Category: Sermons

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“The end of all things is at hand”

“It’s the end of the world as we know it and we feel fine,” or so Great Big Sea claims. But do we feel fine? Or are we fearful and afraid, worried and, like Martha, “anxious about a multitude of things”? St. Peter’s words sound either a note of foreboding or a note of rejoicing. Which is it? A note of impending judgment or a note of joy, indeed the fullness of joy? Everything depends on what we mean by “end”? Do we mean a sense of judgment and finality or the sense of accomplishment and purpose; in short, do we mean by “end”, death or life?

On The Sunday after Ascension Day, we celebrate two related but almost forgotten teachings – the Ascension and the Session of Christ. What do they signify?

The Ascension signifies the homecoming of the Son having finished his course, having accomplished the will of him who sent him, and now returning to the Father. The whole life of the incarnate Christ is about his going forth and returning to the Father in the power of the Spirit. The Session celebrates the rule of Christ with the Father in the bond of the Spirit over the whole of creation. He is King. “See the conqueror mounts in triumph,/ See the King in royal state,” as one of our hymns puts it. Why? Because in his going forth and return to the Father, he returns all things to their source and end, to the divine life which he shares with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

(more…)

Print this entry

“God has gone up with a merry noise/ the Lord with the sound of the trumpet”

It is the psalms, as often as not, that strike the right tone of approach to our liturgical observances. In this case, the high note of rejoicing and delight that belongs to the Feast of the Ascension is nicely captured by the words of the psalmist. “God has gone up with a merry noise/ the Lord with the sound of the trumpet” (Psalm 47.5).

The Ascension of Christ, as The Book of the Acts of the Apostles suggests, marks the fortieth day of Easter. It marks the end, in the sense of the completion, of the Easter season. One of the creedal mysteries of the Christian Faith, the Ascension is often overlooked, perhaps because it doesn’t fall on a Sunday, but on a Thursday. And yet, it provides some very important and powerful teaching.

What is the Ascension about? It is the homecoming of the Son to the Father, for one thing. Jesus in the Rogation Sunday Gospel said “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again, I leave the world and go to the Father.” There is a sense of mission accomplished. And that mission concerns our good and the good of the world. In other words, the Ascension brings to a certain completion and fullness the redemption of the world and the redemption of our humanity. The Son returns to the Father, not in flight from the world, as if matter or the physical world were inherently evil, but having accomplished the redemption of the world.

And that is where the Ascension speaks so profoundly to our present-day concerns, fears and worries. You see, the Ascension means that the world and our humanity have an end in God, an end in God in the sense that the meaning and purpose of the world and the meaning and the purpose of our human lives is found in our relation to God in Jesus Christ. Against the perversity and folly of thinking that the world is just there for us to manipulate, exploit or destroy, the Ascension reminds us that the world is God’s world. It exists for his will and purpose. And so do we. Ascension is about the sense that we have an end and a place with God. “I go to prepare a place for you” as Jesus so beautifully puts it.

His going up is his homecoming for us. As the Fathers put it, the Ascension is “the exaltation of our humanity.” In prayer and praise, in the liturgical pattern of our worshipping lives, we lift up our hands and hearts to Christ our Lord and our Redeemer whose Ascension is the fullness of joy and delight to our souls. “We ascend in the ascension of our hearts” as Augustine says, signaling how the whole of our life is about this Godward direction which locates the meaning and purpose of the world and ourselves with God.

“God has gone up with a merry noise/ the Lord with the sound of the trumpet”

Fr. David Curry Ascension ‘09

Print this entry

The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon for The Fifth Sunday After Easter/Rogation Sunday.

“In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world.”

We are a practical people, or, at least, so we like to think. And yet, it is about the practical that we seem to have the greatest problems and the greatest worries. Ours is a fearful and uncertain world, a fearful and uncertain world about practical things such as the economy and the environment. Whether anything can or cannot be done about them is our fear and worry.

Behind our practical preoccupations with jobs and the economy, work and the environment, lie a host of assumptions about ourselves and our relation to the world. Some of those assumptions need to be challenged, corrected and overcome. “In the world,” Jesus says, “ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

Such a statement seems to imply that the world is the enemy. Yet, what is meant here is our attachment to the world seen as standing over and against God; preferring our material comforts and concerns, our immediate practical interests, as it were, to the spiritual and intellectual principles that properly define and dignify our lives. For here is the paradox. There are no practical solutions to theoretical problems and our problems, in a way, are wholly theoretical, by which I mean that they have to do with the assumptions that underlie our practical preoccupations; in short, our attitudes and approaches to our world and day. Our neglect of things spiritual and intellectual results in our fearful paralysis about things practical.

(more…)

Print this entry