the Prayer Book liturgy as the Summary of the Law, proclaimed and heard at the beginning of the Communion Service. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul; and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.” Here, Jesus draws this out of “a certain lawyer” who tempted him with a question. His question, raised not for the purposes of understanding but for sophistic entrapment, was “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ response was, in perfect Socratic fashion, to ask two related questions, “what is written in the law?” and “how readest thou?” Beautiful. It is in response to ‘the what and the how’ that the Lawyer speaks about the love of God and the love of neighbour, concentrating in a marvelous fashion the whole of the Torah, the Law.

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“Ephphatha, that is, Be opened”

Closed book, closed mind; open book, open mind. It seems simple and straightforward, almost obvious. But, of course, you might say that it depends on what you read; to which, I would add, and how you read.

We are only too well aware of the so-called fundamentalist approach to what are regarded as sacred texts that makes us altogether skeptical of religion in general and suspicious of sacred writings in particular. Sadly, we are largely ignorant of them as well. So open books seem to create closed minds while supposedly open minds are closed to those same books and ignorantly dismissive of them! Curious!

Allan Bloom’s provocative book, The Closing of the American Mind, written in 1987, brings out a further aspect of our paradoxical uncertainties. A cry against the moral and intellectual relativism then and now pervasive in the universities, he saw that the supposed openness of such relativism was really a closing of the mind to the formative and foundational texts of our intellectual culture. A closing of the mind to both the letter and the spirit.

St. Paul, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, points out the dilemma. “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.” What is at issue is what and how we read and, for the digito agitato culture, to coin a phrase, the culture of the digitally agitated that flits from one image to another with barely a pause to think, there is the further issue of whether we are really reading at all. The task, of course, lies in reading with the spirit, the spirit of understanding.

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“God be merciful to me, a sinner”

God’s “almighty power,” today’s Collect avers, is declared “most chiefly in showing mercy and pity.” Think about how radical a statement that is! It, quite literally, turns the world on its head. It, quite literally, inverts the power dynamic of human lives politically, ecclesiastically, institutionally. God’s power is shown “most chiefly” in the acts of mercy and pity. This is the remarkable counter to the power politics of every age.

But mercy also shapes a world and a culture, something which Shakespeare knew. Mercy, he has Portia declaim in his play, The Merchant of Venice, is “mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes/ the thronèd monarch better than his crown.” Temporal power is one thing – something we encounter every day. It is wielded by kings, CEOs and bishops, politicians and tyrants, priests and police. It is signaled in the symbols and emblems of power; for instance, crown and scepter, mitre and staff. “But mercy,” she points out, “is above this sceptered sway.” Divine mercy is greater than all the panoply and machinations of human power. Portia makes the wonderful point that it is to be “enthronèd in the hearts of kings,” meaning that it is a necessary quality for what it means to be a good ruler. Why? Because, as she says, “it is an attribute to God himself.” Mercy has a divine quality. Her final point is the great teaching that our collect along with the scripture readings suggests. “Earthly power doth then show likest God’s/When mercy seasons justice.”

Mercy seasons justice. In other words, mercy perfects justice. When we forget this fundamental aspect of the Christian faith, we are worse than the worst and pervert justice itself. The task of the Church is to proclaim mercy as the fundamental principle for our lives precisely out of an awareness of the limits of human justice and out of an awareness of human sin.

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