Category: Sermons

“I am the vine, ye are the branches”

One cannot think about St. Matthias without thinking about Judas and the betrayals of our own hearts. He is the disciple chosen by lot and by prayer to take the place of “the traitor Judas,” as the Collect says, and so to be of the number of the twelve Apostles. Yet this is a real blessing for it opens us out to the grace of God which is greater than our hearts of betrayal. Out of Judas’ betrayal comes Matthias’ faithfulness.

All we know is about his being chosen as the lesson from Acts tells us. About his ministry and personality, we know nothing. That is in keeping with the Scriptures as a whole which does not cater very much to our modern inclinations towards psychological and sociological assessments of human character, not to mention the gossip that goes viral on social media as a result. In contrast, we are given a theological account and one which complements the inward journey of the soul in Lent. The theme of betrayal goes to the heart of human sin; our betrayal of God and ourselves, the betrayal of love, as Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine helps us to understand.

The theology that we confront here is the theology of substitution, the theology of atonement as belonging to the logic of redemption. Matthias takes the place of Judas. Why does he have to be replaced? Judas betrayed Christ and out of remorse killed himself. Why not just carry on sans Judas? Because of a larger consideration that swirls around the number twelve. The twelve apostles look back to the twelve tribes of Israel and ahead to the Apostolic foundation of the Church. We are part of something more and greater than ourselves, namely, the community of redeemed sinners in the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.”

Peter’s address to the disciples and Mary happens in the same Upper Room where at the Last Supper Jesus spoke of his betrayal by one of the disciples. Peter here quotes a verse from Psalm 69 and from Psalm 109, (verses which unfortunately and rather perversely are omitted from our 1962 Prayer Book), that speak directly to the desolation of Judas’ betrayal, on the one hand, and to the idea of another taking up his office, his episcopé, on the other hand. He mandates a feature of apostolicity, namely, choosing one from among those “which have companied with us” during the time of Jesus’s ministry, one who is to be “ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection.” Apostolic ministry is grounded in Apostolic witness and doctrine.

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“Forty years long was I grieved with that generation and said. “It is a people that do err in their hearts, for they have not known my ways” (Ps. 95, Venite)

The words of the Venite allude to the forty days of Lent in scriptural terms. Theologically, it raises the question about God grieving but identifies that rather anthropomorphic idea with our hearts and minds. What is the cause of this apparent ‘divine’ grief? It is captured in the previous two verses. “Today, O that ye would hear his voice: ‘Harden not your hearts as in the Provocation, as in the day of Temptation in the wilderness; when your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works’.”

Wilderness, temptation, grieving. These are all interconnected. “Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” John Hackett’s formidable, exhaustive, and comprehensive 17th c. treatise of 21 sermons on “Christ’s Tentation”[sic] begins with the observation that the purpose of his going into the wilderness was not to fast but to be tempted; the fasting was secondary, just as Moses’ fasting for forty days on Mount Horeb was not an end in itself but for the purpose of receiving the Law.

What do we understand by wilderness? It is an ambiguous concept for ancients and for moderns. The wilderness can be a place of fearfulness and uncertainty, of chaos, as in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, where it is not just the fear of the unknown but the fear of the unknowable. For others the wilderness is a place of pure nature, unsullied by human activity, a notion, perhaps, best seen in the 20th century phenomenon of national parks, and now, the idea of wilderness sanctuaries where human intervention is held to a minimum or even denied. There is, too, the idea of the wilderness as a place of sanctuary and escape; wilderness as a kind of paradise away from the wilderness of the urban jungle.

In short, the wilderness as barren and desolate, empty and dangerous; the wilderness as a place of solitude; the wilderness of nature; the wilderness of man; the wilderness within; the wilderness without; the urban wilderness of inner city life; the suburban wilderness of empty boredom; the wilderness as an image of purposelessness, aimlessness, and of violence born out of that sense of meaninglessness; thus, the wilderness as an image of man’s destructiveness of himself and our world. Yet, in the story that begins the journey of Lent, there is another idea, the idea of the wilderness as the place of learning and understanding, the place of testing.

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“Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”

John Donne’s sonnet serves as a commentary on this verse from Psalm 51. “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you/ As yet but knock, breath, shine, and seeke to mend;/ That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend/ Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.”

The sonnet’s extravagant imagery, unlikely as it might seem, helps us to take Ash Wednesday seriously in the sense of our extreme separation from God, on the one hand, and the desire for restoration and renewal, on the other hand. Both belong to the project of Lent and to the dynamic of love, “love divine, all loves excelling,” as finishing, perfecting, and renewing our human loves and lives. In another poem, The Good Night, part of an epithalamion, a poem celebrating marriage, Donne notes that “fire ever doth aspire,/ And makes all like it self, turns all to fire,/ But ends in ashes,” only to note about the newly-weds that this is that “which these cannot do”. Ashes are not the end of love. Dust and ashes on this day mark the beginning of Lent as the pilgrimage of love renewing and restoring or setting in order our disordered selves.

That love is the divine love which, as Donne suggests, we seek in order to be made new. Nothing else will do. Our returning to the Lord, our God, with all our heart, as the prophet Joel exhorts us, is only possible through God turning us back to himself from whom we have turned away. Donne’s sonnet meditates on the radical meaning of what that turning means for us. It means being made new.

He asks God as Trinity to “batter” him, an image of violence and force. He suggests that something more extreme is necessary for our good beyond the milder, more gentle biblical images of piety about God “knocking” on the door of our hearts, “breathing” his spirit upon us, “shining” down benevolently upon us, and “seeking to mend” us. Donne says this is not enough. “That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.” The alliteration of the ‘b’ sound in batter, bend, break, blow, burn reinforce these images of force. Overall, the poem makes the necessary but forceful point that God has to break us to make us. Yet the imagery of violence which is maintained throughout the sonnet really reflects the violence of sin and evil in all that opposes God, in the devil and us, that results in the violence that God suffers on the Cross for us.

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“If I have not charity, I am nothing”

“Love bade me welcome,: yet my soul drew back,/ Guiltie of dust and sinne,/ But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack/ From my first entrance in,/Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/If I lack’d any thing”. Love (III)

So begins the last poem in George Herbert’s remarkable set of poems, The Temple, published in 1633, the year of his death, by his friend Nicholas Ferrar, later of ‘Little Gidding’ fame, during what Helen Gardener calls “the great watershed of the Civil War” in England. Herbert’s poems offer, I think, a kind of English poetic summa of what has come to be called classical Anglicanism and provide a fitting complement and commentary on its embodiment in The Book of Common Prayer, the essence of classical Anglicanism, as it were.

“Love bade me welcome” Welcome to what? To the kingdom of heaven, to the heavenly banquet or marriage feast in the language of the parables of the Gospels and to the form of such things eschatalogical as participated in by way of the Eucharist. The phrase speaks to the beginning and end of the pilgrimage of the soul and thus to the readings for Quinquagesima Sunday. Love invites us to love.

Love is in the air! Or was that just yesterday with Valentine’s Day? What is that? At once the commemoration of an obscure Bishop and Martyr (maybe two or three!), bracketed in the Prayer Book calendar, without any date, thus suggesting that the commemoration belongs mostly to legend and story (probably owing to Chaucer’s satire of courtly life in his bird book, The Parlement of Fowls), and yet it has become a secular and commercial extravaganza of the erotic, the romantic, and the emotional bound up with chocolate, lingerie, flowers, and lots of little red heart-shaped images. Is love then just something sensual and sentimental?

It was the great insight of Plato to use one of the four Greek words for love in his Symposium, namely, eros. Yet he shows that it is more than simply about attraction to the beautiful in terms of bodies. Through the wisdom of Diotima, whom Socrates says taught him everything that he knows about love – something about which in a rather un-Socratic way he actually claims to know! She has initiated him in the mysteries of love understood as an ascent from the beauty of bodies, to the beauty of souls, to the beauty of the mind and beautiful discourses, and, ultimately, to the form of beauty itself; in short to the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘good’ that is in all things. Eros, she suggests, is “the passionate desire to know” in the journey of the soul to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, a journey up the ladder of love. This is a parallel to going up the divided line in Plato’s Republic, climbing up out of the cave, the ladder of being, we might say, but without negating the realm of images or shadows and of physical things, in the realm of the visible, and of mathematical concepts and the intelligible forms of all things, in the realm of the intellectual. But this doesn’t mean leaving behind the lower things in the ascent to the higher.

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This homily, preached by Fr. David Curry at an ecumenical service in 1999, offers an extended and charitable view about the common mind of the Church in and through the churches.  He recently sent this out to the discussion group about the concept of the consensus fidelium, and now we post it here.

“That they all may be one” (John 17.21)

“That they all may be one” is the prayer of the Son to the Father. The force of that prayer derives entirely from his being with us in the substance of our humanity. He is “the Word made flesh who dwelt among us”. His prayer expresses something of the purpose of his being with us. He seeks our “atonement”, our ‘at-one-ment’, that is to say, our being at one through our being with him in his being with the Father.

It was the poet and preacher John Donne who observed, in his magisterial Christmas sermon at the beginning of his ministry at St. Paul’s, London in 1621, that the “wholle Gospell [of John] is comprehended in the beginning thereof” and that “in this first chapter is contracted all that which is extensively spread…through the whole Booke. For here is … the Foundation of all, the Divinitie of Christ”. It was the burden of his sermon to show that Word, Son, and Light were more than mere metaphors; they belong “essentially and personally”, “truly and properly” to his divine identity, to his being one with the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. His being with us is the condition of our being one. We can only be one through him, through his being with us in his essential identity as the Word and Son of the Father.

This is the burden of the Church’s proclamation. What is proclaimed to the whole world is received for the whole world; and it creates a new world, as it were. That new world is the Church Oecumenical, the Church Universal (οικυηεναι), which is shaped fundamentally and essentially by what has been given to be proclaimed.

The Church, in some sense, is that whole new world, not the global village of cosmic orphans, mind you, but the whole world as the household of faith, defined by what has been received and by what is given to be proclaimed. The Church is not and cannot be a closed door society. The Church is open to the world, not to be overrun by its follies and concerns, noble or otherwise, to be sure, but to proclaim the world’s redemption in Christ, to set love in order and to be the place where the world is at peace with God in his reconciling love for the world. The Church is not a closed door society because, first and foremost, the Church exists to be open to God in the truth of his revelation, to be the place where God dwells with us, where his Word is preached and his Sacraments are celebrated, where his Praises are sung, where Prayers are offered in his Name; the place where our prayers find their place in his prayer.

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“The seed is the word of God”

The ‘gesima’ Sundays belong to the Lenten pilgrimage of our souls to the source and end of our lives in Christ. The readings for Septuagesima and Sexagesima complement one another in the metaphors and images about the nature of our lives in faith. They are all about the nature of our labours and activities in relation to the free gift of God’s grace and love. The kingdom of heaven is likened to a vineyard in the Gospel for Septuagesima and that agricultural image is further developed in today’s Sexagesima Gospel with the parable about the sower and the seed.

Such images concern the relation of human labour with the natural order of creation but extend that labour to ethical and spiritual matters. But more than just the parable itself in today’s Gospel, we have the unpacking of its meaning, the explication of the sign and the thing signified, as it were. If we are really serious about the challenge of living in the word proclaimed and celebrated in our liturgy then we have to pay close attention to the way in which ideas are made known to us so as to live in us. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear,” Jesus tells us at the conclusion of the parable. That is the challenge for us. Contrary to popular belief, the parables of Jesus are not all that simple and easy to grasp. They have to be interpreted in order for us to enter into their meaning. It requires learning how to think our way into the images and metaphors and to begin to appreciate their radical power and vitality.

Life is in the seed as a kind of potency towards its actualization in the fruit. Life, in all its rich diversity, is something given but for it to come to fruition something is required by all living things. And so, too, for us as human beings. We have to work with the gift of life that is given to us in order for that life to come to fruition in us. The lovely metaphor of the seed as the word of God is complemented by the wonderful and humbling metaphor of our humanity as the ground in which the seed is planted and grows. Something is required of us in working with the grace of the gift of life and the gift of light, of illumination by grace. The ‘gesima’ Sundays belong to the interplay of the classical virtues of temperance, courage, prudence, and justice with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity which transform all of the virtues into forms of love.

Those who strive for mastery have to be temperate in all things, as the Epistle for Septuagesima shows in pursuit of an “incorruptible crown” in contrast to the passing and “corruptible” crowns or goods of this world. We labour in the vineyard whether long or short but receive “whatsoever is right” or just from the standpoint of the eternal justice of God whose will is not constrained to our expectations and thoughts about what we think we deserve and want. In other words, as today’s Collect says, we “put not our trust in any thing that we do.” It is not us in our boastings about ourselves but the working of God’s grace in us, as Paul makes quite clear in today’s Epistle.

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“A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel”

I don’t know which I find more disconcerting, the question “Can AI help us find God?” or the observation that occasioned the question, namely, a study claiming that “a majority of sermons in Christian churches are likely co-written with AI” (The Free Press, Jan. 28, 2026). Not mine. The idea that “AI knows more about the Bible than most human specialists” is philosophically mistaken; at best, AI is a tool for information gathering and one which is entirely dependent on what is digitally available, but information or data is not knowledge. AI knows nothing. There is no knower, thus to outsource one’s own thinking in having AI write a homily, is to my mind, sad, unethical, and undermines one’s own humanity.

Knowledge should be shared, to be sure, but in a transparent and open fashion. Sermons are about our engagement together with the Scriptures, wrestling with the understanding of heart and mind about spiritual matters which cannot be reduced to a technique or technological device. The question “Can AI help us find God?” reveals a profound spiritual problem emphasized over and over again in the Scriptures. It is simply a form of idolatry against which there is no end of denunciations in the various books of the Scriptures and with great clarity and even humour.

“Shall the ax vaunt itself over him who hews with it, or the saw magnify itself against him who wields it? As if a rod should wield him who lifts it, or as if a staff should lift him who is not wood!” This is but one example from Isaiah (Is. 10. 15) who is fully aware of the problem of confusing the Creator and the created and by extension the tool and the maker of the tool. It is wisdom to realize the age-old problem. We are the makers of the tools or technology which unmake us. It is really about us, about ourselves as knowers negating the very thing that makes us human as spiritual beings who know and love. We are made in the image of God. There is a kind of ontological line that cannot be erased between the Creator and creation, between the maker and the thing made, which all of our technological exuberance overlooks and in folly denies.

There is a wonderful story about the Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse who spent some of his summers in Europe and occasionally went to Anglican Churches in Europe; this was after the internet but before AI. Once he was at a service where he heard a sermon of his own, though unacknowledged by the preacher! At the end of the service, he simply said to the preacher four devastating words: “I am Robert Crouse.” Preachers draw upon other preachers, to be sure, but there is the principle of honouring your sources. And to be sure, in our classical Anglican heritage, there are The Books of Homilies which were required to be read or preached by those who were not licensed to preach themselves. But they weren’t pretending that it was their own work.

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“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind”

I know. You have heard this text already this year, perhaps more than once. Yet it befits, I think, The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul which almost always falls within the Epiphany season as it does today, The 3rd Sunday after Epiphany. Paul’s words from Romans read on The 1st Sunday after Epiphany express an essential feature of Epiphany and of Christian life. This text highlights the radical meaning of Epiphany not just as teaching, not just as education, not just as healing (as signaled in the Gospel for Epiphany 3 – “speak the word only and my servant shall be healed”), but epiphany as conversion.

About the idea of conversion there is no end of difficulties. We have, perhaps, a rather skeptical if not negative view of conversion, particularly as a religious term, as conveying a sense of certainty and self-righteousness: ‘I saw the light’, unlike everyone else, I suppose. Paradoxically, it seems to play into our polarized world of ideologies and advocacy agendas with their competing claims to dominance and power.

We assume that conversion means a radical break from one position to another and thus retains a sense of opposition and conflict of opinions. There is, I think, another and more compelling way to think about conversion that Paul’s story suggests. It involves two moments: first, repudiation, and second, recapitulation. In other words, the apparent dramatic change from one position to another lead to a reappraisal and a recapitulation of the former position, a way of transcending opposed viewpoints but without simply negating them. This is especially the case in the conflict of partial goods each claiming exclusive and total control as if they were absolute.

The story of the Conversion of St. Paul, the so-called ‘Damascus road experience’, is told by Paul three times in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles. In one sense, the story is personal, in another sense, universal. It belongs, I think, to the idea of epiphany as conversion in the sense of the break-through of the understanding. It is about coming to see things in a new and deeper way but that does not happen without a struggle, the struggle of the soul to grasp and understand. In other words, conversion is not a passive event, not something which happens to us arbitrarily, inadvertently, or externally. It happens because of an intense struggle in the soul or mind about how to think what is good and right; an ethical struggle. Hence, conversion is an on-going affair. Conversion in this sense is education, the constant transformation through “the renewing of our minds”, to use Paul’s powerful and insightful phrase.

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“Thou hast kept the good wine until now”

“And the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee,” John tells us. The mother of Jesus was there along with Jesus and his disciples. But “the wine failed”. The mother of Jesus tells Jesus, “They have no wine.” So begins this extraordinary Gospel, one which is loaded with significance and meaning.

The story ends with its very opposite: an abundance of wine and not just your usual plonk, but “the good wine”, and the meaning of the whole event. This is, John tells us, “the beginning of signs” which “Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory”, with the additional result that “his disciples believed on him.”

It is an epiphany, to be sure, but of what? Two things at the very least, namely, who Jesus is and what that means for our humanity. This story concentrates several key theological elements that belong to the radical nature of epiphany. What is manifest is nothing less than the essential divinity of Christ, on the one hand, and what that means for the good of our humanity, on the other hand. “This beginning of signs” happened on “the third day” at a little country wedding in Cana of Galilee, the first miracle or sign that Jesus did: an act or sign that is what it signifies. What is that? Simply the real truth and meaning of all the miracle stories of the Gospel. They signify what God ultimately seeks for our humanity: our good found in and through our social joys. That is not simply of our doing but of God’s doing in the very midst of a humble human setting.

God is our highest good. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics argues that the highest good for our humanity is found in what comes closest to the life of the gods, a life lived in contemplation, a life lived in accord with virtue or reason. But he recognises as well that this highest good – which is in itself too high for us because of the great and impassible gulf between God and man – is rightly attended by other goods, such as pleasure and even usefulness though they rank far below his profound sense that happiness, which he even calls in a few passages, blessedness, is our summum bonum, the highest good, which it behooves us to seek. It is about an ethical orientation towards what is higher and beyond simply ourselves.

The Gospel story manifests for us what this means in the Christian understanding. In the background is the ancient Greek wisdom and teaching of Plato and Aristotle in terms of the ethical: a life lived in accord with wisdom and virtue which requires an understanding of what is good as distinct from what is evil and the idea of acting upon that understanding. But in the background, too, is an ancient Jewish saying, that “without wine there is no joy.” We lack, as both the Jewish saying and the philosophers suggest, the means of our happiness, our blessedness, our joy, our ultimate good.

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“They went up to Jerusalem”

Epiphany marks the transition from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. They are the two centers, as in an ellipse, to use a mathematical and astronomical image, around which the Christian understanding constantly revolves. The mystery of Christmas is thus not simply eclipsed, past and gone with the event of Epiphany. Kepler’s use of the ellipse to explain planetary motion was probably the greater revolution so-called in terms of early modern natural philosophy, far more significant than Copernicus and Galileo. For it broke the dominance of the distinction between terrestrial or rectilinear motion and circular motion, and especially the hold that circular motion had for more than a thousand years. Yet it didn’t mean that the beauty of the idea of circular motion was lost from thought, particularly theological thinking about God and about the journey of our minds to God and with God.

Likewise Bethlehem remains constantly with us in the journey to Jerusalem just as Jerusalem is a constant presence in the Christmas story. The wise men, the Magoi from Anatolia, come to Bethlehem, after all, by way of Jerusalem. With their coming to Bethlehem, Christmas is omni populo, for all people; thus there is the continuation of Christmas, of Bethlehem, with us. The gifts they bring inaugurate the idea of gift-giving at Christmas and inform the essential meaning of Epiphany not just as event but as teaching. The gifts teach and thus belong to the manifestation, the making known of the essential divinity of Jesus Christ; the main theme of the Epiphany season.

The readings on The First Sunday after Epiphany within The Octave of the Epiphany signal this new and different focus that belongs to Epiphany. There is a turn, as Bishop John Cosin (17th c. Durham) puts it, from “His coming in the flesh that was God” to “His being God that was come in the flesh”; a shift in focus and emphasis in our thinking, namely, “to turn ourselves from his humanity below to his divinity above.”

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