Category: Sermons

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

“All the people hung upon his words.” So Luke tells us in his account of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. These words are read at Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday. “Take with you words,” the prophet Hosea, says, “and return to the Lord.” These words are read at Evening Prayer on Monday in Holy Week.

Words, and our attention to them, are one of the strong features of our Anglican heritage with respect to the observances of Holy Week. The point and purpose of this week has been to immerse us in the totality of the Passion of Christ, reading from all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion. No other Christian tradition demands quite so much. For the attention deficit culture, it is, perhaps, too much. And yet, so necessary.Along with the Passion, readings from the Old Testament and the New, as well from the Old Testament Apocrypha, such as The Book of Wisdom, offer a rich commentary upon the spectacle of Holy Week. Once again, there is much of a muchness, once again, it is de trop. And yet, so necessary and so instructive.

Holy Week is the spectacle of sin and love, the spectacle of our betrayals, on the one hand, and the redemptive love of Christ, on the other hand. Everything converges on the Cross, “that strange and uncouth thing” as the poet, George Herbert, puts it. And yet, as another poet, John Donne, puts it, himself no stranger to the hideous realities of sin and suffering, the image of the crucified is itself a “beauteous form” that “assures a piteous mind.”

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“A new commandment I give unto you that you love one another

even as I have loved you”

“On the night that he was betrayed,” this night, this very night, Jesus gives us a commandment, an institution and an example. He gives us a commandment that is at once established in the institution of the Holy Eucharist, “do this in remembrance of me,” and expressed in the example of the foot-washing, “for I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” Such is the rich fullness of Maundy Thursday, dies mandati, the day of commandment, even a new commandment, novem mandatum, but more than that, the ultimate mandate, ultimatum mandatum. We are accustomed to taking seriously a person’s last will and testament. Here on the eve of his Passion, in the meaning of the events of the Passover, Christ signifies his ultimate will and new testament towards us. Here on this night is the mandate of our Lord’s love, hence Maundy Thursday (from mandatum). (more…)

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The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this homily for Palm Sunday (8:00 am service).

“We have become a spectacle to the world”

“We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men”, St. Paul tells us (1 Cor.4.9). We have become a spectacle, indeed, but what kind of spectacle?

The question is a constant challenge; one which is critically before us in the events of Holy Week, and one which applies especially to the contemporary institutional church. What kind of spectacle, indeed?

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Lenten Meditation on The Seven Deadly Sins
Anger

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God”

“And when the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation against the two brethren.” The Passion Sunday Gospel names our topic: indignation or anger.

Pride is certainly the deadliest of the seven deadly sins and is what is deadly in them. Envy is certainly the ugliest of the seven deadly sins and is ugly and unattractive to all. But anger?

Well, anger is certainly the most common of all the seven deadly sins. (more…)

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The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon for The Fifth Sunday in Lent/Passion Sunday.

“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place”

“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus said at the approach of Lent on Quinquagesima Sunday, the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. And he told us exactly what that “going up” means, that “all things concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished. For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on: and they shall scourge him, and put him to death; and on the third day he shall rise again.” In short, he tells us about his Passion and Resurrection. (more…)

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Lenten Meditation on The Seven Deadly Sins
Envy

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

Envy and anger complete the triad of perverted love, the first of Dante’s threefold classification of the Seven Deadly Sins as forms of disordered love: love perverted, love defective and love excessive. From the standpoint of the theology of amor, everything comes down to what and how we love. That we love belongs fundamentally to our identity as spiritual beings.

As Dante sees it, pride, envy and anger constitute the forms of perverted love, the love that swerves to evil. Sloth is lukewarm love, a defective love, while avarice, gluttony and lust are the forms of excessive love, “love too hot of foot.”

We have already seen how pride is in all of the seven deadly sins. But of all of the seven sins, envy is the most unique and in some ways the most destructive. Why? Because, as one commentator (Graham Tomlin) puts it, there is no joy in it, no fun in envy at all. It is singularly perverse. Its only satisfaction is endless self-torment. (more…)

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Lenten Meditation on The Seven Deadly Sins
Pride

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

“Pride goeth before a fall,” the old saying goes, and of course, it is true. “Ante ruinam exaltur,” Augustine says, “the heart is exalted before its destruction,” its ruin. But it a way, it is worst than that. Pride is the Fall in us. That is why pride is not only the first and the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. It is what is deadly in all of them!

Augustine called pride the foundation of sin. “Pride made the soul desert God to whom it should cling as the source of life, and to imagine itself as the source of its own life.” Pride always signals a kind of obsession with self.

Aquinas speaks about pride as “inordinate self-love [which] is the cause of every sin.” This is the point. Pride is in every sin. (more…)

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The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon for the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The Annunciation is a feast of great joy that falls this year in the mid-point of our Lenten journey of penitence and sorrow. It complements Sunday’s theme of rejoicing and refreshment, the theme of Mothering Sunday or Laetare Sunday as it is sometimes called. Laetare means to rejoice. In a way, here is all our joy, all our sorrows notwithstanding. As Mark Frank puts it:

A feast it is to-day, – a great one, Christ’s Incarnation, – a day of joy, if ever any; and Lent a time of sorrow and repentance, – a great one, the greatest fast of any. How shall we reconcile them? Why thus: The news of joy never comes so seasonable as in the midst of sorrow; news of one coming to save us from our sins, can never come more welcome to us, than even when we are sighing and groaning under them”.

“Until they are good Marians, they shall never be good Christians” avowed Anthony Stafford in 1637, words which apply to every age of Christianity. (more…)

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The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, based on the Epistle: Galatians 4:26-5:1.

“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free”

Freedom is one of the elusive catchwords of modernity. It signifies a quality of life which is somehow known, somehow anticipated, somehow expected and sought after, somehow claimed. But what is our freedom? (more…)

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A homily on the Feast of St Joseph from The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church.

“But while he thought on these things, the angel of the Lord
appeared unto him in a dream”

In literature and art, Joseph tends to get a bad rap. More a figure of the background, if portrayed at all in art, he is often pictured as a bit of a doddering old man, a sort of gullible fool; in literature, Robertson Davies, in the first of his Deptford Trilogy, Fifth Business, has the eccentric scholar, Padre Ignazio Blazon, describe him as “the most celebrated cuckold in history,” having been upstaged, as it were, by nothing less, it seems, than God the Holy Ghost.

There is something refreshingly honest, then, in turning to the Church’s commemoration of St. Joseph and to the scripture readings that The Book of Common Prayer provides (BCP, p. 113), along with the special collect (BCP, p. 319), for this day. (more…)

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