Category: Sermons

“That you may know the love of Christ that passeth knowledge”

We meet on Angel’s wings in Micahelmastide to ponder the mysteries of God’s love and of our lives as embraced in “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”. Michaelmas belongs to a rich tradition of reflection about what it means to be human; in short, it contributes to a form of ‘theological anthropology’, to how we think and understand our humanity as grounded in God. So, too, in today’s readings, we are being reminded in profound ways that we are intellectual and spiritual creatures, creatures whose very being is caught up in the activities of knowing and loving. The interplay of knowledge and love contributes to a more comprehensive and a larger view of our humanity, to the ontology of love rather than merely power.

God’s question to Job is particularly suggestive and arresting. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job. 38. 4, 7). The morning stars and the sons of God are the Angels. They testify to the spiritual and intellectual nature of reality. We are one with the Angels in thinking the things of God in nature and in human affairs; we are together with them in the same house of the spirit, they above stairs and we below stairs, in Mark Frank’s lovely image. Angels, like us, are spiritual and intellectual beings but, unlike us, they are invisible and immaterial realities. We are embodied creatures; they are not. They are the pure thoughts of God in creation and in redemption, non spatial and sempiternal.

God’s question to Job echoes God’s first question to us in the Garden of Eden. “Where are you?” God asks (Gen. 3. 9). Not because he doesn’t know but because his question awakens us to self-consciousness, to the idea of knowing that we know. It is about who we are. Yet our awakening to self-consciousness happens through disobedience and separation, through contradiction and the denial of what we, in some sense, know; in short, through our presumption. ‘Adam, our humanity, is given a commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen. 2.17). The serpent, later identified as Satan, the Devil, the great dragon, asks the very first question of the Scriptures. “Did God say?” (Gen. 3.1) But we know what God said. The serpent is simply an aspect of our being as spiritual and intellectual creatures who seek to know. Such is our nature. Man by nature, Aristotle famously says, desires to know. But in what way? Everything turns on that question.

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“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy?”

God’s question to Job echoes God’s first question in Genesis to our humanity. Where are you? In the Book of Job, the question deepens the metaphysical and spiritual meaning of that first question. They have entirely to do with the world as spiritual and intellectual, as ultimately good and deserving of reverent respect and of ourselves as spiritual creatures who find themselves in a spiritual community. God’s question to Job points us to that community of spiritual creatures: the morning stars and the sons of God are the Angels. We are in the company of angels, something which our liturgy constantly reminds us. “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious name”.

There is more to reality than what meets the eye. It is what belongs to the mind, to intellect and spirit. Michaelmas testifies to the spiritual nature of reality, not as solipsistic and narcissistic nonsense in flight from the world and the body as evil, but as signalling the intellectual and spiritual structure of the world in which we find our truth and being. Thomas Aquinas, the great Angelic Doctor, as he is called, remarks that the Angels move our imaginations and strengthen our understanding. They are an essential aspect of creation as intelligible and good and belong to a long and profound tradition of reflection about the world as in principle knowable, as known and loved by God in the Christian understanding.

The Angels are the pure thoughts of God. To think is to think with the Angels and to think with the Angels at once counters and redeems our limited linear forms of reasoning, ratio, by recalling us to intellectus, to the unity of thought, to the grasp of things as a whole without which the parts fall away into nothingness. God’s question to Job echoing God’s question to us in the garden of Eden calls us to account as intellectual and spiritual beings and to a self-consciousness which recalls us to God and thus to the truth of our humanity as made in the image of God.

This does not deny the reality of suffering and evil. God’s question to us in Eden calls us to account because of our denial of what God had said about not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. By disobeying we learn two great truths, our mortality and ourselves as self-conscious creatures who like God know good and evil. But unlike God, we learn this through separation and negation, through contradiction and so unlike God who knows evil through the good we have to learn the good through the experience of suffering and evil. Yet the vocation to know even as we are known remains. It impells the spiritual journey in which we are in the company of Angels who assist us in our thinking and doing. They bring down to us the thoughts of God and raise us up to the things of God.

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“Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious”

Perhaps no words of Jesus in the Gospels speak more directly to us. We live in a world of fears and anxieties. Angst ‘r us, to borrow from the deeper sense of dread named by Kierkegaard in the 19th century at feeling rudderless and without direction in a world of choices and possibilities, on the one hand, and a world which seems to be falling apart all around us, on the other hand. This sense of ‘endism’ is crippling and paralyzing. But the point, as the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us, is that the problem is not with the world “for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors,” our fears, our anxieties.

It is really all about us, something which the initial chapters of Genesis go to great lengths to remind us. The world as opposed to God is evil but that is not the truth of creation; it is, after all, very good. We turn the world and ourselves as creatures within the good order of creation against God. The problem is with us but God is greater than our folly and confusion, greater than our fears and worries, greater than our sin and folly.

This gospel provides the antidote to our anxieties and fears about our life, about the things that worry us. It offers us a wee bit more than Bobby McFerrin’s famous lyrical song, “Don’t worry, be happy/In every life we have some trouble/ But when you worry you make it double” (1988). Which is true enough. But what Jesus says here is something deeper, something more profound. It speaks exactly to the meaning of Reece’s baptism, itself a reminder to us of our own baptisms, and as such a poignant reminder of the grace and goodness of God.

In our fears and anxieties, we pit the world against ourselves and God. We forget that this is God’s world and that we are his children, his dearly beloved. So much so that God gave his only-begotten son for us. The gospel recalls us to the wondrous pageant of creation and to the truth of ourselves as made in God’s image and called to act out of that image in terms of our care and respect for the created world and for one another. Jesus strongly suggests that we can learn from the birds of the air and from the lilies of the field; in short, from beholding the providence of God at work in nature and in human affairs.

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“One turned back, … giving him thanks”

This Sunday marks a spiritual turn in the progress of the Trinity season, a turn towards thanksgiving as a profound spiritual activity with respect to our life in Christ. This quintessential thanksgiving gospel teaches us that in turning back and giving thanks we are made whole. It is read as we enter explicitly into the second half of the Trinity season which can be as long as twenty-six Sundays or as few as twenty-two depending on the date of Easter which determines the relative length of the Epiphany and Trinity Seasons. And this year the spiritual turn coincides with the autumnal equinox this week, the official beginning of Fall. We have already felt that turn, of course, in the changes of temperature!

This Gospel is also one of the propers appointed to be used “For National Occasions” such as “The Accession of the Reigning Sovereign. The Birthday of the Sovereign. Dominion Day and other occasions of National Thanksgiving” (BCP, p. 616).Thus it serves, perhaps, as a welcome prelude to the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II tomorrow as well as a segue to our thanksgivings to God for the accession of King Charles III.

Such things remind us of the web of interconnections that belong to our lives together in community in terms of the interplay of things sacred and things secular. They all belong under the umbrella of God’s sovereignty and its meaning for us in our lives. But the turn towards thanksgiving is particularly significant and suggestive and acts as a spiritual counter to some of our anxieties about the physical and material world.

Voltaire, the greatest wit of the 18th century Enlightenment, in his satirical novel “Candide”, provides a most concise illustration of the defining themes of the European Enlightenment as well as a compelling critique of its assumptions. The novel takes us more or less literally around the world, “around the world in eighty pages”, as the literary critic, Italo Calvino, nicely notes. At once euro-centric and euro-critical, it reflects something of the nature of the interchange of cultures. The only thing in the entire novel that is not European are humming-birds about which Voltaire has a kind of fascination. They are unique to the Americas and unknown in Europe.

In the novel, the character Candide at one point finds himself in Eldorado, the land of gold, fictionally located in South America. It is an Utopia – an ideal state that is at once a good place and no place. The point is that all utopias in literature and political philosophy function as criticisms of existing political communities. They highlight what should be in the face of what is which is less than satisfactory. Satire is a powerful literary device that points out the injustices and incompleteness of the status quo, of those in power; it calls our attention to problems about which we should not be indifferent while signalling ideas and principles that are greatly valued.

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“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”

The Cross is the meeting place of lovers. That “strange and uncouth thing,” as the poet George Herbert calls it, reveals the incompleteness of our human loves and the all-sufficiency of divine love. It signals what might be called the erotic liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy which is shaped and governed by the Cross, the liturgy of eros redeemed, the liturgy of the redemption of desire. But what does it mean?

I have often been struck with the coincidence of the early beginning of Fall with the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14th) and especially with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks so profoundly and yet so paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise. Invenio crucis.

Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem and her so-called discovery of the Holy Cross in the early fourth century as well as the exposition or “Exaltation” of the supposed true cross in the seventh century. Invenio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.

In the Christian understanding of things, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual life. The cross is the meeting place of such lovers, too.

The true Cross? The actual Cross on which Christ was crucified, as Christians believe? How would one know? Surely it is worthy of the kind of dismissive scorn of an Edward Gibbons to point out that the many relics of the true Cross scattered throughout Europe would make for a veritable “Birnum Wood” of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, a moving forest of crosses. Which is the true one? And how would one know?

It is one thing to accept that there was crucifixion and that Christ was crucified. It is, after all, what we preach, says St. Paul. But it is another thing to say this piece of wood or that piece of wood was the Cross on which he was crucified. We confront the inescapable limits of historical knowing. Yet this feast, rooted and grounded in the subsequent history of the Church, bears witness to the theological significance of the Cross for the understanding of the Christian faith and to the understanding, too, for that matter, of the cultures and worlds that the Cross, it is not too much to say, has shaped, even a post-Christian world.

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“Go, and do thou likewise”

It is not too much to suggest that the remarkable seventy year reign of Queen Elizabeth II bears eloquent testimony to the ethic of compassion set before us in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. She was a uniting figure in the face of the culture of antagonism in the divisions and conflicts of our postmodern world. A Queen who was deeply devoted to her people who in turn were devoted to her, and “knowing whose minister she [was],” as the Collect puts it, Elizabeth sought in her own gracious way the honour and glory of God through her devotion to duty and her compassionate commitment to sacrificial service. We mark her passing with profound gratitude for her witness and life of service and commend her soul to God’s gracious keeping.

In the two hundred and fifty one years of the life of this Parish, first as the Parish of Windsor, and then, and now, as Christ Church, there have been nine monarchs, two of whom were Queens whose combined reigns, the reigns of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II, were the longest, totalling one hundred and thirty four years. The passing of Elizabeth marks the end of an era and the beginning of another under the reign now of her son, Charles III, the tenth monarch in the history of our Parish. Long live the King.

The passing of a monarch gives us reason to reflect upon the significance and nature of sovereignty whether in its republican or monarchical forms, whether diffused among the citizenry or concentrated in the person of the sovereign. As Queen Elizabeth’s long reign reminds us, all sovereign power derives from God, from what is greater than ourselves. When that is forgotten there is only tyranny and abuse. What is forgotten is the relation of mercy and truth and the necessary interplay of wisdom and power, of thought and action, we might say. This is what is set before us today in the Gospel story and its setting.

How do we face the troubling and difficult things of our world and day? Through the renewing of our minds upon the wisdom of the ethical. What is the Good and how does it live in us? It can only be through the opening of our souls and minds to “the fear” or wonder “of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom,” and which, even more, as Job says, “is wisdom” (Job. 28.28). This is equally about our being open to the epekeina of Plato, the Beyond, the Good which is beyond the being and the knowing of things as their ground in which the soul participates even in its suffering; this, too, is the insight of Job and Jesus. It is ancient wisdom. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the death of Enkidu moves Gilgamesh to embark upon the greater journey, the quest for wisdom. These reminders counter the spectre of “endism” which hangs over us and paralyzes us in our contemporary fears and anxieties about our world and one another.

The story of Mary and Martha, the images of contemplation and action respectively, bookends the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Christian ethic of compassion par excellence. We easily overlook how the parable is framed by the quest for wisdom; first, by the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” which is a question about ‘what is the good as something to be done’, and by Jesus’ response. “What is written in the Law? How readest thou?” and, then, at the end by the story of Mary and Martha which immediately follows it in Luke’s Gospel. In between is the parable given as illustration and answer to the cynical and dismissive second question of the Lawyer: “And who is my neighbour?”

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“Ephphatha, that is, Be opened”

It is one of a handful of ‘aramaisms’ in the New Testament, words in Aramaic, a northern semitic dialect used in Syria which became the lingua franca throughout the Near East, and thus common within the Hebrew world, too. In Mark’s Gospel the Greek translation of the Aramaic word is always provided, as it is here. “Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.”

What does it mean to be opened? The literal sense is obvious, it seems, in terms of the healing by Jesus of “one that was deaf and had an impediment in his speech.” His ears are opened to hear and his tongue loosened so that he can speak. Remarkable enough, but is that all there is to it? What does it say to us? “The letter killeth,” after all, as Paul reminds us, “but the spirit giveth life.”

Yet isn’t that really what the healing miracle is all about? “He hath done all things well; he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.” “The spirit giveth life.” Intellectual and spiritual life is conveyed through physical and sacramental means. In other words, in Christ we are opened out to life in its fullness, life with God. “Our sufficiency is from God” and not “of ourselves.” The real miracle is life. God is essential life. Being opened here is about the “trust we have through Christ to Godward”; the opening is the orientation of our lives towards truth and life and light, to what is more than ourselves. It is not about trusting in ourselves for that is to be closed in upon ourselves in our current obsessions about the self and self-image.

This is largely negative because in the culture of outrage and antagonism the self is constructed in contrast to what is other than self in ways that are oppositional. The pronoun wars reveal the inherent ambiguity of third person pronouns which run the risk of turning one another into an object for others and even for oneself thus negating the self as subject. The same thing can be observed with the digital phenomenon of ‘selfies’. A ‘selfie’ is not you; it is only an image, partial and incomplete, a construct of you and sometimes curated by you. Yet you are more than your ‘selfie’ which becomes merely a projection of your self-image of how you want others to see you or, worse, how others want to persuade you about yourself; i.e. manipulate you. This is the toxicity of the social media world which reflects a sense of antagonism towards the world which is seen as fearful and threatening and in turn projects that sense of antagonism onto others. Things go viral in the social media world just like infectious diseases in the material world. Such is the madness of crowds.

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“He that humbleth himself shall be exalted”

Dante, the poet, in the opening canto of the Purgatorio reminds us of the necessary condition of the soul’s journey to the blessedness of God. Cato, the embodiment of the classical virtues and of Roman liberty, and the guardian of the Mountain, directs Virgil to cleanse Dante’s face with the morning dew and to gird him about his waist with a reed. The reed is the humble plant from the humus, the ground. Humility is the necessary condition of the ascent to freedom and blessedness, to our good in the Goodness of God. Purgation is a necessary feature of sanctification.

Humility is the liberating quality without which we remain enslaved in ourselves like the Pharisee who “stood and prayed thus with himself” and thus not with God! He sees himself as better than others whom he despises, “thank[ing God] that [he] is not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this Publican.” It is all about himself in the posture of self-righteousness which is always divisive and judgemental. We are too much with ourselves, to be sure, particularly in the contemporary culture of ressentiment. For we look at one another not in love but in envy and resentment, seeing each other as threatening, as enemy. This is neither freedom nor our good. Such self-obsession and self-righteousness always points fingers at others and never at oneself. Such is the deadly nature of the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, pride. It is the vain and false endeavour to be God, making the self, rather than God, the centre around which everything else revolves. This is the great lie and our current obsession.

The first of the Beatitudes is humility, the counter to pride. “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The poor in spirit are precisely those who have been freed from their self-obsessions; they are not full of themselves and thus are able to see others with respect and love. In a wonderful image, Dante depicts the proud in Purgatory as bowed down under the weight of a great stone so that they contemplate engraved on the ground before them the great examples of humility in the figures of Mary, David, and even the Roman emperor, Trajan, and, on the other hand, behold the great examples of pride which Dante describes in a series of verses that form the acrostic UMO in Italian, meaning Man. Being bowed down is the opposite of being haughty with noses in the air in disdain and indifference towards others.

They pray the Lord’s Prayer as part of their penitence, offering the last petition about being led not into temptation and about being delivered from evil not for themselves but for others. Their purgation is completed with the singing of the first Beatitude, Beati pauperes spiritu, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Thus they have overcome themselves and are freed, freed to God and to the Communion of Saints. Bowed down they are raised up.

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“He beheld the city, and wept over it”

“Jesus wept,” in sorrow for his friend, Lazarus, John tells us in his Gospel (Jn. 11. 35). It is sometimes said to be the shortest verse in the Scriptures and a phrase used colloquially to express a sense of sorrow and regret at something particularly sad and unfortunate. Here Luke, the Church’s spiritual director especially in the Trinity season, tells us about Jesus coming near and beholding the city of Jerusalem and weeping over it. Why does Jesus weep?

“Because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation,” Jesus says. We are ignorant, it seems, “concerning spiritual gifts,” as Paul puts it in the Epistle and thus to the nature of our lives in community and in communion with God and with one another. What follows is equally important: the difficult scene of Christ’s cleansing of the temple, “cast[ing[ out them that sold therein and them that bought,” upbraiding them and us for the misuse of the house of prayer, “mak[ing[ it a den of thieves.” Why? So as to re-establish its proper use. “And he taught daily in the temple.” Prayer and teaching go together; they are about the pilgrimage of our souls into the knowing love of God for us, our itinerarium mentis ad deum, “The Journey of The Mind to God,” in Bonaventure’s famous treatise by that name. “Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,/God’s breath in man returning to his birth,/ the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,” Herbert says in a wonderful collection of images drawn from scripture, from nature, from domestic life, from the exotic and the intimate but ultimately summed up as “something understood.” Prayer is “something understood”.

We know the story of Christ’s cleansing of the Temple because it is set before us in Matthew’s Gospel on the First Sunday of Advent and, of course, on Palm Sunday. But in both it has to do more with the troubling theme of the wrath or anger of Christ. Here it seems, it is more about the sorrow and sadness of Christ. Jesus weeps for us at what we have not learned or for what we have ignored despite its being present to us because God “hath visited, and redeemed his people” (Benedictus, BCP, p.9). We know but do not know.

The concept of visitation here is spiritually significant. It has very much to do with what God wants us to know, with what belongs to the good of our humanity over and against the things which diminish and destroy us. In the providence of God we are meant to be looking for the things of God, to find “the good in everything,” as Shakespeare puts it (As You Like It), “books in the running brooks, sermons in stone;” in short, reading the providence of God in our lives. It means being recalled to who we are in God, to “know even as also [we] are known” (1 Cor. 13.12). That is an essential aspect of our summer journeyings in the land of the Trinity.

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