Category: Sermons

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?

(more…)

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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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The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon for the Feast of St. Patrick.

“The people which sat in darkness have seen a great light”

The Gospel (Matthew 4. 13-24, BCP., 315, Propers of a Missionary) says nothing about shillelaghs, shamrocks or even about snakes, let alone green beer! It does say something about places “upon the sea-coast”, about the preaching of Christ seen as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy of light coming to “the people which sat in darkness” and in the “shadow of death”, about repentance, about discipleship, and about healing and salvation; in short, about all the things that belong to the evangelium – the good news that is the meaning of the word, gospel.

And the lesson, too, (Acts 12.24-13.5) underscores the same theme. “The word of God grew and multiplied,” meaning what, exactly? (more…)

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The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, based on the Gospel reading, St Luke 11:14-28.

“Seven other spirits, worse than the first … enter in”

All sermons should come with an advisory, a warning that this may be dangerous to your health, either because it is too underwhelming or too demanding, too controversial or too boring. Or too long or just plain impossible. Today’s sermon is all of the above. You may want to ponder the Athanasian Creed or the Thirty-Nine Articles; if you can find them in the Prayer Book before the end of the sermon, extra bonus points and kudos to you! An advisory, I suppose, is most appropriate for today. It is the 15th of March, after all. Beware the Ides of March!

This gospel is the necessary counter to our greatest fault, spiritual pride. The capital sin of the seven capital or chief sins, we might say, pride is the head of all the deadly sins. It is actually the principle that is at work in all of “the seven deadly sins,” to use the categories which belong to the Christian moral tradition. Why? Because pride is the explicit denial of the grace of God without which we are indeed dead in ourselves. (more…)

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