Category: Sermons

“The night is far spent”

The far spent night is an arresting and compelling metaphor. It seems to speak to the unease and uncertainty that belongs to the disorder and disarray of all the institutions of our current culture in the sense of ‘endism’ and collapse. Yet it is really a profound reflection on the fallenness of the human condition in all its limitations and follies, its sins and evils, more generally speaking. To put it in another way, it reminds us that it is always the far spent night. It is a wake-up call to the principle of the knowing and being of things which is always coming to us but which we neglect at our peril. The day is always at hand; the everlasting day of the Lord.

I love Advent not so much because of its anticipation of Christmas, so overblown and coloured over with the sentimental moralism of the 19th century, but in its own integrity as a season and a doctrine. Advent reminds me of an essential feature of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They are all religions of the Word, of the logos. They all draw, in one way or another, upon the intellectual traditions of ancient Greek philosophy which contribute to the distinctive framing of their spiritual understanding.

Advent shows the strong objectivity of God’s Word coming to us as Light and Life. It highlights the primacy of the intellectual and the spiritual which alone redeem the sensual and the material. Advent awakens us to God whose eternal truth and being is always ‘coming towards us’, as it were, in the ways in which we are turned to it. In this sense, Advent, it seems to me, is the counter to the modern “dissociation of intellect and sensibility”, as T.S. Eliot terms it, which belongs to all of our current confusions and contradictions. Such is the falling apart and separation of heart and mind, of body and soul, of our humanity and the natural world, and thus of the brokenness of our institutions. It means a loss of the intellectual and spiritual integration that belongs to the truth of our humanity, a loss of the sense of the co-inherence of all things as proceeding from the co-inherence of the Trinity and the return of all things into unity with God; in short, the co-inherence of our lives with one another as gathered to God.

Advent in its integrity celebrates God’s Word coming in Law and Prophecy through the mediation of the Scriptures; God’s Word coming as Justice and Judgement; God’s Word coming in sacrament and liturgy, in prayer and praise, in acts and deeds of service and sacrifice. These are the motions that define and dignity our humanity. The far spent night is the occasion for our awakening to our lack of awareness about these motions.

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“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

For centuries upon centuries the Gospel read on this Sunday, known by the intriguing name of The Sunday Next Before Advent, was from ‘the Bread of Life discourse’ in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. It is the Johannine account of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness with its distinctive sacramental emphasis. It is familiar to you as the Gospel read on the Fourth Sunday in Lent. In 1959, the revisors of the Canadian Prayer Book changed the reading to what you heard this morning about the disciples of John coming to Jesus and Jesus turning to them and asking them, “what do you seek?” and inviting them to “come and see” and to “follow”.

Both are wonderful readings for this transitional Sunday in the ordered pattern of the Church year. We have come to an end and so to a beginning, a beginning again of the long pageant of redemption in the story of Christ’s Advent and its unfolding through the Incarnation, the Epiphany, his Passion and Death, Resurrection and Ascension, the sending of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, and the culmination of that whole story in the Feast of the Holy and Blessed Trinity. In a way, it is nothing less than running through the Creed, through what we might call the substantial and doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. That in turn becomes the basis for the second half of the Church Year by way of the Trinity season which concerns how the Creed runs through us and incorporates us more fully into the life of God revealed in Christ. In short, there are two movements: one, the motion of justifying grace in the story of Christ’s life, the other, the motions of sanctifying grace in us. This Sunday marks the juxtaposition of both moments.

There is another movement as well in the festivals of the Saints which are about the glorifying righteousness of God realised in the lives of the Saints. They are those who in one way or another have lost their wills and found them again in Christ; his grace is the perfection of their humanity. That pageant of glorifying grace punctuates the other two movements and reaches its climax in the great November feast of All Saints’. Like the harvest, it is about a gathering together of all things into unity, a unity in which we find the real truth and dignity of the diversity of our humanity and of creation itself.

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“Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant,
even as I had pity on thee?”

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.” “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Such are some of the great ethical teachings that belong to the philosophical and religious traditions that once shaped our souls and our worlds. Are we alive to them and to their transformative power? That is the question which is set before us in today’s readings.

The year runs out in a wonderful juxtaposition of the themes of judgement and forgiveness. In the Gospel, the servant whose ears are still ringing with the words of forgiveness refuses to forgive another. In the Epistle, Paul prays “that your love may abound yet more and more in all knowledge and in all judgement … being filled with the fruits of righteousness.” The pageant of the Trinity season is concentrated for us in these readings. These are all the motions of God’s grace towards us but is that grace moving and alive in us?

We come to the near end of the Church year. Next Sunday is the Sunday Next Before Advent. It marks the transition from the pageant of God’s grace which seeks our increase in holiness and virtue, the grace of sanctification, to the pageant of justifying grace in Advent through to Trinity Sunday. We come to an end only to be returned to our beginning. Our end and beginning are one and the same. We end and begin again with the grace of forgiveness. As always the challenge is about what is in our hearts with respect to the ethical teachings which in some sense or another belong to the truth and dignity of our humanity as found in God. The Gospel offers at once a strong warning and great mercy. The warning is all about ignoring the great mercy, the forgiveness which is really beyond number. It is, after all, the infinite quality of God’s grace given to us in the finite conditions of our lives.

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“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

But is God’s word alive in us? Here is the Gospel story of someone who having heard, believed, and having heard again, believed yet again, and all without seeing. And its effects extend to define a community of faith, “himself believed, and his whole house”. “Faith cometh by hearing” has its illustration in this touching scene. But does his Word have its resonance in us?

We meet in the Octave of All Saints, that marvelous festival of spiritual life that reminds us of our homeland, the homeland of heaven in the Communion of Saints, and recalls to us as well the common reality of human mortality in the Solemnity of All Souls. The thread of Christ’s glory runs through the grave of our deaths. Such reflections speak profoundly to the worries and anxieties of our world and day, of our church and world.

They remind us of what so much of our culture and church is often in flight from, namely, the spiritual realities that, properly speaking, define our humanity and shape our souls, our communities, and, of course, our churches. Forget or ignore such things, then there is only the empty barrenness of a world and a church that has despaired of all that makes life worth living, a world and a church that can only experience its own emptiness, what one theologian has called “metaphysical boredom”.

This is the modern disease of secular society which has denied the deepest questions of meaning. But banishing such questions leaves a God-shaped hole in our hearts and our culture into which run a whole plethora of false gods. George Steiner, in a largely forgotten Massey Lecture, called attention to this modern phenomenon as “Nostalgia for the Absolute”, noting that in the place of religion, the ideologies of secular atheism rushed in with such things as Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism and the social anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, all ideologies which have come and gone. They have left in their wake “the incredulity of meta-narratives”, as François Lyotard puts it, a defining feature of what is sometimes called post-modernism.

Yet in the barren emptiness of November we are reminded of those greater spiritual realities, the metaphysical realities, if you will, without which our lives are radically incomplete. In a way, these remembrances are altogether about the resonance of God’s word in human lives. Without them our churches, like our souls, are but “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”, in Shakespeare’s poignant words.

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“And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are … ye”

It is, as Shakespeare suggests, “that time of year … when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” His sonnet (# 73) always reminds me of November and of All Saints. In the barren greyness of the dying of nature’s year, there is a gathering into the fullness of life. We are ultimately to “love that well which thou must leave ere long” but more importantly, perhaps, to have a greater hold of what “makes thy love more strong.” And what is that? Simply the Communion of Saints: our lives as embraced in God’s holy love. It is about our wholeness, our holiness, as found in God.

A vision of our redeemed humanity, All Saints speaks to the world of scattered souls and celebrates instead the gathering into wholeness and blessedness of our fractured and fragmented selves. It speaks to the wholeness of ourselves as found in communion with God and with one another. It is in that sense profoundly counter-culture, a counter precisely to our fractured and fragmented selves in our fractured and fragmented world, the “Unreal City” of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, written one hundred years ago.

Our churches, it seems, are “bare ruin’d choirs” but this is to forget the grace of God who alone makes something out of the empty nothingness of human souls which is the cause of our “bare ruin’d choirs”. Shakespeare, perhaps, had in mind the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century in England and the accompanying sense of a loss of devotion and love. Yet the imagery of the passing away of nature’s year as an analogy to human mortality actually serves to awaken us to that which abides; in short, to the redemption of our humanity and to its abiding in the love of God.

All Saints offers a profound critique to our fragmented world and to our fragmented selves caught in the vortices of the subjective and radically limited categories of indeterminacy about personal identity. We live in a world in which we have turned ourselves into objects. George Bernanos observed that “between those who think that civilization is a victory of man in the struggle against the determinism of things and those who want to make of man a thing among things, there is no possible scheme of reconciliation.” And then, there is Wendell Berry’s remark that “it is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” To be a machine is to be a thing, where even our bodies have become objects, things, to ourselves, as the French philosopher, Michel Henry noted, things that we can manipulate and destroy as we see fit according to the technological means at our whim and fancy.

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“All things are ready”

“All things are ready”, but are we? And for what? What does it mean to be ready for the banquet, for the wedding feast? The readings in the latter part of the Trinity season all have an apocalyptic quality to them. They point us to the end-times, to the idea of judgment, accountability, and responsibility that belong to the nature of our life in Christ. “Walk[ing] circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,” Paul bids us, “redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” No kidding, we might say. Yet it is really all about “understanding what the will of the Lord is” in the face of the evil of our days.

But what, indeed, is the “wedding-garment” without which, it seems, we are not ready; without which, it seems, we are out even when we think we are in; without which, it seems, we shall be “cast into outer darkness” where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”? A rather frightening and sobering spectacle.

The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them, though, no doubt, that raises the larger question about the struggle for the good in our lives. But the point is that the times in which we live cannot be the measure of virtue and character. I have often told students that they are not the victims of Covid. And neither are you. Rather that is simply part of the setting and circumstance in which virtue is shown and character is proved. The question for Christians “at all times and in all places” is whether we will be defined by circumstance or defined by grace. By grace, we mean the highest perfection of human virtue which is God’s work in us, come what may in the world around us. “Wherefore”, St. Paul bids us, “be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.”

In Jesus Christ, the Providence of God is written out for us to read most clearly and most dramatically. He is, we might say, the Mind of Providence, the Word and Son of the Father who “came unto his own and his own received him not.” The parable in today’s gospel is really a parable of the whole Gospel itself. Jesus shows us a picture of our indifference, and even more, our evil to his love, to his good for us. Why? To awaken us to spiritual seriousness. To shake us out of our complacency and our evil and into readiness and preparation: preparation for the eternal banquet of the blessed in communion with God and preparation for the foretaste and participation in that feast now in the banquet of the faithful, the Holy Eucharist.

Here, in this service, we see the outpouring of God’s love for us. What, then, is the wedding-garment? It is nothing less than the charity of God in the sacrifice of Christ. The wedding-garment is Christ Jesus. “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ,” we will hear on the First Sunday of Advent. Yet, even now in these late days of the Trinity season, we are being called to pay serious attention to our life in Christ: being “wise” (Trinity 20), “taking the shield of faith” (Trinity 21), being “partakers of grace” (Trinity 22), knowing that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Trinity 23); these all the point to our end in Christ, that “ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding: that ye might walk worthy of the Lord”, being made “meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light,” (Trinity 24). In other words we are being recalled to our vocation as Saints, wonderfully illustrated for us in the Feast of All Saints in the vision of the Communion of Saints and in the Beatitudes which define our spiritual lives.

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“If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.”

In the gentle softness of October and in the quiet stillness of the ending of nature’s year, we celebrate the completion of the Apostolic foundation of the City of God with the Feast of Saint Simon and Saint Jude. All that can be said has simply to do with their apostleship. They are of the company of “twelve poor men, by Christ anointed,”as a hymn puts it. And after all, what more needs to be said than that? Very little is known about either apart from their apostleship in Christ though they have come to be known traditionally as the patron saints of zealots and of lost causes, respectively. But that only highlights perhaps the essential doctrine of the saints. Another lives in them and so for us. It is all about the sanctifying power of the grace of Christ reflected in those whose lives are hid in Christ and who point us to the nature of our abiding in the grace of God.

That abiding is wonderfully signaled in the lesson from Revelation as belonging to the image of the heavenly city, the city of God. The Collect emphasizes that the Church is built upon nothing less than “the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the head corner-stone” and emphasizes the unity of doctrine as the binding principle that makes us “an holy temple acceptable unto thee.” We abide in the temple and are to be ourselves temples of the Holy Spirit.

What this means is shown in the powerful gospel for their feast which speaks about keeping the commandments of God in love and about the Holy Spirit as the Comforter or Strengthener of our faith who “shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” The Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude completes the festal round of the Apostles and prepares us for the harvest festival of All Saints. What is set before us is the wonder of our co-inherence with God and with one another. God in us and we in him.

Saints Simon and Jude usher us into the glorious celebration of that community of divine love in which we have our abiding, the Feast of All Saints; itself the celebration of “all that dedicated city, dearly loved of God on high.” All our agendas are, after all, but lost causes, all our zeal is but misplaced love apart from our abiding in the love of God which passes human knowing. And as the Gospel makes clear this abiding is our peace and our joy, come what may in the course of this troublous life.

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“Thy sins be forgiven thee”

“Do you think we will ever be forgiven for what we’ve done?” Someone asks about the devastation and carnage of the First World War in Timothy Findley’s The Wars, to which the reply is given: “I doubt we’ll ever be forgiven. All I hope is – they’ll remember we were human beings”. A poignant remark, it suggests that somehow forgiveness is critical to our humanity, something at the very least for which we sense a profound need, especially perhaps when we recognise how we are invariably implicated in the confusions of our world. Our readings today help us to think more deeply about the nature and power of forgiveness.

The forsaking of sins and the forgiveness of sins are two intimately related concepts that speak to the truth of our humanity. Both involve a re-ordering, a re-establishing of the interior life of the soul: the first as directed to the soul’s activity, to what we do; the second, to the soul itself, to who and what we are.

Forgiveness means the actual putting away of all that hinders the soul’s true motion towards the good, towards God; it means the removal of sin. Forsaking means the act of turning away from sin and turning to loving the good, God; it means the pursuit of righteousness. The forgiveness of sins enables the forsaking of sins, the seeking after righteousness through the restoration of righteousness in us. This involves a motion away from sin and a motion towards righteousness. Such motions of the soul constitute repentance. As Jeremy Taylor writes:

“Repentance, of all things in the world, makes the greatest change: it changes things in heaven and earth; for it changes the whole man from sin to grace, from vicious habits to holy customs, from unchaste bodies to angelical souls, from swine to philosophers, from drunkenness to sober counsels”.

“Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you,” Paul bids us. God’s forgiveness must be active in our forgiveness. The forsaking of sins depends radically upon the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins is a divine act – a divine activity accomplished in the flesh of our humanity in Jesus Christ. And Jesus wants us to know this: “that ye may know”. “Repentance makes the greatest change”. It means just that – a change, a change in outlook, a metanoia, a conversion of the mind, a turning around because of having been turned around.

Repentance means a change of heart and a conversion of mind. “Be ye renewed in the spirit of your mind”, writes St. Paul, exhorting the Ephesians to repentance, to the forsaking of sins. “Put off the old manhood … put on the new manhood”. Put away “all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking … with all malice”. Why? For “ye have not so learned Christ.” Repentance means a radical re-ordering of the soul’s activity. But how is this possible? How are our vicious habits to be transformed into holy customs?

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“He had answered them well”

The context is controversy, and quite intense. It always is in matters of spiritual truth. Truth which unites frequently divides; yet it is only through the divisions of our hearts that a deeper unity may sometimes be grasped. Only when our hearts are broken and opened to view may we discover what truly matters, what is truly to be believed and looked for; in short, what belongs to the truth of ourselves. Sometimes it takes controversy to move us beyond our limited and partial perspectives and dogmatic attachments to a larger and more comprehensive understanding, to the truth which is greater than ourselves.

This is to say that we learn through controversy. “Which is the first commandment of all?” Jesus is asked by a member of the literary caste, the scribes. This scribe, about whom Jesus will ultimately say, “thou art not far from the Kingdom of God”, perceived that “[Jesus] had answered them well” in the context of reasoning and disputing with others. Who are they and about what? Well, first, there are “the chief priests and the scribes and the elders” (Mk.11. 27) who challenge his authority about what he is saying. This leads to the parable about the tenants or, as the King James version puts it more accurately, the husbandmen of the vineyard, the farmers (literally, ‘earthworkers’) who are supposed to be taking care of the vineyard for the Lord but instead beat up and kill those sent by the Lord including “his beloved son” (Mk. 12. 1-11). A kind of foreshadowing of Christ’s crucifixion as well as a commentary on Creation and the Fall, they see the parable as being told against themselves and so try to arrest him (Mk. 12. 12).

There are, secondly, “the Pharisees and some of the Herodians” (Mk. 12. 13), a curious coincidence of opposites – the Pharisees as the strict sect of Jewish law in its fullness and separateness from political life, and the Herodians, Jews who collaborated with the Roman authorities. They conspire “to entrap him in his talk” about whether “it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” (Mk. 12. 14), a question about our fundamental loyalties. Jesus replies with the famous “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Mk. 12. 17), thus cutting through the false dichotomy or divide which they both assume to the principle of God himself from whom all authority ultimately derives and which is delegated even to Caesar. As Jesus will say to Caesar’s man, Pilate, at his trial, “thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (Jn.19.11).

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“For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven,
and giveth life unto the world”

Harvest festivals are an ancient and integral feature of the civilizations of the world. They belong to the universal acknowledgment of “the givenness of things” in Marilynne Robinson’s apt phrase. Harvest festivals celebrate in one way or another the nature of our human interaction with the created order and the recognition that the harvest cannot be taken for granted. The harvest is a gift, not a right, not an entitlement.

Harvest festivals belong to human reflection about ourselves in relation to the natural world. We are essentially intellectual and spiritual beings embodied and embedded in cultures. Harvest festivals are one of the ways in which that intellectual and spiritual reality about our humanity shows itself culturally and historically. The great Medieval cathedrals, for instance, often depict the labours of the months as tagged to the signs of the zodiac thus showing the interaction of human labour with the seasons of the year in terms of planting, vine-dressing, and harvesting, especially of grain and grapes; hence the symbolic and sacramental significance of bread and wine.

It might come as a bit of a surprise, then, to discover that there were no provisions for Harvest Thanksgiving services in the classical Books of Common Prayer. Such services were only introduced in 1862 in England. The provisions for “A Form of Thanksgiving for the Blessings of Harvest” only appeared in Anglican Prayer Books in the 20th century. In other words, it is an entirely modern development.

Why? The classical and traditional pattern of the church year by no means ignores the cycles of nature: there is Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation, there are the Ember Days in each of the four seasons, August 1st is Lammas Day or ‘Loaf-Mass day’ which celebrates the first-fruits of the grain harvest. Various prayers and Collects reference the goodness of creation as an expression of the goodness of God. There are prayers ‘For Rain’, and ‘For Fair Weather’, prayers, too, ‘In Time of dearth and famine’. And there are Thanksgiving prayers ‘For Rain’, ‘For Fair Weather’, and ‘For Plenty’ in terms of the “special bounty” of “our land yield[ing] to us her fruits of increase” (BCP, 1662).

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