Category: Sermons

Sermons

Sermon for Christmas Eve

“And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,
full of grace and truth”

Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Vespers & Ante-Communion for Christmas Eve

“The poorest and emptiest season in nature [has] become the fullest and richest in grace,” the poet-preacher Lancelot Andrewes remarks. Christmas Eve is a time of gathering, indeed, “the greatest gathering that ever was or will be”. In the Christian imaginary, we are gathered together at Bethlehem, at once “least among the thousands of Judah”, as Micah states, and yet “not the least”, as Matthew counters. The poorest place has “become the fullest and richest in grace” where everything is gathered together and where “everything holds together, everything”, as a contemporary poet, Malcolm Guite remarks for both time and place. “The end of all our exploring”, our seeking and our desiring, as T.S. Eliot suggests “will be to arrive where we started/and know the place for the first time” (Little Gidding). For not only is “here all aright” but, even more, is “here the world’s desire”, as Chesterton’s lovely poem about the Christ-child puts it.

Yet Bethlehem, then and now, must seem a strange and confused place, a place of obscurity and uncertainty. All our Christmas efforts to dress it up are like so much tinsel and wrap that hide its lowliness and insignificance. What a great confusion of images, a virtual menagerie of creatures, a great cluster of improbable things all gathered together!  Bethlehem may but seem the mirror image of our own times of darkness and confusion, of fear and uncertainty, a place and a time where we are more scattered than gathered not just physically but mentally. Paradoxically, there is no mention whatsoever of Bethlehem in the readings for Christmas Eve; only in the hymns, which we are now not allowed to sing, even if the Bishop had not suspended our gathering together, is Bethlehem named, indeed, four times in three of the four hymns intended for use on this night. Yet Bethlehem captures our attention and at once shapes and controls our imagination through the great variety of creche scenes, ranging from the very simple and rustic to the exotic and artistically refined. They all seek to capture the humble scene of Christ’s lowly birth and its greatness.

Tonight’s readings give meaning and coherence to this range and confusion of images. “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not”; “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” These are texts which remind us of the darkness of ourselves and our world, the darkness of ignorance and sin, that belongs to our betrayals of God and one another. And yet, they are essential to the greater gathering in the poorest and emptiest season and in the least of all places. And all because of what these readings tonight signify and hold out to view, namely, the one who is at the center of everything and in whom everything holds together. As Malcolm Guite puts it “everything holds together and coheres,/ Unfolding from the center whence it came./ And now that hidden heart of things appears,/ The first-born of creation takes a name.”

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Advent Programme 2: “My Lord, and my God”

“My Lord, and my God”

The Feast of Thomas closely aligns, at least in the northern hemisphere, with the winter solstice; the shortest day and the darkest night of the year. Its spiritual significance builds on that coincidence with nature to bring us to Christ, the Light and Life of the world, who comes to bring us out of the darkness of doubt and fear. Yet the story of so-called ‘doubting’ Thomas in the Gospel properly belongs to Easter and to the affirmation of the Resurrection, but his day of commemoration belongs to Christmas and thus to the affirmation of the Incarnation, to the bodily reality of Christ without which his suffering, death, and resurrection are illusory and meaningless. What Thomas says to the Risen Christ, who appears to him behind closed doors, “My Lord, and My God”, the Church says at Christmas about the Babe of Bethlehem, “My Lord, and My God”, the Word who is God and Lord made flesh, God with us. It is what we may say devotionally at Communion, too, at the elevation of the host. His words affirm the radical meaning of God’s engagement with our humanity in the intimacy of the body of Christ sacramentally.

The Feast of St. Thomas underscores the profound interconnection and interplay between Christmas and Easter, between Advent and Lent, in the dynamic and dialectic of their relation. John Donne wisely notes about Christ that his “Christmas Day and Good Friday are but the morning and the evening of one and the same day”. Each mystery is inconceivable without the other; they belong to the whole reality of Christ as Lord and God with us.

Thomas is the patron saint of scepticism which is a necessary part of our coming to faith and understanding. We may be apt to have a negative or sceptical view of scepticism and think that it undermines the assurances of belief. But belief that is mere assertion is empty and weak. What Thomas reminds us is the need for our serious engagement with the things of God being made known to us and thus to the questions about our knowing. It belongs, in other words, to the paradigm of fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.

Neil Postman, an American philosopher and educator (d. 2003), argues for the development of a scientific or what he also calls a sceptical outlook as part of modern education and as one of the gifts of the Enlightenment, a period which some Christians often scorn and vilify as undermining or disparaging the Faith. Scepticism belongs instead to the deep quest for wisdom, to the idea of questioning. Quest and questioning go together; it is about the desire to know, something which Aristotle claims belongs to human nature. Without the questioning, we might say, there can be no real knowing. The questioning assumes the faith that things can be known which is not the same thing as saying that we know everything. Instead, it is the presupposition for our knowing.

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Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Advent

“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, and a light unto my path”

We have used this text as the basis of our Advent meditations which reach a kind of crescendo on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. The word of God is prophetically signalled in the witness of John who points us to the greater wonder of the Word with us, the Word as light in the various darknesses of our understanding. “He was not that light”, we will hear on Christmas Eve “but was sent to bear witness of that light”. Word as light has been our advent concern and interest.

Sarah Bakewell, in her wonderful and brilliant treatment of the essaies of Michel de Montaigne (wittily entitled, ‘How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer’), notes at the outset that “the Twenty-First century is full of people who are full of themselves”. A wonderful aperçu, beginning or opening, it strikes me as having a particular resonance and poignancy for our times. In one way, it is nothing new, and, against Bakewell, the interest in the self as a reflection of the other is not new as something invented by the forms of introspection seen in Montaigne. Yet her remark captures an aspect of our contemporary discontent. Beyond Wordsworth’s “the world is too much with us, late and soon”, we have a world full of those who are full of themselves.

Her opening statement provides an opening to our current concerns and difficulties where we are very much concerned about ourselves in ways that paradoxically undermine ourselves. A world that is full of people who are full of themselves is a world full of empty selves or non-selves, at once narcissistic and nihilistic. Today’s Gospel provides an interesting counter to one of the myriad of forms of self-contradiction in our self-obsessed age. It does so through the witness of John, who in response to being asked who he is,  consistently re-orients the question to the one who is greater than he without whom he himself is nothing. This is truly remarkable and without it we can make little sense of the Incarnation.

John is saying that he is nothing in himself. He is saying that he exists for another. Self and other are not pitted against one another in an endless rivalry and animosity. In a way, we are being reminded of the deeper logic of the law in terms of the inseparable qualities of the love of God and the love of neighbour. Even more, we might say with St. Felicity that “another shall be in me who shall suffer for me because I am to suffer for him”, to which the witness of John points us. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”. ‘Another lives in me’ is the counter to our being full of ourselves.

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Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent

“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, / and a light unto my path”

Strange as it may seem our Advent text from the psalms is even more appropriate for the Third Sunday in Advent. The readings for this Sunday highlight two interrelated themes which challenge us in very direct and important ways. First, we are being called to account about our faithfulness, especially the faithfulness of the ministry. Have we been “ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God”? Secondly, we recall the ministry of John the Baptist as attested to by Jesus in a series of repeated questions which underscore his significance and place in the economy of salvation. The questions of Jesus about John the Baptist highlight the darkness of our world and the idea that Advent brings light to our darkness, not the least of which is the uncovering of the things which in human pride and perversity we would like to keep hidden, if not from one another, then from God. Yet the light of Advent is greater than the darkness of the world; a point which finds its fullest expression in the great Christmas Gospel. “The light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehended (or overcame)  it not.”

The Gospel is very much about the witness of Christ to the witness of John. John points us to Jesus while Jesus points us to John. Can anything better be said and suggested than this interplay of the twin themes of repentance and rejoicing?

In our parish teaching programme this Advent, we are focusing on the Advent saints of Andrew and Thomas whose feast days formally complement and, to some extent, frame the Advent season. Without taking away from their symbolic and theological significance, the greater saints of Advent, to whom they would readily defer, are John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Advent mantra, par excellence, is “repent ye for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” To be sure, but that reaches its highest expression in the Angel Gabriel’s salutation to Mary, “hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee”, remembered in the Advent Ember Days this week. And while Mary is “troubled at this saying, cast[ing] in her mind what manner of salutation this should be”, it signals the note of profound joy heard and felt in the ancient introit for this day which, in turn, is the Epistle for the Fourth Sunday in Advent. “Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again, I say, rejoice.” Hence this Sunday is sometimes known as “Gaudete Sunday,” meaning rejoice.

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Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent

“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet,/ and a light unto my path”

Our Advent text is particularly appropriate for this Sunday, sometimes called Bible Sunday in part because of Cranmer’s beautiful Collect which derives from Paul’s strong words about the purpose and nature of scriptural revelation. “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” we are told. As Cranmer and Hooker note “scripture is a doctrinal instrument of salvation”. On this Sunday we contemplate the pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light and judgement which is hope and comfort for us in our lives but only if we will hear and read. That, of course, is Cranmer’s great insight and prayer: “Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” There is something great and powerful to be gained from the Scriptures.

And yet, reading, let alone reading the Scriptures, is one of the challenges and crises of our times. Paradoxically, students read more now than they did a decade ago but their reading is almost entirely digital; not the reading of printed texts which are now a considerable challenge for them. The crisis is about shallow reading at the expense of acquiring the capacities for deep reading. Alberto Manguel in his lecture to the editorial board of the TLS in 1995, subsequently printed as St. Augustine’s Computer, notes the shift in metaphors that belong to the history of the technology of reading. He was speaking and writing at a time when there was a serious worry that digital formats would render books obsolete and therefore journals about books would no longer thrive. And for a time e-books did overtake the sale of printed books but that has shifted back the other way. In other words, things have balanced out because there are benefits to both digital and print reading. It is not a matter of one replacing the other but there are significant differences with respect to the patterns of reading for each even in terms of brain activity.

Our modern metaphors are about browsing, surfing, skimming, scanning. They are all metaphors of the surface in contrast to the older metaphors to which Cranmer alludes in the Collect. “Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” are metaphors that look back to Ezekiel’s eating of the scroll and to the idea of being turned into what you are reading, becoming a living book, as it were. As such books are more than objects. They speak to essential aspects of our humanity. The history of the technology of reading from cuneiform tablets, to papyrus scrolls, to the codex – the book, to Gutenburg’s 15th century revolutionary invention of the printing press, and now to the digital revolution, is all a part of the story of human culture. It belongs to our understanding and to our remembering of who we are and what it means to be human. Consider, for example, the analogy between a page and the human form where we speak of the page as being like a person with a ‘header’, a ‘footer’ and, in between, the body. Shakespeare, about a letter containing bad news, refers to “the paper as the body of my friend and every word in it a gaping wound issuing life-blood” (The Merchant of Venice).

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Advent Programme 1: “Their sound went out into all the earth, and their words unto the end of the world.”

“Their sound went out into all the earth,
and their words unto the end of the world.”

What are we to make of the saints? Where do they fit into the picture of Christian life? And how are we to understand the various commemorations of the saints in relation to the liturgical pattern of the Christian year? These are important questions which turn upon a number of different theological and ecclesiological concerns. At issue is the relationship between justification, sanctification, and glorification. The saints belong to that sense of our humanity as having an end in glory. “The glory of God is man fully alive,” as Irenaeus puts it, a powerful and arresting thought. The saints somehow speak to that idea of being “fully alive” which is nothing more than being alive to God, the fullness of life and glory. But the saints are by definition “the holy ones”. This connects to sanctification and thus to justification since their holiness and end in glory cannot be understood apart from God in Christ and Christ in them.

In the reformed traditions, illustrated, for example, in the calendar of the Anglican Canadian Prayer Book, and in the provisions for Saints’ Days, it is the figures from the New Testament who bear the sobriquet ‘Saint’. The  only exceptions are St. David of Wales, St. Patrick of Ireland, St. George of England, St. Denys of France, and in brackets, signifying its historical obscurity, St. Anne the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The exceptions bear witness to the emergence of the national states and churches in the post-medieval period and to the popular devotion to St. Anne, looking back to the Patristic period and subsequent medieval developments associated with Mary. The calendar distinguishes between what are known as “red letter days” and “black letter days”, the former commemorating New Testament figures and certain festivals of Christ such as the Transfiguration or Candlemas, at once The Presentation of Christ in the Temple and The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin. Red letter refers to their being written in red in both manuscript and early print books.

The reformed churches draw upon two things, the general New Testament view which sees the saints as belonging to the faithful community of believers, and the idea that holiness is our Christian vocation. They accept the idea of the New Testament saints as well as the common use of the term ‘saints’ for a great number of figures that belong to the pageant of the faith down to the reformed period and beyond but without an ecclesiastical process for the canonization of later figures in the life of the Church such as was developed in Roman Catholicism.  There is in this a certain reticence about the application of the sobriquet ‘saint’. In English, for instance, one never speaks of Jesus as ‘Saint Jesus’ apart from some hymns and devotions which call upon “Holy Jesus”. Instead the term ‘saint’ refers to those who in some way or another embody certain aspects of our life in Christ.

The Communion of Saints is the company of prayer and praise in which we participate and to which we belong in our prayer and praise to God, with God, and in God. In short, we are never alone in our prayers. The saints are integral to our life in the body of Christ which they embody in an exemplary manner such that we remember them as one with us in Christ. They embody the different qualities of spiritual perfection which have their fullness and unity in Christ.

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Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent

“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, and a light unto my path”

Advent signals the motion of God’s Word and Son coming to us. It is Revelation, something made known to us which is not simply a product of human reason but which is nonetheless given for thought and life. On the First Sunday of Advent we encounter the interplay of strong negatives and positives, the strong negatives and positives of God’s Word as Law and Light, the positive in the negative and the negative in the positive.

The Collect concentrates this for us in the complementary actions of “casting off” and “putting on”, echoing explicitly the Epistle reading from St. Paul, a movement from the ‘negatives’ of the Law to the “put[ting] on the armour of light”. Such are the positives of “walk[ing] honestly as in the day”, walking in the light of the Law understood in its fullness in Christ. “Put[ting] on the Lord Jesus Christ” is about us in Christ and Christ in us, the alpha and omega of our lives. This, in turn, is complemented by the Gospel but in the reverse order: going from the positives of Christ’s joyous  and triumphant entry into Jerusalem to the negatives of his “cast[ing] out all them that sold and bought in the temple; and over[throwing] the tables of the money-changers”. Love here appears as the wrath of Christ.

Such images belong to the dialectical nature of Revelation where the negatives are equally positive and vice-versa. What is revealed comes to us as light into the darkness of the world of human sin not simply as condemnation but as illumination and, as such, restoration; in short, as both negative and positive. Advent awakens us to the idea of embracing the coming of the light of God which does not extinguish and annihilate human reason and will but seeks their perfection in truth in its fullness. The Ten Commandments have as their end and purpose the charity or love which establishes friendship between one another in the human community and with God.

Aquinas, following Paul, argues that “the whole law is comprised in this one commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, as expressing the end of all commandments: because love of one’s neighbour includes love of God, when we love our neighbour for God’s sake”. This essentially captures “the summary of the Law”, on the one hand, and recognizes the priority of the ground of each of the Ten Commandments in the first commandment, “Thou shalt have none other gods but me”, on the other hand. “For the love of God”, Aquinas says,  “is the reason for the love of neighbour. Hence the precepts ordaining man to God take precedence over the others” (ST. I-II, 100). There is a complete order of thought to the Ten Commandments; yet in a way they are an explication of the radical meaning of the first commandment about God. They have their unity in the God who reveals himself to Moses out of the burning bush not just in terms of tribal, cultural, ethnic and religious identities, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but as the universal principle of all reality, I AM WHO I AM.

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Advent Meditation

“This will be a time for you to bear testimony”

Times of transition signal occasions for renewal. We come to the ending of the Church Year and to the beginning of yet another. The times of endings return us to our beginnings. Advent fast approaches and with Advent, we begin anew.

But what does it mean, these endings which bring us back to our beginnings? What does it mean to begin anew? Are we simply trapped in a never-ending cycle, like squirrels on a fly-wheel? Is the cycle of the Church Year but another dreary round of the same old things in the same old places with the same old faces? Or is it the dance of God’s grace and glory in human lives?

We come to the end of a year of grace and take stock of our lives in the light of God’s grace. It marks a kind of harvest-time, as it were, for our souls, a gathering up of the fruits of grace of the past year in our lives. But it means, too, that we are returned to our beginning, to Him who is the foundation and meaning of our lives. The grace is God’s Word revealed, the idea of God making known to us things that compel our attention.

In the greyness of the year, comes Christ the King (with apologies to T.S. Eliot). Christ strides across the barren fields of humanity to gather us into the barn of his righteousness and truth. We are returned to him who is “the Lord our Righteousness” (Jer. 23.6), our Judge and King, the Shepherd and the Healer of all mankind, the Alpha and the Omega of all creation. Our endings and our beginnings all meet in him. Basil the Great (330-379 AD) shows us something of what this means:

As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time, flowers in spring, corn in
summer and apples in autumn, so the fruit for winter is talk.      (Letters)

Talk, you may protest, thank you very much, but we have had enough talk, too much talk in fact, especially preachers’ talk. But talk about what, you might ask? What is the talk in the times of endings, the fruit for winter’s evenings, the talk which marks the occasions for renewed beginnings?

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Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent

“The end of the matter; all has been heard”

“The end of the matter” is this, it seems, “all has been heard”. There is, after all, “nothing new under the sun”. Everything comes to nothing, to a sense of emptiness, of futility and meaninglessness, captured in the arresting phrase from Ecclesiastes. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”, says the Preacher. “What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?” It challenges all the forms of human presumption.

What kind of an ending is this? A strange and fearful ending, an ending that is despair? Why do anything if everything is nothing? Our lives are nothing. All our struggle, our labour, our desires and ambitions, our hopes and dreams, are they all an empty nothingness? Yes, at least in and of themselves. That is the stern message of this challenging and remarkable book, The Book of Ecclesiastes. Everything that we are, everything that we do, everything that we seek, all comes to nothing, to the nothing that is vanity. “All is vanity”, says the Preacher, empty of meaning. This recurring refrain phrase frames the entire book.

Yet this is actually the great wisdom of ancient Israel at the height of its philosophical understanding. But it challenges us as well. In fact, it speaks to our modernity like no other book of the Bible, for it raises the question without which the Bible and philosophical theology make little if any sense. What are we here for?

In the grey of late November, what does the Church give us to read when nature herself seems most desolate? The Book of the Preacher, Ecclesiastes, a church book, as it were, at least in its Greek and Latin title, which proclaims the barren emptiness of all human endeavour, the vanity of every enterprise of men and women upon the earth; in short, the barren emptiness of everything. “Vanity of vanities … All is vanity and a striving after wind”, or,  as the King James Version puts it, a “vexation of spirit”, that speaks to our modern day angst, our anxieties. All is nothing.

This is the preacher’s constant refrain as he explores all the avenues of human existence. What is the vanity of humanity’s social, political, material, and philosophical aspirations, which Ecclesiastes uncovers and proclaims? Namely this, that everything under the sun has limits and cannot explain its purpose or ours and therefore cannot satisfy the deep and true desire of our humanity. Instead, we confront the boring sameness to all things finite. Everything under the sun is nothing in and of itself and cannot explain what anything is for. Everything is nothing, it seems.

Yet, to know this is wisdom and the beginnings of the possibilities of grace. “God has put eternity into the mind of man”, as Ecclesiastes also reminds us, and though human wisdom is unable to find out the reason for anything in the things that are “under the sun”, at least it stands open to the one who is the answer. “Ecclesiastes is the question to which Christ is the answer” as the philosopher and theologian Peter Kreeft aptly puts it. Christ is the eternal one who has entered time. In him, time has its meaning. He turns to us and bids us “come and see”. Such is revelation which in turn engages our minds.

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Sermon for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity

“Jesus turned him about”

It is a poignant scene, a scene within a scene. A certain ruler seeks the raising to life of his daughter “even now dead”. “Jesus arose and followed him” only to encounter “a woman, diseased with an issue of blood twelve years”, who “said within herself, if I may touch his garment, I shall be whole.” The story may touch our hearts, too, and make us whole. But what does wholeness or salvation really mean?

It seems that something more is wanted than just a touch, more than just the touch of “the hem of his garment”. Certainly Jesus wants something more for us than just a touch. He wants us to enter into his knowing love for us. Only then are we made whole. The woman both knows and doesn’t know this. To put it another way, she doesn’t know that she knows. She has a hold of something but in an incomplete way.

Yet Jesus wants her to know. He wants us to know. God will not keep his back to us, a Deus absconditus, a hidden God, as it were. That is why he has turned himself to us. Such is Revelation. Such is the nature of Incarnate Love: “Jesus turned him about and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole.” These are wonderful words. They are saving words. They are told to her, face-to-face. She wanted to be whole. But to be whole is to enter into his knowing love for us. And such is the tuning of God towards us in Revelation. Such is Advent.

It will not do to steal a cure from him unawares, to be healed by him without him knowing it. Such is an incomplete awareness about the one from whom we seek wholeness. Jesus turns and looks at her, face-to-face, and only so do we find our wholeness. In a way, it is all in the turning.  More than her secret, surreptitious touch, there is his turning to her, his looking upon her, and his speaking to her. Such is salvation – her wholeness and ours. It is found in his turning and looking upon her and her looking upon him. It is found by our being brought knowingly into his knowing love for us. It is what our liturgy as the symbolic reality of our lives is really all about: our being turned by the one who turns himself to us.

This scene within a scene captures the entire Gospel. To steal a cure from him is to be unaware of who he truly is. More strongly, it denies the truth of God Incarnate. It denies the divinity and the uniqueness of Christ. Yet what we most want, healing for a broken world and for our own broken selves, is found in the one whom we ignorantly deny.

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