Category: Sermons

“Charity never faileth”

“Love bade me welcome”. So begins George Herbert’s poem, “Love (III),” which concludes a wonderful collocation of poems known as The Temple. They are poems that continue to attract across the spectrum of ecclesial identities. As the Puritan theologian, Richard Baxter notes, “Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth a God, and whose business in the world is most with God. Heart-work and heaven-work make up his Books.”

Today is Quinquagesima Sunday, commonly known as ‘Love Sunday;’ in part because of Paul’s powerful hymn to love from 1st Corinthians 13, and, in part because of the Gospel story. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. Like Herbert’s poem, it is an invitation to love. The journey is the pilgrimage of love. Love is God.

This challenges many of our assumptions about love as something personal, emotional, sexual, and psychological; in short, our all too human loves are incomplete. What Paul sets before us is Divine Love, the love which seeks the perfection of our human loves by gathering us into the life of God himself. It is very much about a kind of wisdom in love, about the divine knowing and loving which is greater than the partial, fickle and limited forms of our human loves and our human knowing. We “see in a glass darkly.” Even more, we are meant to see ourselves in the “certain blind man” sitting by the way-side near Jericho, itself the image of the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem, the image of the heavenly city.

Without charity, we are nothing, and, as the Collect says, all our works without charity are “nothing worth,” drawing upon the language of the Epistle. Charity is the Englishing of one of the several words for love in Latin, namely, caritas, itself the Latinising of one of the several words for love in Greek, namely, agape. Charity means more though not less than the idea of providing for the poor and needy. The point is that through the recognition of the limitations of our human loves we are awakened to the Divine love which seeks our good in the motions of the Goodness of God himself.

In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted,
Nor tender feelings to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone. (Sonnet # 141)

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“Now the parable is this”

Not just a parable but the explanation of the parable! We are often as not, at least if we are honest about ourselves, much like the disciples, asking in our hearts, “what might this parable be?” Yet here on this Sexagesima Sunday we are given a parable and its meaning. Jesus is didaskalos, the teacher and the substance of the teaching. “The seed is the word of God”, and he is the logos, the Word and Son of the Father opening out to us a way of thinking about our lives in pilgrimage.

The imagery is down to earth; it is agricultural. It has very much to do with the idea of cultivation in terms of the question ‘what kind of ground are we?’ That is the challenge for us. It demands a kind of self-examination, a metanoia, which means at once repentance and a thinking upon what has been revealed, literally, ‘a thinking after’. Constantly we are being challenged to call to mind, to think after or upon the things of God. What this parable and its interpretation provides belongs to the radical nature of our lives as spiritual and intellectual beings who are embodied and embedded in the particularities of cultures and places. It is a strong message to us about who we are and how we act in the cultures and places of our lives. It is an illusion to think that we are utterly independent and free from the restraints and features of our world and age; but nor are we simply determined or condemned to a social, economic, political and ideologically driven world. Unless we ourselves choose to be. So here is a parable and its interpretation which perhaps can help us to better understand ourselves as the children of God and to our growing up in the truth of God’s Word.

We are the ground upon which God’s Word, like a seed is sown, and sown for a purpose and one which requires something from us; the cultivation of that word within us and in our lives with one another.

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“Go ye also into the vineyard”

With the ‘Gesima Sundays’ we are turned to the dust and ground of creation, quite literally, it seems, even if frozen and covered with ice and swirling snow. The Latin term gesima as in Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima belongs to pre-Lent; they already anticipate the quadragesima, the forty days of Lent excluding Sundays. The ‘Gesima Sundays’ recall different patterns historically about the numbering of the forty days of Lent in terms of not just excluding Sundays but other days which also marked a break from the fast of Lent. Septuagesima refers to the week of the seventieth day before Easter; Sexagesima, the week of the sixtieth day, and Quinquagesima, the week of the fiftieth day. Thus they orient us towards Holy Week and Easter.

But they do so in a preparatory way by providing a kind of treatise on moral life in terms of the classical virtues as transformed by the theological virtues, principally, charity or love. Temperance and justice are set before us today, then courage and prudence, on Sexagesima Sunday and, then, on Quinquagesima Sunday, we are launched into the journey of Lent as the pilgrimage of Love by way of the theological virtues highlighted most profoundly by Paul in his great hymn of love. The pilgrimage of our souls to God requires illumination, purgation and union or perfection. These ‘Gesima’ Sundays belong to that journey.

Just as Candlemas marks the transition from Christmas to Easter, so these Sundays mark a transition by adding to the Epiphany theme of illumination the themes of purgation and perfection or union that ultimately belong to the disciplines of Lent. But on all three Sundays, we are turned to the ground of our lives, first, in the parable of the labourers in the vineyard of creation; secondly, in the parable of the sower and the seed in its question about what kind of ground are we? and, thirdly, in the idea of going up to Jerusalem understood as the meaning of our lives in spiritual pilgrimage, a going up with Jesus in terms of the teaching or illumination about the end and purpose of our lives, the teaching about the purgation of all that belongs to the sinfulness of our lives, and the teaching about what belongs to our perfection, namely, our being with Christ in and through the drama of his Passion. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says.

What is wonderful about today’s readings is that they are really confessional. Paul is speaking about temperance or self-mastery of the things of the body and the need for self-control but with an awareness of the danger of hypocrisy – saying one thing and doing the exact opposite. Hypocrisy casts a wide net in which we are all entangled. This is a reminder of the imperfection and incompleteness of our own lives that should put a check on the forms of self-righteous judgmentalism so prevalent in our world and in which we are all complicit in some way or another. Deploring the problem of climate change and pointing fingers of blame at others, for instance, while remaining beholden to our devices in their massive consumption of energy and to our reliance and sense of entitlement about air travel, to take but two instances.

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“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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