Category: Sermons

“His master praised the unrighteous steward”

Parables are a powerful heuristic devices, ways of teaching about ethical and spiritual matters. They appeal to our imaginations and convict our hearts so that we may learn to see ourselves in them but they are by no means simple. They require our serious attention.

In the course of any given year, there are in the classical Prayer Book and liturgical calendars anywhere from twenty-three to twenty-six Sundays after Trinity. Epiphany and Trinity Season both vary in length owing to the variable date of Easter. There are within the Trinity Season a number of intriguing and compelling parables that focus on the ethical life. The Parable of the Good Samaritan, read at Evening Prayer this week, is also the Gospel for Trinity 13. It is the classic illustration of the essential ethical teaching of the Christian faith as grounded in the love of God and the love of neighbour, something which Augustine highlights in his de doctrina Christiana. It shows the intimate connection between thinking and doing by way of questions that draw us into truth and direct our actions. Other parables, too, highlight how to think and act.

I have in mind two parables which teach us about how to think and act by way of examples from the negative: what notto do and be, as it were, from which we can learn how to think and act better as grounded in the love of Christ. On Trinity 22, there is the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant and, today, the Parable of the Unrighteous Steward. The one illustrates the necessity of forgiving others even as we have been forgiven by way of the servant who is forgiven a great debt but then refuses to forgive the paltry debt of another; a form of hypocrisy which highlights a betrayal of the good which God seeks for our humanity through the forgiveness of our sins. But perhaps even more disconcerting and yet intriguing is today’s Parable of the Unrighteous Steward. He is praised by his master, not for his unrighteousness, but for his prudence.

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“You have received a spirit of sonship”

The year was 524. The place was Pavia, a northern Italian town. The person, a scholar and public official, named Boethius, languishing in prison falsely accused of treason against the Arian king, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. He would be brutally killed. But not before writing one of the great intellectual and spiritual classics of the West, The Consolation of Philosophy. Along with his theological works, it would have an enormous influence upon the development of European culture and thought.

The word “person”, much invoked in the contemporary discourse of natural rights and identity politics, has its roots in the definition that Boethius provided in his treatise about the humanity and the divinity of Christ, Contra Eutyches. Distinguishing between nature and person is essential for understanding the unity of God and man in Christ and for thinking about the unity and difference of God as Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Boethius’ argument serves to illuminate an understanding of the names of God revealed in Scripture as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. From such language and terminology for God, there followed the application of the term to our humanity. For Boethius, following Augustine, man is imago dei which in the Christian understanding is imago Christi, imago Trinitatis. Being made in the image of God means being made in the image of the Trinity through the image of Christ in us. Such are some of the fruits of his labours by which he is known and through which we begin to know ourselves as selves; in short, as persons.

The word person derives from the Greek προσοπον and the Latin persona, originally in the context of ancient Greek tragedies. The terms refer to the masks worn by actors through which they spoke, as in sounding through, but as such conveying meaning and understanding of character. What is Boethius’s definition? “Person is an individual substance of a rational nature.” Compact, precise, and comprehensive, it highlights the spiritual and intellectual features of our humanity that embrace and contain the various aspects of human individuality. The theological context suggests that the language we use about ourselves has its roots in language about God, emphasizing that our humanity is radically incomplete apart from God. Even our language of political and social discourse is grounded in theology.

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“I am the vine, ye are the branches … Abide in my love”

The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for today offer an extended commentary on the last of the so-called “I Am” sayings of Jesus in John’s Gospel; hence my text for this morning. “I am the vine,” Jesus says, “ye are the branches … Abide in my love.” This expresses in a concrete and dynamic fashion the theme of sanctification that belongs to the Trinity season through our abiding in the images of Scripture; our inhabiting their meaning.

Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, the Collect gathers us into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial, that is to say, it concerns the quality of our lives with God as abiding in the truth of God revealed. The organic, agricultural images of grafting, growing, nurturing, and preserving follow upon a doctrinal, metaphysical understanding of God as the “Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things.” That understanding belongs to the meaning of these images. They are profoundly sacramental. Without such an understanding we are but the accidents of desire and the fall-out of circumstance; in short, radically unfree.

The Collect prays the understanding which the Scriptures reveal, particularly in the inter-relation between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle suggests the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. We pray that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel speaks about the sacrament of Holy Communion for there is our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things.” Through the compassion of Christ, we are fed in the wilderness and set upon our way, “he in us and we in him.” If we have been grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” then we must also live from the Word of God revealed. “I am the vine, ye are the branches … abide in my love.”

We are grafted not simply into the name of God but into “the love of thy name.” Thus baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship which has its continuing in the eucharist. The fruit of these organic, spiritual, substantial and sacramental relationships is holy lives and a holy end. “But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life.” The Epistle and Gospel show the intimate connection between baptism and communion. They are gemina sacramenta, “twin sacraments,” as Augustine notes.

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“Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you”

How utterly impossible, perhaps, utterly unimaginable. Yet the Collect notes, “God has prepared for them that love [him] such good things as pass man’s understanding.” And so we pray God to “pour into our hearts such love toward [him], that we, loving [him] above all things, may obtain [his] promises which exceed” or go beyond, “all that we can desire.” Remarkably concise and comprehensive, it gathers together into a kind of fulness what is presented in the Epistle and Gospel. It is the crystallization of an essential theological and ethical understanding that belongs at once to the core of Christian thought and to what moves in the thinking of the great religions and philosophies of the world. In the most radical sense, we confront the deep meaning of love, not as sentiment and emotion, but as the divine love which seeks the perfection of our loves, without which, as Paul puts it in 1st Cor. 13, “we are nothing,” and, indeed, dead to God and to one another. “No story so divine.”

No passage of Scripture is more compelling and telling about God as love than today’s Gospel. It illustrates what the Epistle says about the radical meaning of baptism theologically and ethically in terms of “being dead to sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Only so may we begin to make sense of the Gospel reading.

Nothing could be more counter-culture in the face of a world of hatreds and animosities, of divisions and enmities. But, in truth, it challenges and counters each of us about the divisions and divides within our own hearts. Our “enemies” are not just out there in the world, which to be sure “hates” us, as John says in the 2nd lesson at Evening Prayer for today. “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you”(Jn. 15.18,19).

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“The people pressed upon him to hear the word of God”

Today’s Gospel illustrates wonderfully the Epistle reading from 1st Peter. Both readings  complement rather providentially the significance of this Sunday as falling within The Octave of the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul. They are the twin pillars and princes of the Apostolic Church and Faith grounded upon the living word of God which defines their life and ministry. The Gospel for the Feast is ‘the confession of Peter’ that Jesus is “the Christ the Son of the living God.” Jesus acknowledges this as something revealed to him not invented by him. That strong sense of commitment to the revealed word of God is what unites two very different personalities, that of Peter and Paul. As Augustine notes,”they are as one.”

They are as one in their attention to the living word revealed in Christ Jesus despite their very different backgrounds and biographies, the one a poor fisherman, we might say, as seen in this morning’s fishing story gospel, the other, a proud scholar who is blinded into sight by the vision and words of Jesus that transforms him from the persecutor, Saul, into the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul. In the Gospel for The Feast of St. Peter and Paul, Simon son of John, sometimes identified as Simon Peter, Jesus plays upon the name Peter: “thou art Peter,” πετρος, meaning rock or stone, “and upon this rock I will build my Church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” He then invests the apostolic ministry with ‘the power of the keys,’ the grace of Christ’s forgiveness on the Cross for our sins conveyed through the sacrament of priestly absolution. (It is worth noting that Lancelot Andrewes recognized the principle of forgiveness as inherent in the sacrament of the altar, the body broken and the blood outpoured “for [us] and for many for the remission of sins”).

The Feast of St. Peter and consequently Petertide is one of the oldest Christian festivals looking back to at least the early 3rd century. Yet from the earliest times the Feast of Peter was also associated and accompanied by the commemoration of St. Paul. The two are inseparably linked as witnessed by the sermons of Augustine and Leo, for instance. Much later in the 17th century, Bishop John Cosin, attempted to restore the title “St. Peter’s, and St. Paul’s Day” in the Prayer Book. In other words, throughout the churches both East and West, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, to use later terms, Peter and Paul have been commemorated together.

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“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”

There is no greater contrast than between Peter and Paul, the one a poor fisherman, the other, a proud scholar. And yet, as Augustine argues, “they were as one”. What unites them? Christ Jesus. What does that mean? It means that Christ Jesus has overcome all the oppositions, enmities and animosities that are present in the world and in our souls.

The truth and unity of the Church is found in the confession of Christ. “No one can say, Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit,” Paul will say, just as Peter famously confesses to Jesus, “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God.” And Jesus says to him that “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father who is in heaven.” One of the most dominant metaphors for God in the Old Testament is God as the Rock, the rock which like a father has begotten you, the rock which like a mother has brought you to birth, as the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy puts it. “That rock was Christ,” Paul proclaims, having in mind the wilderness journey of Israel and the stricken rock out of which comes life-giving water. The image is at once static and solid and dynamic and life-giving. Christ is the stricken rock out of whose pierced side water and blood pour forth, the symbols of the sacraments by which we live from him who died and lived again. Jesus says to Simon Peter, “you are the rock upon which I shall build my Church.”

The Church, the ekklesia, referring to the gathering together in unity of heart and mind, is defined by the Lord, Kyrios, from which is derived the word, Kirk, and Church. Peter and Paul are one in the beginnings of our coming together in “the blessed company of all faithful people,” the Church. Their stories are best known from The Book of the Acts of the Apostles and from their writings. The many Epistles of Paul and the two Epistles general of Peter, are essential parts of what becomes the New Testament. Yet their story is not without controversy and argument, a conflict about the universal and the particular, about Jew and Gentile, about the Old Covenant and the New, in relation to Christ and his company. It was a necessary argument out of which arises a deeper understanding and confession of “Christ, the son of the living God,” whose death and resurrection means the overcoming of all and every form of enmity and whose redemptive love is by definition for all.

“God is love,” we commonly say, forgetting that this is the love which died and rose again for us. Why? So that in him we might die, being “buried with him by baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised up from the dead … even so we also should walk in newness of life”. It is the very meaning of our life in Christ, our life in his body, our life as confessing the crucified and risen Christ.

It means dying to ourselves and our hatreds in order to live for Christ in and through one another. The mission of the Church universal proclaims our life in the body of Christ as the community of reconciliation and reciprocity. The feast of Peter and Paul in the tradition of the Church unites these two Princes of the Church and the Faith. To commemorate them is to remember the rock upon which we stand and the living word which goes forth to all the ends of the world. The rock and the mission are one.       

“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”

Fr. David Curry,
Feast of Peter & Paul,
June 29th, 2026.

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“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful”

Suffering and glory. Mercy and justice. They seem to stand in opposition one to the other yet our readings suggest otherwise and illuminate the nature of the Christian pilgrimage of the soul. It is nothing less than our participation in what has been fully and completely accomplished for us in Christ’s sacrifice but which remains to be more fully realized in us. We live by faith in what we have been given to know. We live by hope in what belongs to the truth and end or purpose of our humanity in God. We live by love that unites faith and hope and sustains us in the journey of our souls to our homeland in God both now and evermore. In short, we await “our full adoption as sons.”

That sense of participation highlights a sense of agency in our taking a hold of the life of Christ. Our seeking is our finding in order to seek all the more. It is not about possessing the truth, as if it were a thing, a consumer product, or simply a fantasy of our own devising; rather it is about being possessed by the truth. What that means is further illustrated in the witness of John the Baptist whose nativity was this week. In the tradition of the church we meet within the Octave of that feast precisely because of the significance of John the Baptist in the pilgrimage of sanctification.

An intriguing and challenging figure, his life and story is only about one thing and one thing only: he points us to the truth of God in Christ. The whole purpose of his being from his birth to his death is to point to the one who is greater than himself, the one whom he names as “the Lamb of God”. John the Baptist prepares the way of Christ by preaching of repentance. Repentance is our constant turning to God, a twofold turning, a turning towards God and a turning away from our sins which separate us from God; in short, conversion and contrition. John the Baptist preaches a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins; Christ is that forgiveness. Christ’s baptism by John in Jordan reveals the truth of God and the meaning of that truth for us in the restoration of the image of God as Trinity in us, for that is the radical meaning of our pilgrimage, our sanctification in embracing and growing into Christ.

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“Rejoice with me”

Humility and rejoicing are intimately connected. The one, humility, is the condition for the other, our true rejoicing in the absolute goodness of God’s love imaged in Luke 15 by the shepherd’s care, the woman’s diligence, and the father’s love. The humility of God’s charity calls us to humility against our pride. Pride is that grand delusion in which we think we are totally self-sufficient; as if we stand in need of nothing. We presume to be the centre of everything. The self-giving love of God stands opposed to the self-centeredness of our pride. Our pride opposes God and God’s ways for us and with us in our lives.

In the Gospel, “all the publicans (meaning here tax collectors) and sinners [drew near] to hear Jesus”. But there were others who objected. “The Pharisees and Scribes murmured, saying, this man receiveth sinners and eateth with them”. In other words, the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law, the self-righteous about their religion, complain about the company which Jesus keeps, the company of tax collectors and sinners. Jesus tells this parable in relation to this division between tax collectors and sinners, on the one hand, and Pharisees and the teachers of the law, on the other hand.

Tax collecting is a necessary feature of public life in any organized state or political community. Tax collectors are hardly ever regarded in a favourable light, but how much less so in the context of the Gospel? For then, they were seen as traitors to Israel because they were working for the Roman Authorities over and against their own people. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they were seen as extortionists. The business of tax collecting was out-sourced by the Roman government to local agents. They were given a quota they had to meet; anything above that was for themselves. Consequently, the tax collectors were out to get whatever they could from an unwilling and hostile population.

Traitors to Israel and extortionists of their own people. No one could be more despised and seen as a sinner than a tax collector. Hardly respectable company for a teacher of religion, it might seem, or, at least, so the Pharisees and the teachers of the law thought. After all, they saw themselves as the worthy ones, as the respectable company with whom Jesus should be, not this rabble of unworthy tax collectors and sinners. How does Jesus respond?

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“If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts”

The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday provide the critical matrix for our understanding week in and week out. It is no less so for this Sunday. The Gospel is Christ’s parable which likens the kingdom of heaven to a great supper to which all who were invited made excuses. But is the kingdom of heaven a good equal to our other desires and pleasures in our concerns about property or goods or states of life, even such as marriage? How can that be? Thus the consequence  of our refusals would seem to mean not only “no feast” but equally a denial of God’s will and kingdom, as if our conveniences and interests really take precedence over God’s will for our highest good, our blessedness. Here our preoccupations about such concerns contribute to our indifference to the things of God through too much attachment to worldly concerns. Loving the things of the world too much, the things that are always passing away, leads to the neglect of the things of God, the things that are everlasting. It is one of the forms of the disorder of our loves that constantly need correction.

We have to learn, it seems, how to care for the things of our daily lives in the right way by learning to love all good things in God. “Teach us to care and not to care,” as T.S. Eliot puts it; in other words, teach us to care in the right way.

It might seem that our excuses must frustrate God’s will. But that cannot be. We can only frustrate ourselves; itself a kind of self-condemnation. God will have his house filled with those whom he makes ready as the Gospel shows, bringing them in who could not come on their own, compelling them to come in who would not come any other way. In a way, it is a strong statement of God’s love for our highest good, a strong statement about what God wants for us and which is prepared for us. “Come, for all things are now ready.” Now, in God’s time and will, not ours. But are we ready?

Yet the invitation nonetheless recognises human agency. God invites those whom he would have come willingly and freely out of love; those of whom it may truly be said, “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” It suggests hospitality and conviviality in our social joys as grounded in God’s purpose and will for us. It belongs, in other words, to human redemption. As John tells us, the first miracle which Jesus did at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee was to turn water into wine, an image of our social joys and pleasures but as belonging to God’s will for the good of our humanity; in short, our joy is found in him and his kingdom, the communion of saints. It is not simply about our private goods. To refuse the invitation is to deny the love in which we find the ultimate truth of ourselves, knowing ourselves as we are known by him, known in the radiancy of God’s glory and love which has been shown to us.

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