Category: Sermons

“O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

What do we want? Do we really know? This Gospel story speaks directly to those realities and concerns. The Prayer of Humble Access in our liturgy captures the essence of this Gospel story in its application to our lives in our wilderness pilgrimage to God.

We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord; Trusting in our own righteousness, But in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy So much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, Whose property is always to have mercy…

We pray this as a necessary part of our preparation and approach to the Sacrament. The prayer echoes explicitly the story of the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus so resolutely and yet so humbly. But not simply for herself. “Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.” The troubles of the daughter are also the worries of the mother. They always are.

Two words stand here in a complementary relation. They are the words “humble” and “access”. Humility is the condition of our access to God. What the prayer expresses is a fundamental attitude of Faith. It is not our presumption – our trusting in our own righteousness, our feelings and self-certainties – but our humility; our trusting in the manifold and great mercies of God. Against all that is thrown at her, she has a hold of this one thing: the mercies of God in Jesus Christ. To have a hold of that is humility – she presumes upon nothing else. It is this that gains her access to the heart of Christ.

Humility is not the same thing as low self-esteem. It is not the whinge of ‘I can’t do that’ which really means ‘I won’t even try’. It is not the whine of the ‘poor-me’s’ which is really our grovelling for attention. Humility is not grovelling self-pity. For such things are really our presumption and pride. We demand all the attention as if we were the centre of everything. We aren’t. Humility is the recognition that Jesus is the centre and that we have access to him.

“Then came she and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me.” There is an encounter and an engagement with Jesus. The dialogue is quite intense – even frighteningly so. But her kneeling down before him is not manipulation. It is not grovelling self-abasement. It is instead the attitude and posture of Faith. It says, in effect, that God is God and we are not. Such is humility. It is the condition of our access to God. The woman does not presume to be the centre of attention. For all her persistence, what is constant is her focus on Jesus. He has her undivided attention. She sees in him the mercies of God which she seeks. “Lord, help me.”

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“He learned obedience through what he suffered”

The temptations of Christ in the wilderness on the First Sunday in Lent are a kind of commentary on Creation and the Fall and on the Ten Commandments and the Exodus. ?hey speak to the truth of our humanity as “co-workers with God” and the untruth of our humanity in its negation of God. They illuminate the struggle for us to take a hold of the grace given in Christ and as such they illustrate what Paul says in 2 Corinthians about our life in Christ. “We go up to Jerusalem” with Jesus as he told us last Sunday. We go up “as workers together”, having “receiv[ed] not the grace of God in vain.”

He uses three little words to describe the pilgrimage of our lives: two prepositions and a relative pronoun or conjunction: in, by, and as. They reveal the human condition. We struggle to work with God’s truth and mercy in the face of the disorders of our humanity, in the forms of suffering the various distresses of the world. We endeavour to do so by way of the qualities of God at work in us, the spiritual disciplines that allow us to face such things – “by pureness, by knowledge, by long-suffering, by kindness,” etc. And we do as those who unite the seemingly contrary aspects and paradoxes that belong to our finite lives, ultimately “as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.” He is talking about how we live in the wilderness of the world while being one in Christ; “as dying, and, behold, we live.”

The temptations belong to the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, to the beginning of the willed way of the cross, to the beginning of the way of suffering freely embraced. Jesus wills to learn what we have failed to learn. He learns obedience through the suffering which belongs to our failure to accept the givenness of the created order and the transcendence of God; in short what God wants us to do and to be. To be tempted comes with the territory of our being rational creatures – it belongs to the truth and good of our being. The temptations are our temptations. They recall us to the meaning of the Fall in Genesis. In this sense they follow logically upon the dust and ashes of Ash Wednesday; in short, to Creation and the Fall, and to the Exodus journey of learning through suffering.

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“Remember O Man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.”

The Ash Wednesday words at the Imposition of Ashes echo God’s words to us in the Genesis story of the Fall. “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” These words belong to our being called to account by God for our sin and disobedience, our separation from God and from one another. Lent begins in dust and ashes. We begin with the remembrance of the Fall but is that our end?

“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” but only so as to be raised up. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. It symbolizes our lives in faith with God. Such is the journey of Lent. The American version of the children’s rhyme, Ring around the Rosie, is probably an echo of the devastating effects of the plague in 1665 in England, transformed centuries later into a light-hearted children’s game. Yet it reminds us of serious things.

Today, in a wonderful paradox of Providence, is both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. “It’s all about love” (Bruce Cockburn), the divine love which seeks the redemption and perfection of our humanity. We begin the pilgrimage of love with the ritual of the Imposition of Ashes upon our foreheads with the sign of the Cross and with the words, “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” We are recalled to our origins in creation as the dust into which God has breathed his spirit but as well of the consequences of our falling away through our sin and disobedience; the awareness of separation, of sin, suffering, and death. Hence the significance of the ashes. They are a biblical symbol for repentance, our recognition of having turned away from God’s Word and Will yet desiring to be turned back to God. Lent is about taking our lives as spiritual beings seriously through “self-examination, and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word.”

Such disciplines belong to the pilgrimage of love. It is a question about what really matters, about where our hearts are. It is a question about our spiritual priorities: will it be with the passing things of the world or will it be with the eternal things of God? Lent is a call to maturity and seriousness about our “words, thoughts and deeds;” in short our lives spiritually which inform all that we do. The pilgrimage of love is about attending to the motions of God’s love made visible on the Cross and the idea of our participation in Christ’s sacrificial love. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” God seeks our hearts in his all-sufficient love seen through the breaking open of the heart of God in Christ’s Passion. “The sacrifices of God,” as the Psalmist tells us, “are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” In every way, God calls us home to himself in his eternal love. It is his love we seek, the love that raises us up.

“Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” as John Donne puts it in an extravagant and moving poem, “for, you/As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;/ That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend/ Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.” God has to break us to make us, it seems, and all by moving our hearts and minds; only so may we rise and stand. “Knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend,” are gentle images that stand in stark contrast to the strong (and violent) verbs and images of “batter, break, blow, burn.” Such is the challenge of Lent. A time for serious thought and discipline about the radical meaning of our being embraced in the love of God accomplished in the sacrifice of Christ.

“Remember O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return”

Fr. David Curry
Ash Wednesday 2024

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“Charity never faileth”

“Push come to shove/ It’s all about love. Or so it would seem in the great to and fro” of experience and life, as one of Bruce Cockburn’s songs in his latest album, O sun O moon, puts it. Well push has come to shove as we stand on the brink of Lent for which this Sunday wonderfully prepares us. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent and in a kind of Providential paradox it is also Valentine’s day! It’s all about love! But what do we mean by love? This Sunday teaches us about the divine love which redeems and perfects our human loves.

Lent concentrates the whole Christian pilgrimage to God into the span of forty days. It is a journey into light and understanding about the radical meaning of God’s love accomplished for us in Christ’s sacrifice. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells the disciples and us in today’s gospel. Jerusalem is the summit and symbol of human aspiration and desire for an absolute good or end. It is “Jerusalem which is above,” our heavenly end in God.

We know, at least in part, I suppose, what that going to Jerusalem means: the overcoming of all sin and evil in the Passion of Christ; in short, the free gift of Christ for us and for our wounded and broken humanity. It is altogether about the accomplishment of “all things written by the prophets concerning the Son of man,” as Jesus himself says. The challenge for us is to take a hold of that radical love of God revealed to us in the Passion of Christ. It is nothing less than learning and living the love of God in our lives. Jesus speaks about his Passion, death and resurrection but, as Luke puts it, “they understood none of these things,” for as yet they have not happened. We know about them after the fact but are here being given the interpretative means to understand exactly what they mean.

Paul’s great hymn to love complements and shapes the understanding of the journey to Jerusalem. It celebrates the eternal love of God made visible in Christ’s Passion. The love he is talking about is the divine love, the love which never faileth. Charity means love in its strongest sense. Caritas in the Latin carries over into English as charity and charity is more, though not less, than our compassion and outreach to those in need, the acts of charitable giving, as it were. Yet those acts are grounded in the deep love of God. The Greek word here is agape and belongs to the theology of amor, for the pilgrimage of the soul by love, with love, and to love, the love of God which is the true end and meaning of all our loves.

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“They … having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience”

“As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time, flowers in spring, corn in summer and apples in autumn, so the fruit for winter is talk.” The quote is from Basil the Great, one of the outstanding fourth century theologians, one of the Greek Cappadocian Fathers who has shaped so much of the intellectual and spiritual history of Christian thought and life, both east and west. I love the image. The idea that talk is the fruit of winter. Something is meant to be alive and growing in us, in the soil of our hearts, even in the frozen wastes of a Canadian winter!

The analogy is straightforward: good ground and good heart and, as a result, good fruit brought “forth with patience.” How wonderful in what is, literally, the bleak mid-winter, to be reminded of springtime and flowers, of the fruits of summer and fall! Already Marilyn is consulting the seed catalogues and planning the vegetable and flower beds. But how wonderful too to be reminded that we are the ground in which God’s Word has been sown. What kind of ground will we be? And what will be the fruit of our planting? In Basil’s image, our talk, too, is the fruit borne out of our winter’s evenings, huddled by our fires in the long nights of winter.

But what kind of talk, we may ask? After all, this is a world of too much talk, a Panglossian world of all talk and no action, of talking heads, and talk, as is so often said, is cheap, not to mention dangerous and destructive of lives and careers. Yet Basil’s image, so appropriate on this Sexagesima Sunday, reminds us of two things: the seed which is the Word of God and the ground which is our heart in which it is sown. Yet there can be no fruit on a winter’s evening that is not borne out of an honest and good heart, as Luke so powerfully suggests. Therein lies the challenge that is our part.

The talk which is the fruit of winter, in Basil’s sense, must surely be our talk of God, the talk which allows God’s Word to have its sovereign sway within our lives, the talk which lets God’s Word shape our hearts and minds. Only because that Word has been planted and sown within us but if neglected and ignored? What then?

That is the point of the parable. There can be no fruit without the planting and without our nurturing of what is planted in us. The great parable of this day is the parable of the sower. “A sower went out to sow.” We are given the wonder of the parable and then, there is the greater marvel of the interpretation of the parable. Deeds and words, we might say; things done and things thought upon. Jesus gives us both in Luke’s account. This points to a particular kind of challenge which belongs to the season of the ‘gesimas’. There is what God makes known and provides, to be sure, but then there is the question about our taking a hold of his Word and truth; about it living in us. Something is required of us. Such is the great and surpassing dignity of the Christian faith. It is about God with us and us with God and with the good order, too, of creation. That is about the disciplines of spiritual life in attending seriously and thoughtfully to the things of God, bringing them to fruition in our lives.

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“Every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things”

Striving? Striving for what? Something that passes away – a corruptible crown, as it were? Or something which is everlasting – an incorruptible crown or end? Which is it? It makes all the difference.

Yet the paradox is clear. We strive for what we cannot achieve on the basis of our own merit. The Epistle calls us to the disciplines of spiritual life, specifically today to the virtue of temperance, the self-mastery of our appetites. It extends to all the exercises of mind and heart through the athletic metaphor of runners in a race. Yet the Gospel reminds us that the prize of eternal life is God’s free gift that can neither be taken for granted nor simply assumed. We labour by faith in the vineyard of God’s creation. We are not owed anything except what is right according to the Lord of the Vineyard, not according to the limits and vagaries of human justice. “Whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.”

This Sunday marks the transition from the Christmas cycle of feasts to the Easter Cycle which culminates in Ascension and Pentecost. The ‘Gesima Sundays are pre-Lenten Sundays that at one time marked the beginning of the penitential season of Lent in the early Church but have now become for us the necessary means of our preparation for the Lenten pilgrimage of our souls to God. We are to be like athletes in training for the games, engaged in the disciplines that belong to the perfection of human character. But for what end? Our end with God which is by definition not of our making but one which requires the activity of our souls in faith to grasp what God wills for us. For in so doing, we will what God wills for us and for the good of our humanity and “in all things,” as Paul notes. The classical virtues are the qualities of the excellence of character identified in the Greek poetic and philosophical traditions. They are not negated but transformed into forms of love in the Christian understanding.

Thursday past was the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul who was blinded into sight by “a light above the brightness of the Sun,” the divine light of the Epiphany, we might say. Next Friday will be Candlemas, the Purification of Mary and the Presentation of Christ in the temple as an infant, a double feast at once of Mary and of Christ. It marks the fortieth day after Christmas but points us to Holy Week and Easter. Christ is at once “a light to light the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel,” as Simeon says. To Mary, he says, “a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also” in reference to Christ’s Passion. “This child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against … that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Powerful images. And as if in complement to today’s epistle, the Candlemas Gospel includes Anna the Prophetess who “departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day.” Fasting and prayer are some of the spiritual disciplines that belong to the pilgrimage of faith.

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“Speak the word only”

The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday provide the interpretative framework for the pilgrimage of our souls to God and with God. The epiphany season is particularly about the pilgrimage or journey of the understanding with respect to the things of God made manifest in the images and teaching of the eucharistic lessons. They are at the heart of The Book of Common Prayer, itself the heart of Anglican Spirituality, at once reformed and catholic, and as embodying a credal or doctrinal reading of Scripture. It is a good devotional practice, I suggest, to pray and read the Collect, Epistle and Gospel before the service in preparation for hearing and receiving the Word proclaimed and celebrated.

Today’s Gospel presents us with a double healing, the healing of the leper and the Centurion’s servant by Jesus Christ. Epiphany season abounds in miracles. They belong to the making visible of the glory of God. A miracle, after all, is a sign of wonder as we saw, I think, last Sunday. The healing miracles are a wonder. But what exactly do we see? Only the signs of the glory in the effects of what is said and done. The wonder, really, is the wonder of Christ.

Christ heals a leper from within Israel and he heals the paralyzed servant of the Centurion who is part of the Roman military order, literally responsible for one hundred men, but who is from outside Israel. Jesus speaks and he acts. There is healing. The healings are within Israel and beyond Israel; both to those near and those far away in every sense of distance literal and metaphorical, cultural and historical. Through the history and meaning of Israel, the glory of God is not only made known to the world but for the whole world. The leper is healed within the context of Israel and is held to the requirements of the Law in Israel. Yet with the Centurion’s request, Jesus acknowledges something more: there is the wonder of faith which coming out of Israel transcends Israel. “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel.” For both the leper and the Centurion, Christ is the wonder. There is an epiphany.

Christ is the wonder before he puts forth his hand, even before he speaks. The healing miracles are surprisingly not the glory. They are only the making visible of the glory which is already present in Christ Jesus. He is the glory. And he is the glory which is somehow known and known not just in his effects but in his person.

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“O woman, what is that to thee and to me? Mine hour is not yet come.”

This is, we are told, the “beginning of signs which Jesus did and manifested forth his glory.” Yet “this beginning of signs” is also the ending of signs, meaning the end or purpose of the signs. Signs here means miracles, the things of wonder which illuminate and transform our lives. But in what kinds of ways? Is it by the things of God being reduced to us and our inclinations and concerns, our obsessions and agendas? Or is it by our being shown the things of God which dignify and ennoble our humanity and raise us up into the things of God in which we participate and find our good? There is all the difference in the world between those two perspectives and tendencies. This story counters and corrects the first by showing us the wonder and mystery of the second and does so in a way which moves our hearts and minds. We are “transformed by the renewing of our minds” upon the things of God revealed to us in which we find our highest good. It is about neither God nor ourselves being conformed to the world in its divisions, confusions, and conflicting agendas.

The story of the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee shows us the radical meaning of miracles or signs. They teach us about God in himself and about what God seeks for us, namely, the good of our humanity. Only John gives us this story. Most of the miracles of the Gospels are about the healing and restoration of our wounded and broken humanity such as we saw in Advent about the purpose of Christ’s coming: “the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them,” Jesus himself tells us. And even more, he adds, “and blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.” All this is wonderful and true and belongs to the vision of our humanity as redeemed from sin and its consequences, a wonderful reminder of the wholeness and completeness of our humanity as found in communion with God.

What that really means, however, is seen in this Gospel story. For what end are we restored to wholeness? It is, I think, captured in the Westminster Shorter Catechism composed in 1647 by a synod of English and Scottish theologians of a decidedly Calvinist bent, but then our Anglican sacramental thinking follows Calvin and Thomas more than Luther. “What is the chief end of man?” it asks and answers, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” “O what their joy and their glory must be, those endless sabbaths the blessed ones see,” as the medieval theologian Peter Abelard says in his lovely 10th century hymn, O Quanta Qualia, where “God shall be all and in all ever blessed,” in John Mason Neale’s translation. God is the beginning and end of all created beings, especially rational beings, as Aquinas teaches. This Gospel shows us that God seeks our social joys which have their meaning in our communion with God through Christ’s sacrifice.

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“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”

Epiphany concentrates our minds upon the themes of divinity. Its primary focus is the essential divinity of Jesus Christ and as such it argues for the essential attributes of God. We “turn ourselves” as John Cosin, the 17th century Bishop of Durham in northern England puts it, “from his humanity below to his divinity above,” a turn from our contemplation of “His coming in the flesh that was God to His being God that was come in the flesh.” Epiphany is full of divinity. The word means manifestation; it is the idea of things that are made known to us. God makes himself known to us through the Word and Son of the Father.

This is why this story, read on The First Sunday after Epiphany and often within the Octave of the Epiphany, is so important. It reminds us that the Epiphany story of the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem, is at once the completion of Christmas and the beginning of a new journey, a new orientation. The Magi-Kings, to be sure, came to Bethlehem by way of Jerusalem but “they departed to their own country another way,” being warned in a dream not to return to Herod. In a deeper and more spiritual sense, they are changed by what they have seen. There is a transformation of intellect and heart. T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Journey of the Magi, intuits that deeper transformation. “We returned to our places,” he has them say, “but no longer at ease.” The phrase becomes the title of Chinua Achebe’s celebrated novel, No Longer at Ease, which treats the collision of cultures between Europeans and the tribal world of the Igbo peoples of Nigeria. Something changes irrevocably. There is no going back.

With Epiphany there is a double journey: a journey from Anatolia to Bethlehem and a journey from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. They are the two centers of Christian contemplation, the two centers of an ellipse around which the Christian understanding moves. It is, above all else, a journey of the understanding. It is all about teaching. What is the teaching? It is altogether about the essential divinity of Jesus Christ. What does that have to do with us, we might ask? The essential divinity of Christ has everything to do with us because the truth and dignity of our humanity is found not in ourselves but in our life with Christ. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds,” St. Paul powerfully reminds us. “Be not conformed to this world,” for that is atheism in its many and varied forms, from the aggressive and antagonistic to the melancholic and wistful, from the dogmatic to the confused.

Sunday, January 14th, and Monday, January 15th will be marked in Halifax by the book launch of the two books by Fr. Robert Crouse, the outstanding teacher and scholar who was the inspiration and mentor of so many priests and people across the world. St. Paul’s words in today’s Epistle were among his most favourite and most frequently quoted passages. For him they captured so much of what belongs to the pilgrimage of the soul to God, the pilgrimage of the redemption of human desire, and especially with respect to the confusions, conflicts and concerns of contemporary culture. The transformation of our minds upon the things of God made known to us contrasts with our being conformed to the bad infinity of the endless and competing claims of the world.

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