Category: Sermons

“Go ye also into the vineyard”

“My beloved had a vineyard”, Isaiah says, in a remarkable passage of triple reflexivity. “Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard”. The prophet sings a song about God’s love, the beloved who in turn loves us. The vineyard of creation is the place of our being loved. How have we responded? “He looked for it to yield grapes but it yielded wild grapes”.

Isaiah captures the human dilemma. We are created in the image of God, as Genesis 1 reminds us in the first lesson at Matins every year on Septuagesima Sunday. We are also made out of the dust of the ground into which God breathes his spirit. In other words, the early chapters of Genesis remind us of two essential things: our connection to every other created thing, from dirt to angels, as it were, and our relation to God in whose image we are made. Genesis 1 places our humanity in the context of the whole order of creation. Creation is about nothing more than a relation to a Creator, which is to say that we are part of an intelligible order of reality. But what is the dilemma which Isaiah highlights? It is our turning away from the order and purpose of creation to pursue our own interests. As with Genesis, that reveals a contradiction within ourselves and with reality. The intelligibility of creation is all about the wisdom of God over against the folly of our humanity.

Yet our folly does not negate the truth of the vineyard, itself an image of creation and of the proper form of engagement with the natural world. But what is the purpose of creation? Lynn White’s 1967 paper, ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis’, claims that it is “the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man”. This has played a major role in blaming Christianity for the environmental and ecological catastrophes of our times. But is that the Christian teaching? He was right to note, as Alistair McGrath observes, the importance of religion in relation to ecology.

There is a long and rich tradition of reflection within the religious and philosophical traditions about our relation to nature. But to suppose that creation exists simply for us really reveals more about the impulses of our utilitarian and technocratic world which attempts to reduce the world to our interests and pursuits, in short, to technological domination. It results in the endless and often thoughtless manipulation of nature and ourselves which destroys both. This is the opposite of what Genesis means by God giving man “dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” which can only mean in the context of Genesis acting in the image of the Dominus, the Lord, in terms of care and respect for the whole created order. To view dominion as license for humans to manipulate and destroy is a serious misreading of the story and one which is profoundly false to Christian theology in its history and in its various forms of reflection on creation and nature.

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“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”

We don’t hear these readings very often. Epiphany season varies in its length along with the Trinity season. The readings for the Fifth and Sixth Sundays after Epiphany do double duty. They were appointed by John Cosin in the 17th century for both these Sundays after Epiphany and for the Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Sundays after Trinity in those years when the date of Easter is early, resulting in the shortening of the Epiphany season and the lengthening of the Trinity season. Cosin’s choices reveal a profound understanding of the logic of the eucharistic readings throughout the course of the church year and, especially, about the connection between the Epiphany season and Trinity season.

One of the benefits of the suspension of services over the past several weeks – over Christmas in its entirety and most of the Epiphany season – has been the opportunity to consider not just the eucharistic readings (Epistles and Gospels) but the readings for Matins. For the last three Sundays we have been reading from the Book of Amos and from John’s Gospel. Such readings contribute to a deeper appreciation of the doctrinal and devotional aspects of the Epiphany season. Accordingly, I want to make reference this morning to the Matins readings along with the eucharistic propers.

This Sunday marks the end of the Epiphany season this year. It ends, we might say, with the sunset blaze of the light of Candlemas, on the one hand, and with a note of reflective judgment, on the other hand. Candlemas marks the transition from the Christmas cycle to the Easter cycle. It belongs both to Epiphany and to the pre-Lenten and Lenten journey of our souls. Such coincidences are providentially wonderful and soul-enriching..

Epiphany season is about the making known of God and about what God wants for us. It centers on the idea of revelation, that there are things God wants us to know and which are revealed to us. That says much about the truth and the dignity of our humanity and about the truth and the mystery of God. God makes himself known to us so that his life can live and move in us. This is Paul’s point: “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”. In a way, it is a kind of summary of the Epiphany teaching.

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“A light to lighten the Gentiles”

Candlemas is the most complex of all the festivals of the Christian year. It is perhaps easy to get lost in the details and find it all a bit confusing. But perhaps with an effort of attention we can begin to make sense of the significance of Candlemas, the more popular and simpler term for this festival. It is the Greek word for this festival, υπαπαντη (hypapante) which captures wonderfully the meeting or coincidence of opposites that Candlemas presents.

Hypapante means meeting. Here, in Luke’s Gospel, is the meeting of the old man Simeon and the infant Christ, the meeting of the old woman Anna and the Christ child, the meeting of Mary and Joseph. It is the meeting of God and man, male and female, old and young, more generally speaking, and the meeting of cultures as well.. And they meet in the temple at Jerusalem. The words of Simeon, echoing Isaiah’s first and second Servant Song, signal the greater meeting of the Old Covenant and the New, of Jew and Gentile. The waiting of Simeon and Anna “for the consolation of Israel” and “for the redemption of Jerusalem” respectively is fulfilled with the coming of the infant Christ and his mother to the Temple.

They come to the Temple for a twofold purpose captured in the Prayer Book title for this mid-winter feast. It is both ‘The Presentation of Christ in the Temple’ and ‘The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin’; in short, a double-barrelled commemoration that concentrates the meeting of God and Man in Jesus Christ.  Simeon’s words about the infant Christ are at the heart of the feast as are his words about Mary. Christ, he says, is “a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel”. But what his being presented means is further signalled in his words to Mary. “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against,” adding parenthetically what that will mean for Mary herself: “(yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also;)”. To what end, we might ask? To which he tells her and us, “that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed”. A “light to lighten”, it seems, awakens us to a kind of self-awareness.

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“Why are ye so fearful?”

Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany.

It is the question for our times. That it comes in response to another question put to Jesus by those in the midst of the storm reveals an even deeper problem. “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” they ask. He arises, rebukes the wind and calms the sea, and then asks, “why are ye so fearful?” and answers with a rhetorical question, a question which provides the answer. “How is it that ye have no faith?”

Care but what kind of care and in what way? Our fear about what exactly? Our lack of faith in whom or what? These are the serious questions of the Gospel that challenge each of us and our contemporary world. My hope is that you would have been here today had there been no winter storm because you care about the care of Christ and his Church, that you would have been here not out of fear but out of faith, the faith that is grounded in love not fear, the faith that knows the deep care of God for our humanity and our world so magnificently signaled in this epiphany story.

Storms and tempests are nothing new, especially for a maritime culture. The storms and tempests of nature are an integral part of an older Canadian sensibility about finding ways to survive and not least how to survive the bleak, mid-winter! Our literature has been more about survival than conquest and more often than not that survival depends upon the reciprocity between those who govern and those who are governed. The juxtaposition of this Gospel story with the passage from Romans reminds us of a profound spiritual teaching. We are to “render to all their dues”, to all who are in power but only in the wisdom of knowing that all power belongs to God and that those who wield power do so only in a delegated sense. They are not omnipotent. The exercise of power by those in authority over us must be grounded in respect and toleration. It must be just and not vengeful. It must be aware of the uncertainties of the finite world and the limits of human justice and human reason. When those things are ignored or forgotten then authority overreaches itself and paradoxically undermines itself. Its claims to care reveal more about themselves and the systems of power with which they surround themselves. It is dominance rather than governance.

A problem about care is shown in this Gospel story. Those caught in a tempest at sea awaken Jesus asleep in the boat, not out of any sense that anything can be done, but to enroll him in their own fatalism and fear of death. He is awakened to be yet another fearful one. Not to be part of the culture of fear is to be an outsider and a threat to the dominating spirit of fear. But such is the culture of death; we are but the walking dead.

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“Overcome evil with good”

Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Third Sunday after Epiphany.

It epitomizes the essential message of the Epiphany in terms of the manifestation of the truth and goodness of God towards and with us in Christ Jesus and the radical meaning and purpose of our humanity as found in that truth and goodness. It is the triumph of the good not by way of opposition and division which is the way of the world but by way of the nature of the goodness of God itself. With God all is good. God overcomes all evil by good. Evil has no power over the essential goodness of God.

It is not an easy lesson, especially in our polarized world of opposition and division, yet it belongs to a central insight by Jew and Gentile alike, in terms of the Gospel, an ethical insight which belongs to the religions and philosophies of the world more generally speaking. It is a kind of epiphany ‘break-through of the understanding’ where we are allowed to look beyond the masques of the present to confront the sad reality of human suffering. Hence the power of the Gospel story which complements and completes the Epistle. It manifests the power of the good over the forms of human evil for both Jew and Gentile; in short, for all. Epiphany is for all. The truth and goodness of God are not confined to the limits of the finite. The infirmities of our humanity are universal as well. They affect us all.

“Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean“, a leper says to Jesus. “Speak the word only”, a centurion says to Jesus. These are epiphanies. They make known an insight into the truth and goodness of God manifest in Jesus which both have grasped. Such epiphanies are the only real antidotes to the miseries of our humanity. They manifest the overcoming of evil with good. Thus the Gospel story marks a further break-through of the understanding. Healing and wholeness are found in the motion of the Word of God towards us, the Word which is both creation and redemption.

This Sunday highlights our response to the creative and redemptive Word of God. As such it points to the resonance of that word in us by faith. The Gospel passage focuses on the remarkable exchange, first, between Jesus and the leper and, then, between Jesus and the centurion who seeks the healing of his servant. There are several points of interest here. First, this is the second healing in the passage, and secondly, in contrast with the first, it is moved by a concern for another and not simply for oneself. The healings are within and beyond Israel; they make manifest the universal principle of the goodness of God for the whole of our humanity. But they do so through the epiphany of prayer both for ourselves and for one another.

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“Mine hour has not yet come”

Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Second Sunday after Epiphany.

It is, as John tells us, the first miracle, the “beginning of signs” which Jesus did “in Cana of Galilee”. It is an epiphany, a manifestation of his glory, the making known of his essential divinity. But as we saw last Sunday, Epiphany also makes known the will and purpose of God for our humanity.

“This beginning of signs” highlights one of the key features of the Epiphany season; the idea of miracles. We are apt to be rather skeptical or even contemptuously dismissive of miracles thinking they negate or contradict the order of nature. It was an ancient debate but for us it is largely seen through one aspect of the legacy of the so-called Enlightenment in its confidence in human reason to the point of denying any other form of knowing, particularly revelation. Thomas Jefferson, for example, influenced by Thomas Paine and other radical figures, took his scissors to the New Testament, cutting out all the miracles of Christ and leaving only a husk of morality. But morals without metaphysics are empty and without meaning, belonging more to the shrill claims of political and social correctness, arbitrary and contentless in our times.

Miracles as signs do not contradict the order of nature but open us out to its underlying principle, God. The God who creates the natural order is, by definition, not constrained by that order. Epiphany seeks to make known the end and purpose of creation for us and for the understanding of our humanity. It counters the idea that the natural and material world accounts for itself in and through the processes of evolution, for example, but avoiding the problem that neither Newton nor Darwin can say what anything is and overlooking the implicit teleology of evolution brought out for instance in Herbert Spencer’s famous addition to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, “the survival of the fittest”. That assumes a telos, an end. Though Darwin cannot say with any epistemological clarity what a species is, there is much to appreciate in the adaptations within species to their environment; it is another thing, a further hypothesis, to assume the development of one species into another. These are just some of the questions but which in no wise take away from the importance of evolutionary theory in its various forms.

Timothy Findley in his marvelous novel, The Wars, relates the very moving discourse between Harris, a young man from Sydney, Nova Scotia, who is dying in a London hospital and the main character, Robert Ross, who is deeply attached to his friend and to the extraordinary things which he says. Harris is fascinated with the ocean and with the sea as the embodiment of all life. Robert says “No. We were always men”, always humans. Harris responds, in a splendid passage of poetic prose about our connection to the sea as the mother of life. “The placenta is a little sea. Our blood is the sea moving in our veins … we are the ocean walking on the land”. Simply wonderful. The point is that both positions are true and both reflect the profound philosophical insight of the creation story in Genesis which connects our humanity to everything else in the created order, on the one hand, but also to the uniqueness of our humanity as made in the image of God, on the other hand.

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“Be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind”

Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Matins & Ante-Communion for the First Sunday after Epiphany.

Epiphany marks at once the culmination of the Christmas mystery in Bethlehem and extends its scope and meaning in wonderful ways. It inaugurates something new in what I like to call the break-out from Bethlehem, the journey not to Bethlehem but from Bethlehem, a journey of the understanding. The Magoi from the East, from Anatolia, as Matthew styles them, present their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, signifying Christ as King, as God, and as Sacrifice. But in the mystery of Bethlehem, they, it seems, do not hang around but “depart into their own country another way: having been “warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod” in Jerusalem which conveys a sense of fear and danger. As T.S. Eliot suggests, in returning to their own countries and kingdoms, they are “no longer at ease”, but have been changed in some way by what they have sought for and seen in the child-Christ at Bethlehem.

Epiphany means manifestation, the making known of the essential divinity of Christ, on the one hand, but also the making known of the divine will and purpose for our humanity, on the other hand. Both aspects are present in the Epiphany story and in the other readings that belong to the Octave of the Epiphany, such as the commemoration of the Baptism of Christ, an explicit manifestation of Christ as the Beloved Son of the Father upon whom the Holy Spirit descends “like a dove”. His baptism by John is for us and signals the divine purpose of Christ’s coming to inaugurate a new relation to God; in him will be the renewing of our lives through our incorporation into Christ’s death and resurrection through our baptisms. Thus his baptism is at once a divine epiphany of the Trinity through the Incarnation and marks the beginning of new life in us, a new life which means as well the mission of the Church in making known to the world the meaning of Christ as the saviour for all, omni populo, hence the readings appointed for the Missionary Work of the Church Overseas.

There the Epistle reading from Romans highlights the concept of Revelation through Scripture and the proclamation of the Word of God through preaching while the Gospel complements it with the divine commission in Matthew to “go” and “make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit;” and “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you”. Word and Sacrament go together and belong to the idea of epiphany. Something is made known to us which is also to be made manifest in us.

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“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass,
which the Lord hath made known unto us.”

Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Second Sunday after Christmas.

The language and images that belong to the Christmas mystery illuminate and instruct. They do not hide from view the grim and dark realities of sin and evil in its variety of forms, yet they signal a profound note of positivity and joy which is largely concentrated in the idea and concept of Bethlehem. It is the place of our abiding in the mystery of Christmas for the space of twelve days. In and through the great cluster, even a confusion of images, Bethlehem has a powerful symbolic force as the place where the pageant of themes belonging to redemption and salvation meet and cohere in a radiancy of joy and awe.

While the Christmas mystery culminates with the coming of the Magi-Kings at Epiphany, the readings for the Sundays after Christmas enrich our understanding of the mystery of Christ’s holy birth. The Epistle reading from Galatians for the Sunday after Christmas Day affirms the reality of the Incarnation in terms of the sending forth of God’s Son, “made of a woman, made under the Law” to redeem and, even more, to adopt us as the sons and heirs of Christ. The Gospel from Matthew unfolds the story of Christ’s birth, highlighting the uncertainty and compassion of Joseph about Mary being “found with child of the Holy Ghost” who in “[thinking] on these things” is instructed by an angel who reveals to him the essential mystery of the birth of a Son whom Joseph shall call Jesus, meaning Saviour. Matthew offers a  further elaboration in parenthesis, quoting Isaiah, that Jesus is “Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us”.

The Second Sunday after Christmas follows upon the Octave Day which commemorates the Circumcision of Christ, a further affirmation of the humanity of Christ, who, as human, is man born of woman. As John Hackett nicely observes, “Christ is man born of woman to redeem both sexes”; it is a kind of testament to the concrete realities of the human condition. “Male and female he created them”. And while that is not everything about what it means to be human, it is not nothing; it is an important affirmation of the embodied nature of our humanity. Those propers, the appointed Collect and readings, are also appointed to be used on this Sunday.

The lesson from Isaiah is especially familiar with the ‘names’ of the child and son who “is born” and “given unto us” upon whom the governance of the world rests. The idea of name here takes us on a deeper meaning recalling the name of God given to Moses at the burning bush; not just the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but “I Am Who I Am” which is further elaborated here in terms of names or titles which signal the divine attributes of power: “Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, the everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace”. They are all terms that contribute to the wonder of the babe of Bethlehem in his symbolic and essential being as God with us and God for us.

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“Take the young child, and his mother, and flee into Egypt”

Fuga in Egyptu, the flight into Egypt, is one of the more intriguing stories of the Christmas mystery and yet belongs to its most disturbing moment, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. Nothing more apocalyptical, it seems, and certainly no story speaks so hauntingly to the hideous spectacles of destruction and violence which belong to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It brings out something of the deeper meaning of the Incarnation as providing the only real counter to human evil and wickedness.

The fuga in Egyptu is a salvation story within the salvation story of human redemption. It looks back to Exodus and to Pharoah’s attempt to control the population of the Hebrews through a policy of infanticide. Out of that story comes the birth of Moses, God’s instrument for the Exodus, the intellectual and spiritual journey of Israel which culminates in the Law. With Matthew, the flight into Egypt portrays Joseph as the instrument of the deliverance of the Holy Family from Herod’s wrath, envy, and fear about a potential rival to his power through a similar policy of infanticide.

That this story should be captured in one of the loveliest of the carols of the season reminds us of how the Christmas story is substantial and serious and not just sentimental. Puer Nobis Nascitur is a fifteenth century carol, though probably of much earlier origins, which emphasizes the sense of Christ’s birth as deliverance from evil in the form of the political. “Came he to a world forlorn, the Lord of every nation”. “Cradled in a stall … with sleepy cows and asses”, the carol suggests that the beasts “could see” what evil of man sees but rejects “that he of all men surpasses”.

Herod then with fear was filled:
‘A prince’, he said, ‘in Jewry!’
All the little boys he killed
At Bethlem in his fury.

The story deepens the theological idea of the Word made flesh coming to a world which “knew him not” and “unto his own who received him not”. It is the attempt to annihilate and destroy the one whose very coming and being as truth and goodness challenges all the pretenses of worldly power. It is an old story and one which sadly recurs over and over again in our world. The Holy Innocents are the nameless victims of the power games of those in authority. Their innocence lies simply in their powerlessness, in their inability to harm. In a way, the feast highlights a sad feature of ‘the city of man’ historically and in the global present; a world of many, many victims who are caught up in the machinations of political economic power and are destroyed. Most of them are unnamed by us.

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“His witness is true”

The intellectual and the sensual are not set in opposition but reconciled in the truth and light of God. Such, we might say, is the witness of John the Evangelist, whose feast day is one of the feasts of Christmas, along with St. Stephen’s Day and Holy Innocents. All three are placed in the Prayer Book with the Christmas season thus inescapably integrated into the doctrine of the Incarnation and its meaning for us in our lives.

With John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and who, in a lovely image of intimacy,  “leaned on his breast” at the last supper, we have love-in-contemplation. But this contemplation is not a flight from creation and the world but the highest form of its redemption. Once again, as the Feast of Thomas at the end of Advent, and with yesterday’s feast of Stephen on the day after Christmas, we see the inseparable connection between Christmas and Easter.

The Epistle for today is from 1 John 1 and acts as a commentary on the great Christmas Gospel from the Prologue of John’s Gospel, itself a commentary and further extension of Genesis 1. “In the beginning God … in the beginning was the Word”, the Word which is God and is προς τον θεον, always towards God, the eternal Word in eternal motion, going forth and returning into the principle of its eternal repose. That Word is Christ incarnate “which was from the beginning”, from the principle, and which “we have heard”, “seen and looked upon”, and “handled”. That Word is “the Word of life”. Such is John’s witness signaled in the Gospel reading today from the last chapter of John’s Gospel which concerns the life of the Church following the Resurrection. His witness to the Resurrection is a further attestation of the Incarnation. The themes are inseparably connected.

In the darkness of nature’s year and in the darkness of the uncertainties and fears of our own world and day, John teaches us “that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” His witness is a profound insight into the radical nature of God as light and life, the twin themes which belong to the pageant of Christmas and Easter and which illuminate, shape, and inform the Christian understanding. It is a reflective, meditative, indeed, contemplative understanding of the mystery of God in himself and with us. That mystery, and this is John’s great witness, transcends and counters any and all forms of gnostic dualism; at once aware of the immensity of God in Christ whose words and deeds “even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written,” (the word is βιβλια, biblia), and yet intimately with us. To anticipate a later creedal statement, the Incarnation is “not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, but by taking of Manhood into God … not by confusion of substance, but by unity of Person” (Athanasian Creed). Such is the legacy of the witness of John in a kind of direct succession of thought. It is revealed in a parentheses: “(for the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us)”. It is something made known which changes how we think about everything.

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