Category: Sermons

“Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”

We will hear these words in the mystery of Christmas. What things does Mary keep and ponder in her heart? All the things that are said about the child Christ. By extension we, too, are bidden to ponder all the things that belong to the mystery of Christ. Such is part of the meaning of tonight’s commemoration. We can’t think about Christ apart from Mary. She is an essential part of the mystery and meaning of the Incarnation.

Pondus meum amor meus. My love is my weight. A powerful phrase from Augustine, it has shaped the patristic, medieval, and reformation churches’ understanding of human redemption. Augustine’s image captures a significant theological theme which speaks to a culture which has abandoned God and finds itself adrift and isolated. Such is our wilderness.

Mary in Advent is Mary in Holy Waiting. What defines Mary is her waiting upon the will of God. Far from a kind of passive acquiescence, Mary’s waiting is an holy activity, a kind of attentiveness to the pageant of God’s Word revealed in the Law and the Prophets and now, on Angel’s wings, it seems, opening us out to the wonder and the marvel of God’s coming to us through her. To what extent are we in her? For Mary, in Irenaeus’ poignant and potent phrase is the pure womb which gives birth to that purity which Christ himself has made pure: “that pure one opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.”

It is impossible to think of Mary apart from Christ; she is quietly and patiently with us in our meditations and thoughts. For the Church in prayer is essentially Marian. Mary is an inescapable feature of the landscape of Advent. She plays a critical and crucial role in our understanding of Christ’s coming to us as Emmanuel, God with us. Through Mary we begin to discover how our humanity is totally and inescapably bound up with the will of God towards us; in short, his advent.

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“All the city was moved, saying, Who is this?”

Advent is the season of questions, questions that awaken us to the radical meaning of God’s Word coming to us in law and prophecy, in mind and in flesh. Without the questions of Advent, Christmas is only tinsel and wrap that conceal the illusions of our hearts and leave us in the darkness, desolate and in despair. The great questions of Advent illuminate the Word of God as the Light which overcomes the darkness of disillusion and despair.

The questions are at once our questions in all of their confusion and uncertainty and the questions of God that redeem our desires. Our questions are really about the deeper desires of our hearts and minds for wholeness, for what is absolute and true, however misguided we may be in what we think we want. God’s questions belong to the redemption of our desires; in short, to the redemption of our humanity. But how? By confronting us with the wilderness and the darkness of our hearts and world.

The great Gospel for The First Sunday in Advent is about Christ’s coming to Jerusalem in triumph but also in judgement. The triumphal entry of Christ, in images that fulfill the prophetic expectation of the Messiah, is full of the sense of joy and delight in the one who comes. HIs royal procession is greeted with branches of palms strewn in the way and with the exultant cries of “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord.” We know this from Palm Sunday. There is the sense of joyous expectancy, of hope, that speaks directly and clearly to the world of darkness and uncertainty both then and now; to our world, to be sure. It is a moving spectacle. “All the city was moved,” Matthew tells us, “saying, Who is this?” At once named as the Son of David, referring to the Messiah and to the hopes for justice and peace, and yet unknown, it seems. The first question of Advent is about our unknowing, about the darkness of our minds and hearts. We know and do not know in equal measure.

And so we must begin again to attend to the radical pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light in the darkness. We “know in part,” as Paul puts it, “in a glass darkly,” but we long to know and to be known more fully, more completely. That can only happen by confronting the darkness. We learn from the darkness about the light which is greater than all the forms of suffering and evil that belong to the darkness of the world and our hearts. Without that we can really make no sense of the one who comes and who will be called Emmanuel, which by interpretation, as Matthew tells us, is “God with us.”

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“Master, where dwellest thou?”

The Sunday Next Before Advent is a day of double prepositions. It signals at once an ending and a beginning in the Lesson from Jeremiah and in the Gospel from the end of the first Chapter from John. Yet, for centuries upon centuries, the Gospel read on this day was from “the Bread of Life discourse” near the beginning of Chapter Six of John’s Gospel. It is the story of the miraculous feeding of the multitude in the wilderness also read on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, albeit with a different point of emphasis, namely, the idea of God’s provisions for his people in the wilderness. As read for centuries on this Sunday, the emphasis is more on the idea of the fullness of redemption, the gathering up of all of the broken fragments of our lives into the life of God; hence the sense of ending. “Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost.”

The change to the Gospel which you heard this morning was one of the few changes made in the 1962 Canadian revision to the Prayer Book. It suggests the Advent theme of God’s turning to us, the Advent pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light in the darkness of our hearts and our world. But that doesn’t entirely eclipse the idea of an ending in the sense of meaning and purpose which is found in our dwelling with God and God with us. Thus the readings are complementary and belong to the transitions from one form of spiritual emphasis to another that are inescapably interrelated; the themes of justifying righteousness and sanctifying righteousness that belong to our incorporation into the life of Christ and to the hope of heaven, our end in glory.

“Come and see,” Jesus says to the disciples of John and to us. Ultimately, it is an invitation to the banquet of divine love opened out to us through the pageant of God’s Word. Advent signals the coming of God’s word to us. The constant struggle of our lives is about learning to live in and from that Word. The task of the Church is simply to proclaim the Word of God faithfully and sacramentally. Today marks a kind of gathering or summing up of the past year of grace even as it catapults us into a new year; a time of endings and beginnings. “In my beginning is my end” and “in my end is my beginning” (T.S. Eliot, East Coker, Four Quartets).

God’s word coming to us is given as the principle of our abiding in the love of God. As George Herbert says, “the crosse taught all wood to resound his name” and that is very much signaled in the architecture wherein the wood of this Church resounds with the name of Christ so that his word may have its resonance in us.

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“We give thanks to God … for the hope which is laid up for you in heaven.”

At the heart of Paul’s lovely flow of words of prayer and praise to God for the people of Colossae is the hope of heaven which they have heard and received in what he calls “the word of truth in the Gospel; which is come unto you” and which “bringeth forth fruit and increaseth” in them “since the day ye heard of it, and knew the grace of God in truth.” His prayer is that they “might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding,” and that they “might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing.”

The passage in its intensity of warmth and expression belongs to the grace of God at work in our lives which has been a dominant feature of the Trinity season in terms of the idea of sanctification. Yet at the same time, the readings in the late Trinity season also point us to the coming of that grace towards us that belongs to Advent. Thus these Sundays are transitional; at once an ending and a beginning.

T.S. Eliot’s poem East Coker, the second of the Four Quartets, begins with the phrase “in my beginning is my end” and ends with “in my end is my beginning,’ capturing the nature of the transition that belongs to the interplay between justification and sanctification. It is really all a kind of redire ad principia, a kind of circling around and into the mystery of Christ, what Eliot terms the “still point of the turning world” … for “there the dance is” (Burnt Norton).

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

That end which is always present is God and the hope of heaven in us that “makes us meet to be partakers of the saints in light,” as Paul puts it. What that hope looks like is illustrated in the Gospel story. It is the yearning or desire for wholeness, for the integrity of our lives as found in Christ. That yearning is captured in the unspoken prayer of the woman who was diseased with an issue of blood for twelve years who came behind Jesus and “touched the hem of his garment.” As Matthew tells us, “she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.” Such is her insight into the grace of God in Christ and such is her desire for healing, for wholeness. Yet it is as if she thinks she can steal a cure from Jesus without his awareness. As such her desire is incomplete.

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“Our citizenship is in heaven”

We are “strangers and pilgrims” who seek “a better country, that is, an heavenly,” as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us in the Octave of All Saints’. That “better country” is what Paul means by “our citizenship in heaven”, for “we have here no continuing city.” Some worldly utopia is not our end, however we imagine it in the sense of being a human construct. What we desire is indeed a critical feature of our humanity but our desire for what is absolute and good is precisely beyond our constructing. Such is the delusion of thinking that we can make heaven on earth.

The readings today challenge our culture and church which assumes that the church and religion should mirror and reflect our ideological agendas. It doesn’t either anciently or now. Paul’s statement about our citizenship being in heaven points to the idea of how the things of this world have their truth and meaning only in God. The secular finds its truth only in the sacred; this is the strong teaching of these readings which transcend the opposition of sacred and secular to show the nature of their interrelation. It is neither a dogmatic assertion of the heavenly at the expense of the worldly nor is it mere relativism.

What is stated in the epistle is illustrated in the Gospel. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”. The distinction is crucial to the understanding of our lives as “strangers and pilgrims” in this world. Caesar here is symbolic of the powers of this world; in short, the secular. Yet it has its truth and purpose as belonging to the greater truth and power of God. As Jesus says to Pilate, “thou couldst have no power … except what has been given you from heaven.”

We have forgotten this and have turned the secular agendas of our world and day into forms of religion and cult. The institutional churches fall prey to the assumption that religion is only a reflection of cultural and social ideologies and agendas. This is the advocacy culture which demands not acceptance and toleration but the celebration of identities and interests that negate the givenness of creation and the transcendence of God. Paul’s claim that our citizenship is in heaven does not negate the forms of our secular or worldly lives but redeems them by suggesting that they only have their truth in God. “We have here no continuing city.”

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“Blessed are the merciful”

Mercy is at the heart of the Beatitudes, the great ethical teaching that belongs to the Communion of Saints in the vision of humanity redeemed. In the sombre greyness of November we are reminded of our end in glory. As such we are more than the divisions and enmities in our hearts that contribute to the miseries of the world; we seek for something more and greater that belongs to grace, to what is given to be our life in Christ. As Dante says about the Divine Comedy, its whole purpose is “to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of happiness,” ad statum felicitatis, literally, felicity (Epistle to Can Grande della Scala). This applies to the spiritual pageant of the Trinity season and to our lives in faith.

The Beatitudes are the blessednesses, the principles of grace that define the good of our humanity in relation to God and in our lives with one another; in short, our end in God in the Communion of Saints, is the true vocation of our humanity. This is what Paul alludes to in the Epistle reading from Philippians, “that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement: that ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere, and without offence, till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ unto the glory and praise of God.” The gradual psalm reminds us of “how good and joyful a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity”; it is the blessing of life for evermore that belongs to the creedal profession of our faith. In each and every liturgy we participate and are at one with the Communion of Saints in giving praise and glory to God.

The Gospel illustrates this teaching by way of the negative example of the unforgiving servant who was forgiven a great debt by his lord and king but then refuses to forgive the paltry debt of another owed to him. To be forgiven and not to forgive is to negate mercy and forgiveness. The point is made very clear. “Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant, even as I had pity on thee?”

The Beatitudes always remind me of Portia’s great speech in The Merchant of Venice. “The quality of mercy is not strain’d,” she says, meaning that it can’t be held back and it can’t be forced. It has a necessity of its own as something divine. “It is twice blest: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” This is what the unforgiving servant has denied; the reciprocity of grace, the give and take of mercy. The merciful obtain mercy, like for like. As Portia puts it, “we do pray for mercy and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy.” This is exactly what the unforgiving servant didn’t do. He prayed for mercy for himself but failed to render the deeds of mercy to another. The story is told to highlight the necessity of the reciprocity of grace, of mercy for mercy. It does so by way of a negative example and one which speaks to the problem of sin; pursuing our own self-interest in denial of the needs of others. The unforgiving servant betrays himself and the community to which he belongs.

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“Above all, take the shield of faith”

We go from the “wedding-garment” to “the whole armour of God,” an intriguing juxtaposition of opposites, it might seem. The image of clothing in these readings – at once of last week’s gospel about the wedding-garment and in this week’s epistle reading from Ephesians about the whole armour of God – is not about external appearances but about what moves in us inwardly. Once again is about faith; hence the significance of Paul’s words, “above all, taking the shield of faith.”

This is illustrated for us rather wonderfully in the Gospel story of a certain nobleman “who believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him” about the healing of his son and whose faith is deepened into knowledge upon hearing from his servants that his son was healed. Note that his faith extends to the faith of his whole house. Faith is never simply personal but corporate.

The image of the shield is particularly striking and powerful and belongs to a long tradition of reflection upon the paradoxes of the human condition. Homer’s Iliad presents a detailed description of Achilles’ shield as part of the armour created by Hephaestus as he prepares to return to the battle to revenge the death of his friend Patroclus. The shield is marvellously described as depicting two cities: the city at peace and the city at war. How is the city of peace described? By a wedding festival and by a court of law reconciling a conflict. Virgil reworks the same contrast between war and peace in his depiction of the shield of Aeneas in The Aeneid. And the image of the shield of Achilles is reworked in modern times by the poet W.H. Auden in his poem entitled The Shield of Achilles.

Written in 1952, that poem speaks to the dark and troubling realities of our world soaked in blood and hatred. He has in mind the horrors of the Second World War. Auden depicts Thetis, the mother of Achilles, looking over the shoulder of the techno-god Hephaestus “for vines and olive trees,/Marble well-governed cities,” looking “for ritual pieties,/ White flower-garlanded heifers, libation and sacrifice,” and looking “for athletes at their games, Men and women in a dance/ Moving their sweet limbs/ Quick, quick to music;” all images of the city at peace. But instead of such images of peace and life, what she sees is “an artificial wilderness/ And a sky like lead,” a barren and empty world with “no blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,/Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,” a meaningless world of armies “column by column in a cloud of dust/ … march[ing away] enduring a belief/Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief;” a world of “barbed wire,” “bored officials” and “sweating sentries” where “a crowd of ordinary decent folk/ Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke”, silent in their despair or indifference “as three pale figures were led forth and bound/To three posts driven upright in the ground;” a reference to Calvary by way of the holocaust.

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“Friend, how camest thou in hither, not having a wedding-garment?”

God’s questions call us to account, to a sense of intentionality and agency without which we are lost in indeterminacy and indifference. “Be ye not unwise” Paul bids us, “but understanding what the will of the Lord is.” That will of the Lord is about the quality of our life in Christ, he in us and we in him. It is sanctification, the grace which moves in us. It requires our full hearted attention to the transcendence of God, to the givenness of the created order, and to the realities of our common life in the body of Christ. Something is required of us. This is the meaning of the wedding-garment.

“See then that ye walk circumspectly,” Paul says, paying attention to all that is around us, “redeeming the time,” a lovely phrase which is about our life as ordered to God, our God-awareness, as it were, even in the awareness that “the days are evil.” We know this only too well. How to live a good life is not about possessions and pleasures. It is about life in Christ, a life of prayer and praise, of a kind of joy in the midst of the disturbing and dark times in which we live. The constant thrust of the Christian faith is that we are not fundamentally defined by the circumstances and events of our world and day, however much the days are evil. That is simply the context for our lives in faith which is about our constant attention to God in and through our lives with one another. Being alive to God in Christ is our calling and our challenge.

This means, as Paul suggests, being “filled with the Spirit,” another lovely phrase which is explained in terms of the qualities of prayer and praise alive in us through the liturgy: “speaking to yourselves in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs; singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is a wonderful and vibrant statement of living faith which contrasts with contemporary claims about personal faith and/or personal identities which are radically incomplete and indeterminate, solipsistic and narcissistic. They are really all about oneself in a kind of idolatry of the self. “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God,” on the other hand, speaks to our lives together in the Faith which is corporately confessed and lived in the body of Christ.

Quite simply something is required of us. This is illustrated in the powerful Gospel parable which Jesus tells: the kingdom of heaven is likened to the marriage feast of a certain king for his son to which we are bidden, or invited. But what is our response? First, those who were bidden, “would not come.” They refuse or ignore the invitation. The invitation is issued yet again for “all things are ready; come unto the marriage”. Some “made light of it and went their ways,” turning to their own immediate interests of property and merchandise; others took the servants of the king “and entreated them spitefully, and slew them;” a reference to the prophets sent by God to call us to repentance. The consequence is their destruction.

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“Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”

Paul’s strong and powerful words are complemented and illustrated wonderfully in the Gospel. The teaching of both is, perhaps, best concentrated for us in the Collect: “forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee: Mercifully grant that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts.” For the readings all turn on the question about what is moving in our hearts. In short, the emphasis is upon the qualities of Christ present or absent in us and in ways that challenge our thinking.

Have we learned Christ? Have we heard him? Have we been taught by him, “as the truth is in Jesus”? The question is put to us directly, not as external rebuke but as the strong reminder of our new creation in Christ, having put off “the old manhood” – the term is inclusive, our old sinful humanity (τον παλαιον ανθρωπον) – and putting on “the new manhood” (τον καιον ανθρωπον), our humanity as made new in Christ. How? By being “renewed in the spirit of your mind.” This is altogether about our sanctification, literally, “the holiness of truth,” the complete counter to our current intellectual and spiritual despair of truth in a world of lies and deceit.

This has to do with the quality of our lives together in the body of Christ. We are bidden to put away lying and speak truth to each other because “we are members one of another.” We are not isolated, autonomous beings; we have our life and being with one another in the body of Christ. Paul’s words unpack the whole meaning of our life in Christ in thoughtful but shocking ways. “Be ye angry,” he says! What! Isn’t our world angry enough and way too angry? Yes. But there is a place for righteous anger about things which should disturb us because they diminish and destroy what belongs to the truth of our humanity. Such is the righteous wrath of Christ in the cleansing of the temple, to take but one example. “Be ye angry but sin not.” Don’t let your wrath possess you. “Let not the sun go down on your wrath: neither give place to the devil.”

There is nothing here that is mere ‘feel goody-goodism’ or obsessive self-righteousness. It is really about a kind of critical self-appraisal but without wallowing in self-pity. He goes on to consider the forms of our relationship with one another; not stealing but labouring, “working with [our] hands the thing which is good” but doing so for the good of others as well, “that [we] may have to give to him that needeth.” Once again, the emphasis is on the ethical, upon our being together as “members one of another.” So too with our speech which is not about evil talk but about what edifies and builds up and “ministers grace to the hearers.” All of these exhortations belong to the Holy Spirit moving in us without which we risk grieving the Holy Spirit, in effect denying the Spirit of Truth in self-contradiction, and negating our being in God. The Epistle sums up in a magisterial fashion what we are to put away from ourselves and what we are to do: “Be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”

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“One turned back … giving him thanks”

Austin Farrer once summed up the Gospel according to St. Mark in three sentences: “God gives you everything. Give everything back to God. You can’t.” Except, it must be said, by the grace of Christ in thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the highest form of prayer, a kind of adoration. Thanksgiving is really a kind of thoughtfulness, our thoughtfulness towards God and towards the unity of all things in God. It is the counter to the idea of entitlement and privilege, to our tendency to take everything for granted and to think that we are owed the things we want. Thanksgiving speaks to the highest dignity of our humanity.

The readings for Thanksgiving Day from Deuteronomy and Luke capture the quintessential features of thanksgiving as a kind of thoughtfulness. They are complemented by the readings for Harvest Thanksgiving from Isaiah about God’s Word going forth and returning not empty but with purpose and in joy and from the Bread of Life discourse in John’s Gospel about our sacramental participation in Christ. Thanksgiving in all senses is really about our participation in the motions of God’s Word and Will.

Deuteronomy’s wonderful litany about the good land flowing with the abundance of good things, “a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing” is grounded in the idea of “keeping the commandments of the Lord your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him”; in short, honouring God. There is something quite wonderful about our being gathered to God in the gathering of the fruits of the harvest into the Church where even the lowly zucchini, squash, and pumpkins not to mention the little gourds proclaim the goodness of God.

The harvest gathering belongs to the greater gathering of prayer. It is intellectus, the gathering of all things into unity in God from whom all good things do come. There is the danger of attending too much to the good things themselves and losing sight of the fact that they are all gifts, the gifts of God in creation of which we too are a part. Bread and wine, after all, are not simply natural creatures. They are the product of our working with God in the good order of his creation. But that belongs to our vocation as “nature’s high priest” (George Herbert). Thanksgiving brings out the deeper meaning of Genesis 1 and 2 about the created order and our place within it. In a way, it highlights the meaning of being made in the image of God and, in a complementary fashion, as the dust into which God has breathed his spirit; connected to God and to the whole order of created beings, from dust to angels.

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