Category: Sermons

“A Light to lighten the Gentiles”

This is an ancient feast and an ecumenical feast, uniting both east and west. Its full title suggests something of its rich significance. It is a double feast in which we honour both Jesus, our Lord and his Mother Mary, our Lady, in one festival. It is “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin.” For Eastern Christianity, it is known as hypapante, meaning meeting. But its simpler and more usual name is Candlemas. These are all terms and names which contain a host of associations.

Its most basic sense is the remembrance that Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem forty days after his birth to offer the required and ancient sacrifices of purification and presentation of the first born. Luke alone gives us this story. The focus is on the encounter between the Child Jesus and the old man Simeon and the aged Anna; a meeting rich in significance.

The Song of Simeon is the Nunc Dimittis, for instance, which has long been a feature of the Church’s evening sacrifice of prayer and praise. It is, we might say, the Song of Candlemas. It signifies the meeting or the bridge between the old and the new; thus the significance of hypapante or meeting in the Eastern Church.

The meeting signifies something more than just the passing away of the old and the inauguration of something new; it captures the sense of fulfillment. There is the sense that what was looked for is actually more than what was expected.

Simeon and Anna are in the temple at Jerusalem waiting, watching, and hoping. The overarching theme here is that of hope. And what Simeon beholds in Christ is the hope of the Old Testament brought to an intensity of expression, to its fullness of meaning. It marks the inauguration of something new, ultimately, we may say, it is the Church; but this does not mean the eclipse of the old so much as its redemption and the purification of its intention; “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.” This is its ringing theme and song with its emphasis upon universality.

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“Why are ye so fearful?”

Today’s Gospel marks the end of the Epiphany season this year. And it ends, appropriately enough, with an Epiphany of Christ as Pantokrator, the ruler of all. “What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

But the manifestation of Christ as Pantokrator is not some imperious display of power and domination. It is more about divine compassion, a form of love. This sensibility is seen visibly in our icon of Christus Pantokrator. The icon is a Russian copy. The words around the figure written in the Cyrillic script are part of the so-called Comfortable Words in the liturgy. “Come unto me all that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you,” Jesus says. The icon includes the words which immediately follow: “take my yoke upon you, and learn from me”(Mt. 11.29a). For as Jesus says, “I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt. 11. 29b,30).

“For there is no power but of God,” Paul tells us in Romans 13, again the continuation of the readings from Romans 12 that we have had on these Epiphany Sundays. This is all part of the doctrine of the Epiphany, not the narrative. It is all part of what is manifested so that we may learn about God and his will and purpose for our humanity.

The image of Christus Pantokrator seen in relation to this Gospel story counters the great fearfulness of our culture and world. “Master, carest thou not that we should perish”, captures something of the ‘catastrophism’ of our time and the default to a kind of despairing hedonism, a retreat into immediate pleasures and emotions having despaired of thought. But in having despaired of thought, our loves, too, are in disarray and disorder. It is a kind of solipsistic nightmare, the idea that reality is just what we feel in our minds.

This is more than just the fall-out from Covid, the new ‘cancer’ fear word of our times. Catastrophism concerns our world environmentally, economically, politically and socially but in each case there is a kind of philosophical despair borne of the assumption that the good can only be simply something material and physical, pleasing and comforting, hyggelig, as it were. Our catastrophism assumes that now is the end of the world, that the failure of the modern liberal project is the absolute end of nature and our humanity. Will it end with a big bang or a whimper? This was already raised by T.S. Eliot, “this is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper” in his 1925 poem, The Hollow Men.

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“I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel”

Epiphany is commonly said to be the Christmas of the Gentiles. With the coming in of the Magi-Kings, not only is the Christmas scene of Bethlehem completed but it goes global, we might say; it is omni populo, for all people. And while the Feast of Epiphany celebrates the journey of the Magi to Bethlehem, Epiphany as well launches us on the journey of the understanding in what we might call the break-out from Bethlehem, the journey of the soul to God. Thus, on the first two Sundays of Epiphany we find ourselves first in Jerusalem in the Temple with Jesus at the age of twelve and then at Cana of Galilee with Jesus and Mary at the wedding feast miracle of the water made wine.

The teaching of Epiphany as doctrine and not just event has to do with what is made manifest to our humanity through Jesus, at once “God of God” and “Light of Light” but also God with us. The focus is on the essential divinity of Christ albeit revealed through his humanity and in his engagement with us. In that lies the further Epiphany of God’s will and purpose for our humanity. And that is something universal, something for all. That sense of the universality of Christ’s coming is shown today in the Gospel story of a double healing; one within Israel in the healing of the leper, and one outside Israel, as it were, in the healing of the centurion’s servant. The one healing is direct and by word and touch; the other is indirect and by the power and truth of God’s Word alone in Christ.

But the real miracle lies not simply in the healings of the leper and the servant sick of the palsy – a weakness and lack of muscle control – but in the exchange between Jesus and the centurion and, especially, his words of faith that excite such great wonder in Jesus himself. Here Jesus wonders in astonishment at the centurion’s response to his simple statement that “I will come down and heal him”.

The miracle is ‘a miracle of insight’ into the mystery and truth of God who is not and cannot be subject to the constrictions and limits of our finite world but who makes himself known through the world and through us. The centurion, a Roman officer in charge of one hundred soldiers, recognizes that God is not subject to us at the same time as he alludes to the operations of God’s Word by way of an analogy to the passing of directions down the line of military command He recognizes something about the power of God’s Word that transcends the limits of human speech and human customs. “To whom will you liken me”, God says in the evening lesson from Isaiah, “and make me equal, and compare me, that we may be alike?” … “for I am God, and there is no other; I am God and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning … I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it” (Isaiah 46. 5, 9b-10a, 11b). Epiphany makes known what God seeks for the whole of our humanity. The miracle lies in the faith of the centurion, a non-Israelite. “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof; but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed”.

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“There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there”

In some years there can be as few as two Sundays after Epiphany. This means that the stories of Jesus being found in the Temple and the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee are read every year in the liturgy. They show Epiphany as doctrine. This reminds us that the Scriptures are not simply a random collection of narratives and stories from which we might pick and choose whatever catches our fancy or our disdain but are essentially doctrinal; “a doctrinal instrument of salvation” to coin a phrase from Cranmer and Hooker. The Scriptures are seen as having a unity and an order, a purpose. They are understood credally, we might say. The Creeds come out of the Scriptures and return us to the Scriptures with a hermeneutic, a way of interpreting and understanding them.

Epiphany as a concept or idea is very much about the things that are made known to us: God revealing himself and his purpose for our humanity. Jesus, as we heard last week, “must be about [his] Father’s business”. He is both God and Man who reveals to us the things of God through his essential humanity as taken from Mary who, in turn, reveals the essentially Marian character of the Christian Faith and the Church; “keeping all these sayings in her heart”. Thus these two Gospel readings highlight two dialogues between Jesus and Mary that belong to Epiphany as manifestation, a making known.

The wedding feast at Cana of Galilee is unique to John’s Gospel. It is, we are told, the “beginning of signs” in which he “manifested forth his glory” and awakened faith in the disciples. It is an Epiphany of the divinity of Christ and of human redemption; in short, what God seeks for our humanity. It has very much to do with the concept of marriage theologically understood as an image or symbol of the union of God and man in Jesus Christ, “the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his church”, as the Marriage service so aptly puts it just before making explicit reference to this Gospel story about Christ’s “presence, and first miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galilee”.

The exchange between Mary and Jesus brings out the radical nature of this Epiphany. It reveals to us not simply the beginning of a series of miracles or wonders but the end or meaning of all miracles as belonging to the greater miracle of God’s revelation of himself. God seeks the good of our humanity which ultimately has to do with our social joys as found in communion with God and with one another. Most of the miracle stories concern the healing of our humanity wounded and broken by sin and suffering. But not “this beginning of signs”. It sets before us the end or purpose of all the miracles.

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“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds”

The Magi-Kings, having come to Bethlehem, complete the Christmas mystery and launch us into another journey, the journey of the understanding. It is Epiphany, not just as event, but as doctrine. It means manifestation, the idea of the making known, of things coming to light. This speaks to the meaning of ourselves as knowers, as intellectual and spiritual beings, embodied in the particularities of culture and circumstance but not fundamentally defined or limited to such things. Epiphany signals the idea of the true universality of our humanity. We enter into the greater journey of learning, a learning which is entirely about what God wants us to know, and thus about what is, in principle, knowable. We cannot be knowers without a kind of faith that there are things to be known. At issue is our wanting or seeking to know, our desire to learn, what Plato calls the eros, the passionate desire to know.

This is transforming. The true transformation of our humanity happens by our being changed by what we have been given to see. The Magi-Kings, about whom we know next to nothing empirically or factually, are those who teach us that we are more though not less than sensual, material creatures; we are knowers and lovers. They go together, they are inseparable. We are launched on the journey of fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, as Anselm famously put it, echoing Plato and Augustine. This journey belongs to the dignity of our humanity because it is about becoming “partakers of the divine nature”. That is the true transformation of our humanity. We don’t become other or less than what we are; we become who we are in the knowing love of God; knowing even as we are known.

God’s purpose for our humanity is about the truth and perfection of our humanity. It is a true universal over and against the false universals of our times in the endless illusions of the self in its own projects and fantasies; on the one hand, fleeing the determinisms of technocratic and material culture, and, on the other hand, completely beholden to them, lost in the false sense of our own completeness and sense of perfection. Epiphany as feast and doctrine recalls us to the truth of our humanity as grounded in the will and purpose of God. Our seeking what God seeks for us.

It is not found in our conformity to the deceits of the world materially and technologically, but “by the renewing of our minds”. This is the true transformation because it speaks to what is most true about our humanity. That renewing of our minds is not about becoming machines, or thinking like machines, being transformed into bots which serve the interests of technocratic power and domination. Nor is it about a fantasy flight into some imagined view of ourselves in the illusions of liberalism, freed to be whatever we think we want to be. Epiphany teaches us about what transforms us in and through the world and not in a gnostic flight from the world.

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“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass
which the Lord hath made known unto us.”

They are the words of the shepherds to one another after the angels had departed from them into heaven. And so begins the Shepherds’ Christmas as they make their way to Bethlehem and “[find] Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger”. Everything converges on Bethlehem, it seems. Such was the Angels’ Christmas on Christmas morning in the angel’s announcement to the shepherds that “unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord”. It is the occasion of great joy in heaven and on earth. For “suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, good will toward men”.

The Angel’s word launches the shepherds on their journey to Bethlehem. And while Luke tells us that Mary’s first-born son was “laid in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn”, in the Christian imaginary, the stable of Bethlehem, too, is a most crowded scene. And we are drawn to that scene to do like the Angels, like the Shepherds, and like Joseph and Mary; in short to behold and wonder “at those things which were told them by the shepherds”. The lowly shepherds have become, it seems, angelic messengers of the mystery of Christ’s birth. For “when [the shepherds] had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.”

Everything converges on Bethlehem and yet everything is concentrated on the child Christ. Everything circles around the child, the center of wonder and worship. As the great mystical and theological definition of God puts it, “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”. At Christmas that center is the babe of Bethlehem around whom the whole of creation gathers in wonderment and joy. The mystery enfolds us in the divine love which cannot be constrained and contained by us. Rather it envelops us.

“High and low, rich and poor, one with another,” Palestrina’s great Advent Matin Responsory begins. That crowded scene is not a jumble of indiscriminate things. It is not like Holy Week, the madness of crowds. Rather like Pentecost, it opens to us a wonderful vision of creation restored into unity and wholeness. It sets before us the true vision of the universality and unity of our humanity at one with God and with the good order of God’s creation. Matthew’s account of the Nativity will result in the coming in of the Magi-Kings which in some sense completes the tableau of creation restored. Thus both Matthew’s and Luke’s account of Christ’s Nativity complement the great Christmas Gospel from John which centers on “the Word made flesh”.

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“These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth”

“Behold the Lamb of God”, we have heard throughout Advent in the witness of John the Baptist. He highlights the deep truth of the meaning of the One who comes. Christ comes as sacrifice. He is the lamb of God.

Perhaps no part of the Christmas mystery is more disturbing and difficult than the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the third of the Christmas troika of celebrations which serve to deepen our understanding of the Christian mystery of the Incarnation. It bids us contemplate the almost unbelievable and unbearable idea of the slaughter of little children, the innocents of the world, those who are the most vulnerable and utterly unable to harm. Such is their innocence.

But in the story of the flight into Egypt and Herod’s endeavour to seek the young child, Christ, to destroy him, that leads to the mindless slaughter of “all the children that were in Bethlehem”, we see something of the radical meaning of Christmas. It speaks to the hardest and darkest things of our world and day, a world which continues to witness to an horrific extent the deaths of countless little ones, both born and unborn, in the dystopia of our world. The Christmas mystery does not hide the realities of human sin and wickedness which implicates us all in one way or another.

What this feast shows us is that the little ones are not unknown or unloved by God despite our evils and despite the limits of human justice and compassion. This feast, like the Feast of Stephen and the Feast of John the Evangelist, reminds us of the greater depth and meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. It reminds in a most poignant and painful way that suffering and sacrifice are inescapably part of the human condition, but, even more importantly, they are part of the story of human redemption.

Herod’s actions are a retelling of Pharaoh’s attempt to control and annihilate the Hebrew people in Exodus through a policy of infanticide. Infanticide is not unknown in our world and takes different forms. They all involve the privileging of some lives over and against others and often the claims to the complete autonomy of ourselves as agents freed to the pursuit of our own immediate interests even at the expense of the lives of others. In other words, Holy Innocents is a strong indictment of our culture and world too.

But the greater lesson of this disturbing yet necessary Christmas feast is what is seen in the lesson from Revelation. What it reveals to us is that the little ones are in Christ and participate by anticipation in the purpose of Christ’s coming. This is to suggest that we are always more though never less than the things which happen to us, whether they are the things over which we have no control, such as the little ones who are most vulnerable, or the things for which we do bear some responsibility or other. The striking feature of this feast is that nothing falls outside of the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. In other words, “nothing can separate us from the love of God”.

We confront in this feast one of the most difficult and horrific aspects of our humanity and yet we confront as well the idea that these little ones participate in the sacrifice of Christ. The one whom they precede they follow. The love of God in Christ defines us even as it defines them.

“These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth”

Fr. David Curry
Feast of Holy Innocents, Xmas 2022

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“These things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.”

The Feast of St. John the Evangelist belongs to the Christmas mystery and deepens our understanding of the Christmas Gospels about the Word made flesh proclaimed by John himself and about Christ’s nativity conveyed to us by Luke and Matthew. The point of emphasis is on his testimony and by extension on the witness of the Scriptures themselves to the Revelation of God in Christ.

Something great and wonderful is revealed to us. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life”, John states in his 1st Epistle. It is the strongest possible affirmation of the Incarnation and here he signals to us the end or purpose of what is revealed and made known to us: “that your joy may be full”.

And yet, as John himself also reminds us, what is made known of the mystery of God with us in Jesus Christ in no wise captures the fullness of the mystery of God himself. It is an important cautionary note, a recognition that the truth of God is by definition always greater and more than human knowing. We do not possess the truth, the truth possesses us. We are opened out to the inexhaustible mystery of the wonder of God, a mystery which the world cannot contain and possess. “The world itself could not contain the books that should be written”, he says, about the “many other things which Jesus did”.

Yet what has been manifested to us and what he says, “we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you” is “that eternal life, which was with the Father”. It belongs to our fellowship with the fellowship of the Trinity, “that ye also may have fellowship with us”. This is the deep joy of the Christmas mystery: our fellowship with one another in fellowship with God.

This is what the Collect means about our “being enlightened by the doctrine”, the teaching of John. His teaching illuminates the wonder and mystery of Christmas, the wonder and mystery of what is revealed in all of the images that belong to the scenes of Christ’s holy birth. There is more to what we see than what meets the eye. We behold in all of the stories of Christmas nothing less than the Word made flesh. We are enfolded in the mystery of God himself. This is our joy and end, the light of everlasting life.

“These things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.”

Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. John the Evangelist, Xmas 2022

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“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”

The readings for the Feast of Stephen are in stark contrast, it might seem, to the feelings of good will and good cheer associated with Christmas. How strange that the wonder of Christmas night and Christmas morn should be followed by the stoning of Stephen as recorded in Acts and by the dire words of Jesus about “kill[ing] the prophets, and ston[ing] them which are sent unto you”? Images of stark and disturbing violence. How is this good news, we might ask? How to reconcile this with the Christmas messages of peace on earth and good will toward men? And yet, the Gospel insists that these things are really all a blessing.

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”. The three holy days of Christmas illuminate the radical meaning of Christ’s birth. It is not about ignoring and denying the realities of sin and evil, the realities of the cruel suffering inflicted by humans upon humans. Rather what we see is what is proclaimed in carol and song: “Christ was born for this!” Born for what? Born to bring redemption and healing to a broken world, born to suffer and die that we might have life in him.

In a profound sense, St. Stephen’s Day illustrates the meaning of the Christmas anthem from 1st John. “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him”. The love of God means loving your enemies and blessing those that persecute you. Such is the radical nature of divine love which alone transcends the divisions and animosities of our hearts and world in disarray.

Stephen is the proto-martyr, the archetype of Christian witness, not simply by being killed, but by the spirit in him by which he faces death. Another lives in him, we might say, and that other is Christ. Christmas is really about our lives as lived in the love of God; God with us and we with God, we in him and he in us. That sense of co-inherence and mutual indwelling establishes an entirely different perspective on how we think about the darkness and evil of our souls and our world. Stephen’s words deliberately echo Christ’s words on the Cross, the words of forgiveness. Those are the words of love conveyed towards us as sinners which in turn shape our words towards those who seek our harm.

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“Fear not, for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy,
which shall be to all people”

It is really all about what we behold. And what we behold is what has been given to us. “Love is in the nature of a first gift through which all gifts are given,” the great Medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas notes. His words capture something of the wonder and the mystery of the Christian celebration of Christmas but extend as well to the sense of the awesome mystery of life that belongs to the other great religions and philosophies of the world. It is about the awareness of what is greater than ourselves.

One of the passages of Scripture which always catches my imagination at Christmas is from the Wisdom of Solomon. “When all things were in quiet silence and the night was in the midst of her swift course, then thy almighty word leapt down from heaven, from thy royal throne” (Wisdom 18.14-15). It awakens us thoughtfully and prayerfully to the presence of the wisdom of God in the world, an image that counters so much of the hype and busyness of this time of the year in our distracted and now much divided and hostile world. While in its context in Wisdom, “thy almighty word” leaping down from heaven refers to a “stern warrior”, it has become associated with the gentleness of wisdom embodied in the Incarnate Christ at Christmas, the Word made flesh. The gift of God’s own givenness.

This sense of “the givenness of things”, to borrow a phrase from the American novelist and theologian, Marilynne Robinson, is part of the greater wonder and mystery of Christmas, part of the greater wonder and mystery of the wisdom of the ages. The simple givenness of things in which we find wonder and delight stands in contrast to the idea of life as simply that into which we have been thrown, the ‘thrownness’ of things, as it were, in which we find only alienation and despair, a sense of nihilism. It also stands in contrast to the contemporary illusions of the radically autonomous self, freed to its own projects and interests to be whatever it chooses to be regardless of the givenness of things in creation; in short, as if we were self-complete. But this is all a lie and a delusion. It is equally nihilistic.

The simple givenness of things is about life as a gift, about life as light and love. The simple givenness of things is the love through which all other gifts are given.

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