Category: Sermons

“Behold a voice out of the cloud”

“The glory of God is man alive [a living human being] and the life of man is the vision of God,” as the 2nd century theologian Irenaeus said. Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. It sets before us the vision of Christ transfigured, the vision of his divine majesty, and what that means for us, namely, the idea of our transformation. “That we, being purified and strengthened by thy grace, may be transformed into his likeness from glory to glory,” as the Collect puts it. What does that mean and how, we might ask? Well, it has to do with what we see and hear, in short, what we are learning through what is being taught.

On the Mount of Transfiguration we are told, “Behold a voice,” a voice that comes “out of the cloud”, the bright overshadowing cloud of God’s glory, the shekhinah of the Hebrew Scriptures that signifies God’s presence. What does it mean to see what is heard? It means an understanding – a divine understanding articulated through our human understanding. Hearing and seeing are the biblical senses of understanding, and they are, if I may put it this way, the most intellectual of the senses, meaning that they point us beyond a literal sense to something intellectual, to something understood. To behold a voice is the language of Revelation.

The Transfiguration is the summertime epiphany of the Trinity. It complements the wintertime epiphany in the Baptism of Christ. For both there is a beholding of what is heard. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matt.3.17) and again, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; Hear ye him” (Matt.17.5). The Baptism inaugurates the way of the obedience of Christ for us, our justification. The Transfiguration commands the way of the obedience of Christ in us, our sanctification; hence the added charge, “Hear ye him.”

The voice is the Father’s voice. To hear that voice in the biblical sense of acting faithfully upon what we hear is to enter into the way of understanding through the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The sequence of teaching which brings us to the Transfiguration (Matt.16.13-17.1) illustrates just how hard and yet how necessary that way is. “Who do men say that the Son of man is? Who do you say that I am?”, Jesus asks his disciples. Peter answers: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”.

Jesus’ response shows that what Peter understands, he understands from God. “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matt.16.7). It is not simply a finite human understanding, a human opinion or construct by us. It shares in something more. It is divinely human. Through this understanding Simon becomes Peter, πετρος, which means ‘rock’ And upon this understanding (and no other), Jesus says, “Upon this rock, I will build my church” against which nothing will prevail (Matt.16.18). But how well do we stand upon this rock of understanding? Again, Peter provides the paradigm.

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“Ye shall know them by their fruits”

“How came we ashore?” Miranda asks her father, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He was the Duke of Milan but preferred his books in the study of natural philosophy to the mundane duties of running his dukedom which he had delegated to his brother, Antonio.. Betrayed by his brother, who in cahoots with Alonzo, the King of Naples, usurped his dukedom, Prospero and Miranda are set adrift on the seas on a derelict raft. Never mind that Milan is not an Italian port city! They wash up on an island – “the Bermoothes” – Bermuda, as it turns out. Not such a bad place to come ashore, I suppose. The play is the only play of Shakespeare that is set outside the Euro-Mediterranean world. Miranda at the time in the play was three. Now at fifteen she learns who she is, the daughter of the Duke of Milan. Prospero’s answer to her question “how came we ashore?” is “by providence divine.”

The play explores the ambiguities of Prospero’s intent. His knowledge of nature in Renaissance eyes is a kind of magic – so-called ‘white magic’. It belongs to early modernity in different ways to see knowledge as conferring a power over nature. We should be only too well aware of the deadly consequences of such knowledge in our own times. Prospero conjures up a storm, a tempest, to bring his betrayers to the island and under his power. But to what end? Revenge? Or something more? Reconciliation?

There is a nice sense here of the interplay between natural and moral philosophy. On the ship are not only his betrayers but also the son of one of his betrayers, Ferdinand, the son of Alonso, King of Naples. As well there is the noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo, who gave Prospero his books as he was being set adrift. On the island, there is Caliban, the symbolic image of the indigenous cultures in their encounter with European culture. Shakespeare not only explores the complexity of that encounter but provides a Euro-critique of itself that derives from the indigenous cultures themselves.

The play unfolds the love theme between Ferdinand and Miranda that leads to forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness and reconciliation are extended even towards those who show no remorse, no change, such as Prospero’s brother, Antonio, and Alonzo’s brother, Sebastian, unrepentant scoundrels and miscreants both. Yet grace is greater than those who resist it; they are sustained by what they refuse to embrace but, at the same time, what they cannot enjoy. There’s the rub.

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“I have compassion on the multitude”

Today’s Collect is a loaded prayer that pulls together the central ideas of the Epistle and Gospel readings. Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, it gathers us into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial, that is to say, it concerns the quality of our lives with God as standing upon the truth of God revealed. The images of grafting, growing, nurturing and preserving are organic and agricultural – most fitting for our lives in the valley – but they follow upon an understanding of God as the “Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things”. That understanding shapes the meaning of these images. It makes them profoundly sacramental.

The Collect prays the understanding which the Scriptures reveal, particularly in the inter-relation between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle unpacks, we might say, the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. And we pray that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel alludes to the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Communion. Our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things”, is through the compassion of Christ who feeds us in the wilderness and sets us upon our way, “he in us and we in him,” as the Prayer of Humble Access in our liturgy put it. Grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” as Paul teaches, we are meant to live from that Word of God revealed.

That we are grafted not simply into the name of God but into “the love of thy name” reminds us that Baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship which has its continuation 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”. Thus the interplay between the Epistle and the Gospel is like the connection between Baptism and Communion.

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

This morning’s Gospel ends where we began two weeks ago. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” The radical meaning of that mercy is expressed in our text: “love your enemies, do good to them which hate you.” Nothing could be more counter-culture. Nothing better expresses the ultimate ethical statement that belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity. And yet, this commandment, the impossible somehow made possible, is but the illustration of the Epistle reading from Romans about the nature of our reconciliation and life in Christ.

“Know ye not,” St. Paul asks us, with a rhetorical flourish, “that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” Death and resurrection lead to “newness of life”, having crucified “our old Adam,” having destroyed “our sinful self,” “that we should never again be slaves to sin.” Powerful ideas that belong exactly to the radical meaning of our life in Christ, “alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” What does that mean? Simply that Christ lives in us.

We are only alive when we live in the reconciling love of Christ. This transcends the oppositions of our souls and lives, our enmities and hatreds. For that is the real meaning of sin: our opposition and hostility to the deeper truth of our humanity as found in God. No one expresses this better than the great second-century theologian, Irenaeus: “The glory of God is humanity alive and the life of man is the vision of God.” God in man and man in God. To have a glimpse of this changes how we see everything. It signals the overcoming of all division and opposition, all animosity and enmity. This is truly radical because it is God’s truth and life in us. And it is equally the counter to the so-called ‘transhumanisms’ of our contemporary world which are really anti-human and anti-life, turning ourselves into machines and/or negating our embodiment as living beings.

This word challenges our world of endless divisions and strife both ancient and modern. Socrates in Plato’s Republic counters both the conventional views of justice and the ‘sophistic’ rejection of justice which is really anti-human as well. The conventional view, then and now, is that justice means “doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.” As Socrates points out with great clarity, justice as a virtue, a quality of excellence, cannot result in doing harm to anyone or anything. He also attempts to counter Thrasymachus’ claim that justice is “the interest of the stronger;” in short, that might equals right. That really means there is no justice, no truth, just power and domination which is predicated upon division and enmity; it is ultimately anti-human. Here we are opened out to a greater vision and a greater truth not simply about our being in the world but about our being in Christ, our life in the vision of God, to put it in Irenaeus’s terms.

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“At thy word”

“‘Take my camel, dear’, said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” It is a famous opening line from Rose Macaulay’s novel The Towers of Trebizond, an Anglo-Catholic classic. There are also great ending lines, too. “Grace is everywhere” or “all is grace” (tout est grâce) ends George Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest. There are beginnings and endings that evoke a whole pattern understanding and which illustrate the character of our lives in media res, in the midst of things. And sometimes, mirabile dictu, there are opening and ending lines which go together and complement each other like what we have with this morning’s Epistle and Gospel.

The Epistle reading from 1st Peter begins with the strong phrase, “be ye all of one mind” and ends with “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” The Gospel reading from Luke begins with the strong and compelling image of “the people press[ing] upon Jesus to hear the word of God” and ends with Simon Peter, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, and others “for[saking] all and follow[ing] him.” In each case everything in between is held together by these phrases. In the Epistle, what is in between is an exhortation to a godly life against the explicit forms of wickedness which so easily arise not only in our hearts, but also in the forms of suffering and persecution, terror and trouble, fear and anxiety that are part and parcel of human experience in a our common life together. In the Gospel, what is in between is the equally compelling image of the empty frustrations that belong to human experience: “ we have toiled all the night,” Simon Peter says, “and have taken nothing.” We have but laboured in vain, it seems.

“Be ye all of one mind,” Peter tells us. But what is that one mind? Is it mere unanimity regardless of what one is agreed about? Surely not. Peter is talking about the mind of Christ for he goes on to describe the qualities of the love of Christ towards us which must become the form of his life within us. Such is sanctification. But as the Gospel reminds us that is not simply about our doing, a human enterprise. It is and can only be the work of God’s grace in us. “Apart from me you can do nothing,” Jesus tells us.

Being of one mind is not simply about consensus. It is about truth as life in us corporately and individually. Within state and church, within society and parish, we can be of one mind about things which are wrong and unethical, for example, or we can arrive at a good and fine decision but in questionable and coercive ways. Do we not all with one mind cry out “crucify him, crucify him” in the drama and spectacle of Holy Week?

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

We shall return to this chapter from St. Luke’s Gospel later on with the passage which immediately precedes this morning’s gospel about “lov[ing] your enemies” (Trinity 6). Here we have the further articulation of the reciprocity of grace that is to be at work in us which belongs to the pageant of sanctification. It is about our life in Christ, about our abiding, quite literally, in the doctrine of Christ. What that means belongs to our attention to the reading of the Scriptures as they shape our lives in grace.

That means reminding ourselves of the interplay between the various texts of the Scriptures. To be sure, we have these marvellous and, of course, challenging readings each Sunday at Mass but they do not stand simply by themselves. They need to be seen as complemented by other Scripture readings that are also set before us both in the Sunday Office lectionary and the Daily Office lectionary. In a way this points us to the two great questions that we will hear at the midpoint of the Trinity season and which belong to the Christian ethic of compassion in the story of the Good Samaritan, namely, “what is written in the law? How readest thou?”

I was reminded of this by the readings in the Daily Office from Proverbs and from the Letters of John this week that speak to the nature of our abiding in the love of God, something which has already been highlighted in the readings for the first two Sundays after Trinity. Proverbs is, I think, a bit more than simply a loose collection of wise sayings or maxims; it provides a way of thinking things through and of the reciprocity and exchange of ideas that are meant to be lived out in our lives. In that sense, it belongs to our reading in the Trinity season because of its emphasis on sanctification, on our abiding in the Trinity through the words of Scripture which are understood in their unity as the words of Christ. As Cranmer puts it, “he that keepeth the words of Christ is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling-place or temple of the Blessed Trinity”.

In 2 John (9,10), we read that “he who abides in the doctrine [of Christ] has both the Father and the Son.” Doctrine is the teaching, διδακη. In Proverbs 9, “Wisdom”, we are told, “has built her house” and there is the intriguing and at first puzzling contrast between the invitation of the wise woman and the foolish woman. They begin with the exact same words: “whoever is simple, let him turn in here!” But there is all the difference in what that turning in leads to and means.

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“The God of all grace … shall himself restore, stablish, strengthen you.”

The epistles, especially of the Trinity season, lay out the doctrine of our abiding in Christ. They focus on the qualities of our being in Christ. The First Sunday after Trinity sets before us the principle of abiding in God and God abiding in us; it belongs entirely to God as love and that love as shaping our loves and our lives. The Second Sunday showed us something of its radical meaning in terms of how that divine love overcomes the animosities, divisions, and condemnations of both others and ourselves. Both those epistles were taken from John’s First Epistle. Today, the epistle reading is from 1st Peter from which the epistle for the Fifth Sunday will also be taken. Next Sunday, the epistle reading is from Paul’s letter to the Romans. These so-called ‘catholic’ epistles of John and Peter, meaning that they are addressed to the whole or universal church, along with Romans 8 next week, emphasize the theme of our sanctification in and through “the sufferings of this present world” and thus provide an introduction to a series of readings from Paul’s epistles that will instruct us in our life in Christ over the rest of the Trinity season. “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts,” as Peter will tell us.

The emphasis on the doctrine of our abiding in God and God in us is sanctification. The pageant of justifying grace in what Christ has done for us from Advent through to Trinity Sunday now gives over to the qualities of its realization in us, the pageant of sanctifying grace which belongs to our life in Christ. The Gospels illustrate the meaning of the doctrine or teaching and in often vivid ways.

Today’s epistle reading exhorts us to humility as the necessary condition of our being “restored, stablished and strengthened” which the Gospel illustrates in “this parable” which “[Jesus] spake unto them.” Who are they? Well, the motley crew of our wounded and broken humanity! Publicans and sinners, on the one hand, and Pharisees and Scribes, on the other hand. In a way, it embraces the whole range of our humanity. Publicans here refer to tax-collectors who are linked to the more general aspect of our humanity as sinners. The Pharisees and Scribes, the religious leaders and authorities in the Jewish world with their different approaches to the law, murmur against Jesus. Why? Because the Publicans and sinners “drew near … for to hear him.” The context is again the ways in which the human community is divided against itself and in particular against others; the Pharisees and Scribes against the publicans and sinners. But even more, there is the reality of our opposition to God.

The positive lies in the drawing near of the publicans and sinners to hear Jesus. This suggests the desire of our souls for the teaching of God beyond the divisions and divides in our worldly lives. But the condition is repentance; something which the witness of John the Baptist also highlights “by preaching of repentance.”

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“Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God”

Something of the charity of Christ is at work in our dealings with one another. It is about more though not less than good manners and civility.

This is a central theme in the Trinity season. We participate in what is proclaimed. “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him,” as John says in his 1st Epistle and which becomes the recurring refrain of the Trinity season. There is a necessary, inescapable and intimate relation between the making known of God in Jesus Christ and the form of our life in Christ. In today’s Epistle, John drives home a very hard lesson that follows from that understanding. It is about our love towards those towards whom we may feel anything but love and affection, kindliness and concern. There may be things about our brother or sister (let’s not be gender exclusive!) that are quite unlovely, even hateful.

What, then, are we called to love in those whom, quite frankly, we can’t stand? Simply this, we honour their being made in the image of God, howsoever much that image has been obscured, denied and derided, howsoever much we ourselves may be confused and deluded in our judgment. This provokes the equally salutary thought. Our awareness of our judgmentalism leads to self-judgment. Yet that, too, can be quite destructive; self-condemnation easily leads to despair. But here is the strong counter: “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” In every way, we are being encouraged, if not actually catapulted into the mystery of God which we have been privileged to hear and receive. This is the astounding teaching: we are more though not less than our thoughts and actions. To be catapulted into the mystery of God is to know that we are loved and known in God; a check upon our own presumption.

It belongs to the joy of the Trinity season to place us in the intimacy of the Blessed Trinity. Trinity season is about going through the open door or, at the very least, standing on the threshold of that open door of the kingdom of heaven. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, but we don’t always see it, do we? Yet, the realities of the kingdom are here and now, present in our daily lives, before our very eyes. Thus we have a parable about the kingdom told by Jesus: “A certain man made a great supper and bade many.”

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I have called you friends

Elsewhere in Acts, St. Barnabas is called “the son of consolation” or encouragement; a lovely and suggestive image (Acts 4.36). Do we not sometimes find strength and comfort, in short, our consolation, from one another? To be sure. But what, really, is our consolation? The radical message of this Sunday is that it is found simply in our abiding in the dynamic love of God the Blessed Trinity, our abiding in the grace of God. “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain,” Jesus says. The Lesson from Acts locates Barnabas within that sense of ministry, “Who, when he came [to Antioch], and had seen the grace of God, was glad; and exhorted them all that, with purpose of heart, they would cleave unto the Lord” (Acts 11.23). The consolation of Barnabas lies in that exhortation to cleave unto the Lord. It was in Antioch, Luke tells us in his understated way, that “the disciples were first called Christians” (Acts. 11.26).

The Gospel for this feast complements the lessons from John’s first Epistle which belong to the first two Sundays in the early days of the Trinity season about the divine love which commands us to love. The Gospel for the Feast of St. Barnabas follows directly upon one of the greatest Scriptural images of our abiding in the love of God; namely, the idea of the vine and the branches. “I am the vine, ye are the branches,” Jesus says, “abide in me.” It is the last, and to my mind, one of the greatest of the “I am” sayings in John’s Gospel. They illuminate two things: first, Christ as God echoing Exodus, “I Am Who I Am,” and, secondly, the forms of our incorporation into his life by way of a series of intimate metaphors, “bread”, “light”, “door”, “shepherd”, “resurrection”, “way, truth and life”, “vine”.

Yet the most powerful statement about our abiding in the love of God appears in this astounding statement where Jesus says “ye are my friends.” Somehow in Christ we are made the friends of God and so, too, friends of one another.

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