Category: Sermons

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

It is true, profoundly true. Why then does Jesus respond to the statement with a parable about our excuses? We excuse ourselves from the heavenly banquet by turning to our worldly interests such that “none of those which were bidden shall taste of my supper.” Strong words that highlight the problem of our indifference. We exile ourselves.

Once again, it seems, like the parable of Lazarus and Dives, the rich man, that we have ignored the truth that is before us and negated the calling of our humanity to abide in that truth. Our preoccupations are with ourselves and to the neglect of others more than perhaps we realize. In a way, these readings counter the tendency to think that salvation or human happiness is found in our choices and actions in themselves. We forget that the ground of all human activity is God. The parable Jesus tells is simply about our turning away from the divine life into which we are constantly invited and turning instead to our own concerns apart from God. In a literal sense, it is about turning to the ground of human affairs as if that were everything, a kind of divinizing of ourselves and our doings.

It is not that the places of our lives, the “piece[s] of ground” upon which we live, and our activities with the living creatures of the land, “prov[ing] five yoke of oxen,” and our lives with one another in such things as marriage, symbolizing one of the sanctified states of life in the world, don’t matter. The question is, in what way? Through our daily lives God is readying us for the fullness of life which is found in him with one another. “Come, for all things are now ready.” Such is the banquet of heavenly love in which we participate now sacramentally. The strong teaching is that our liturgy is not simply an add-on, an extra, an option; rather it is a necessity and for no other reason than that it is about our life with God and in God. When we ignore or neglect that we are forgetting the real truth and dignity of our humanity.

We meet in the Octave of the Nativity of John the Baptist. His whole ministry from the moment of his conception in the womb of Elizabeth to his being beheaded by Herod is about one thing: pointing us to Jesus as the one whom we seek and with whom we dwell. He points us to Jesus so that we can be with Jesus. His ministry is a ministry of preparing the way of Christ by the “preaching of repentance.” That is about a constant metanoia, a constant turning of hearts and minds to God in Christ. Repentance is the counter to all our prosaic complacencies and preoccupations; in short our indifference to the things of God. It means taking the love of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ seriously and joyously out of an awareness of our sinfulness.

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“This commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also”

“You have the poor with you always, and whensoever you will you may do them good,” Jesus famously says. But what do we will? It is a disturbing statement. What does it mean? What we will is what we love or desire and what we love or will is inescapably bound up with what we see and know in some sense or other. And what we do or do not do with the poor and with one another belongs to our knowing and loving God. That is the point and the challenge of this day.

The Epistle reading from 1 John 4. 7-21 is a theological tour-de-force. It highlights the mystery of the Trinity for us in our lives together with one another. How? By the necessary interplay of knowing and loving in God and that interplay in turn in our knowing and loving. “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 Jn. 4.8). “God sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him” (1 Jn. 4.9). “Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us; because he hath given us of his Spirit” (1 John 4. 13). Everything is grounded in the mutual indwelling of God as Trinity. We live in the knowing love of God. Our loving is our knowing and vice versa.

The mystery of the Trinity perplexes us, perhaps. We may look askance at it because the images of God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit may seem to be mere metaphors that reflect social and political power structures of our devising. This would assume that we make God in our own image and not the other way around. Yet last Sunday made us think upwards not downwards; that is the true meaning of thinking analogically. Father, Son and Holy Ghost or Spirit are not metaphors; they are the names of God revealed by Jesus which open us to the mystery of God as love. “We have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth (or abideth) in love, dwelleth (or abideth) in God, and God in him” (1 Jn. 4. 16).

This statement governs our thinking and doing especially in the Trinity season. It governs how we see and deal with one another. “This commandment,” John tells us, “have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also” (1 Jn 4. 21). And our “brother” is the other who is inescapably one with us in our common humanity. The brother is the one whom we see and know in some sense or other and whom we are therefore commanded to love. This is a strong ethical imperative, the radical meaning of which is illustrated in the Gospel parable of Dives or the Rich Man, and Lazarus, the poor man.

While the poor man/rich man dichotomy reflects social and economic realities, the paradox of the parable is that it reverses them. The poor man turns out to be rich, and the rich man poor but only because the parable shows that the truth of our humanity is not found simply in matters of material wealth but in how we see and love one another. That turns entirely on our knowing and loving God.

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“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

It is really a dance, the dance of the understanding. It is wonderfully and powerfully expressed in the Athanasian Creed. It is nothing less than the dance of kataphatic and apophatic theology. These are the theological terms for positive and negative theology, the forms of thinking the mystery of God revealed in the witness of the Scriptures to Christ. God is and God is not like anything else. God is, in short, no thing.

Positive theology affirms something of the idea and nature of God by analogy to created things; negative theology recognizes that God is utterly beyond and other, even not other, non aliud. This is the strongest possible counter to the problem of reducing God to any of the forms of human reason, which would make God a construct of our thinking. The dance of the understanding is the circling around the mystery of God as revealed yet revealed for thought. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity”; think of the Trinity in this way of affirmation and negation. This is Thou and this is not Thou. Such is the dance of the understanding.

The Trinity is the central doctrine and teaching of the Christian Faith, but is equally the teaching which provides for and requires a respectful engagement with other philosophical religions. Hegel in the 19th century notes that the doctrine of the Trinity is in some sense adumbrated or shadowed forth in all religions. It is not by accident that the first article of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion is “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity”. The first hymn in our Hymn Book, too, is a hymn to God as Trinity; the tune is called Nicaea after the Creed and Councils that determined the terms of our thinking the Trinity. Our thinking the mystery is our life. We cannot not think the Trinity. But how? Only by entering into what is revealed for our thinking and in the ways in which we have been given to think it.

“A door was opened in heaven,” John in Revelation tells us; a door not a window. One of the so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus is “I am the door” (Jn. 10.7). We go through the door and into the mystery of God revealed in Christ, at once the Son of man “that came down from heaven” and “who is in heaven.” To think this is to be born again, literally born upward into the things of God as signaled in the Gospel story of Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night.

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“He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you”

We get it wrong, I am afraid. Pentecost is not some emotive experiential happening, some happy-clapping affirmation of ourselves in our self-assertions. Just as the Resurrection is not a flight from the world and nature, so too, Pentecost is not the celebration of self-identities.

Pentecost is not the celebration of the diversity of our humanity but its unity-in-diversity as grounded in the life of God. Credally or doctrinally speaking, it marks the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples to become the Apostolic Church. In the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the Holy Ghost” is followed directly by “The Holy Catholic Church” and “The Communion of Saints;” these are strong statements about our life together as shaped and formed by the Spirit of God. This is explicated more fully in the Nicene Creed. The Holy Ghost is “the Lord, The giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, Who spake by the Prophets”; after which comes “I believe One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

These strong statements locate the unity of the human community in the unity of God because the human community has no unity in itself. The Pentecost story is the redemptive retelling of the story of the Tower of Babel. That story, so often misunderstood, is not a just-so story to explain the diversity of tongues and cultures as something evil which assumes that there should be only one language, only one culture, just as in reverse, in our contemporary world, the claim is that an endless and indeterminate diversity of identities is the good. The binary is false. It may be, however, that the levelling nature of our global technocratic world ultimately excites a desire for diversity and difference as a yearning for some sense of what it means to be an individual, a person, but that only raises the questions about the categories of difference and identity and what they mean in terms of our common humanity. Which categories and upon what basis?

The story of the Tower of Babel is really about human presumption and arrogance which results in confusion. Babel means confusion. The confusion arises out of the agendas of dominance and the abuse of power. “Come let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” Such is presumption and arrogance, an attempt to rival God. The divine response is to “confuse their language” which means to return things to a respect for the diversity of tongues which are already God-given out of which we may learn a unity of understanding. Babel confuses the things of God with the vanity of ourselves and our human projects. The confusion is us in our competing assertions for dominance and control of one another.

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“The end of all things is at hand”

The spectre of “endism” hangs over us – an ominous presence of foreboding and despair in our current age. It is an endemic feature of our fragmented world in the sense of the collapse of cultures and institutions that belong to human flourishing and dignity. This is the dominant form of fear that is with us. A deeper fear than the fear of Covid-19, it is the pandemic of fear itself, a fear of death and of the end of the world. “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper” as T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men puts it, though perhaps with both a bang and a whimper, we fear.

One hundred years ago, in 1922, T.S.Eliot wrote The Waste Land, his poem on the wilderness of modernity. Composed of five sections, the first one is entitled The Burial of the Dead, an explicit reference to the Prayer Book Burial Office. It presents a telling image of a world and church in ruins.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree give no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you,
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The images of death and decay are drawn from the poet-prophet of the Exile, Ezekiel, and from Ecclesiastes, the poet-philosopher of the Hebrew Scriptures. Son of man, ben adam, taken from Ezekiel, alludes to our common humanity and to Christ but also to our uncertainties about life and death. “You” – we – “cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images.” That, too, is from Ezekiel: “and your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken” (Ezekiel 6.4). His world, too, was a world of ruin and fragmentation, of loss and exile on Babylon’s strand.

It all seems so dark and ominous, so negative and dystopian. Yet the poem offers more than despair and darkness, more than fear and death, and again as drawn from Scripture and as belonging to the life of the Church in all times and all places. It is found in the idea of “com[ing] in under the shadow of this red rock,” an allusion to Isaiah 32.1-2: “a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment./And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” The images belong to God and his Providence.

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“God is gone up with a merry noise”

There is something truly celebratory and delightful about Ascension Day. It signals a kind of participatory delight in the movements of God. The Ascension marks the culmination of the Resurrection in the homecoming of the Son to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption. His homecoming to the right hand of the Father celebrates our homecoming, the idea that we have a home, a place with God. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world an, and go to the Father,” Jesus says. The meaning of that coming and going is captured in the Ascension of Christ and belongs to the promise of the gift of the Holy Spirit sent by Jesus and sent by the Father in Jesus’ name. Such is the dynamic of spiritual life.

And there is the wonderful sense of a participatory pleasure and joy expressed by the Psalmist (Ps. 47.5). “God is gone up with a merry noise,/ the Lord with the sound of the trumpet.” It is such a strong affirmation of the divine life which is the ground of all life. Not God has gone up but God is gone up! There is no life apart from the essential life of God. And as we have seen, the Resurrection is cosmic in scope and never lets us forget the Passion in all of its witness to the follies of sin and evil. Ascension bids us rejoice in God, in the motions of the Son’s homecoming to the Father which signals our home with God, our life in the life which does not end.

Ascension reminds us of an important feature of Christian spirituality partly in its Anglican expression. Our liturgy, shaped by a number of different traditions but in this case by Calvin, is very much the liturgy of the Ascension, the liturgy of the sursum corda, the lifting up of all things in prayer to the God who has descended and ascended and has gathered all things back to him from whom all things do come. Prayer is about our hearts in ascension. As Augustine wonderfully puts it, we ascend in the ascension of our hearts, ascendimus ascensiones in cordis. But he adds “et cantamus canticum graduum,” we sing a song of ascent, of degrees, of steps up to the wonder of God, the God who ever is.

In prayer and praise we participate in the life of God. Ascension is the strong reminder of the radical nature of prayer. In prayer we participate in the return of all things to the Father through the Son in the Spirit.

This teaching is marvellously expressed in the very building of Christ Church. It embodies the whole motion of prayer, the motion of the ascension. In the lifting up of our hearts, all things are lifted up to God and by God. Such is prayer in its deepest sense.

“God is gone up with a merry noise”

Fr. David Curry
Meditation for Ascension Day, 2022

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“In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world”

Rogation Sunday concentrates wonderfully for us the radical meaning of Christ’s Resurrection. It signals our freedom not from the world but in the world through our being grounded in the mutual love of the Father and the Son. “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father,” Jesus says, capturing in a phrase the essential life of God himself, the life which overcomes all sin and evil, all that opposes the truth of God. Far from being a gnostic flight from the world as if it were evil, it signals the redemption of the world. The Resurrection gives us a way to face the difficult things of our troubled world, a world of tribulations and oppressions, of sufferings and sorrows, a world of fears and hatreds, of divisions and animosities.

These are words, as the disciples seem to begin to grasp, albeit yet in a glass darkly, spoken “plainly” and “no parable”. Jesus in response makes it equally clear that there are and there always will be tribulations in the world. “You shall be scattered every man to his own,” and in reference to his passion, you “shall leave me alone.” Such is the meaning of our betrayals of God; the meaning of our sin is seen in his desolation on the Cross in the terrifying aloneness of his suffering. “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” Nothing captures more fully the meaning of sin, the sense of abandonment because of our having forsaken God. “And yet,” as Jesus says, “I am not alone,” the little conjunction, “yet” highlights his being with the Father and the Father with him. Such is the dynamic of God’s goodness and truth which is by definition greater than the follies of sin and evil. The Resurrection never lets us forget the Passion.

The words of the Cross begin and end with the address of the Son to the Father: “Father, forgive them”; “Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit.” Everything is gathered back to the Father in love. This is the radical meaning of his going forth and return to the Father. This is the victory of love over hatred and fear, over sin and evil. The Resurrection brings out the radical meaning of creation and our lives in the world, a world which is more than tribulation and oppression because it is God’s world. Thus, James bids us “be doers of the word, and not hearers only” because that is the radical truth of our knowing even as we are known in Christ. The Resurrection opens out to us “the perfect law of liberty,” which is our freedom in Christ, a freedom from sin and death. That freedom is grace, the grace that allows us to face the world and ourselves without fear. It gives us the courage to act and engage the world of nature and human affairs.

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