Category: Sermons

“That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope”

There are things which, perhaps, we would rather not think about that belong to the wisdom of the Advent season. What are those things? They are things like death, judgment, heaven and hell, the proverbial four last things or eschatology which for centuries were served up as the basic preaching fare during the Advent season. They are things which we would rather ignore or forget. We do so at our peril because such things really belong to hope, the great advent teaching of the Second Sunday in Advent.

Scripture speaks to Scripture, opening out the Word to us that carries hope in its breath. The Holy Scriptures are “written for our learning,” St. Paul exclaims, and Archbishop Cranmer prays the same in the wonderful Collect that adorns this day and this week, a Collect that embodies a whole attitude of mind and approach to the Scriptures. It encapsulates a way of understanding the Scriptures. They are writings that teach us “that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” Comfort here is not simply hygge suggesting a quality of coziness and material comfort making us hyggelig. Comfort here is much stronger and deeper; it relates entirely to our life with God in his word coming to us that challenges us and redeems us from ourselves.

Hope is one of the great lessons of the Scriptures. Why? Because hope is precisely something which is not dependent upon us. The hope to which the Scriptures awaken us is real hope, the hope that has realized the utter limitations of human endeavour, the hope that has faced the empty abyss of ourselves and the vanity of our actions, the hope that has considered the reality of sin and death. Looking into the things of judgment and condemnation, hope also looks up to God and to the coming of God into our midst.

The coming is hope itself. We look for what we do not see. We wait for it. In the coming of Christ we look for what we do not see in ourselves but see in him, namely, the redemption of our wounded and weary humanity. But it takes the Word proclaimed and celebrated to awaken us and to sustain us in the hope of the Gospel and in the hope that we might begin to see this even in ourselves.

For what do we hope? Simply for the accomplishing of the good will and purpose of God in our lives. Big deal, you might be thinking. What will be will be. Que sera, sera. Yes, but why assume that that will be good? Why not assume misery and suffering? Plenty of that to go around, after all. Such an attitude is fatalistic. It leaves the individual completely and conveniently out of the equation – what will be will be whether I act or don’t act, whether I do something or nothing. That is sheer hopelessness. Fatalism is ultimately our despair of anything good; it is, really, a denial of hope. The denial of hope is our despair of God and his love. We consign ourselves to victimhood. It belongs to the culture of depression and dependency; the culture of despair. It is ultimately anti-human and negates the truth of our humanity as found in God.

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“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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