Category: Sermons

“Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s;
and unto God the things that are God’s”

When “golden October decline[s] into sombre November” bringing us ultimately through these times of endings to new beginnings in Advent, then, as T.S. Eliot puts it in his play, Murder in the Cathedral, “who has stretched out his hand to the fire and remembered the Saints at All Hallows, remembered the martyrs and saints who wait?” Somehow there is a significance about the Octave of All Saints that is meant to remain with us. Yet we so easily forget the glory of All Saints and its meaning for us in the pilgrimage of our souls. The Octave of All Saints is the strong reminder to us of our true citizenship in heaven which is the pattern of our lives in faith.

“For here have we no continuing city”, Hebrews reminds us (Heb. 13.14) and in the Octave’s commemoration of “Founders, Benefactors, and Missionaries” (BCP, p. 302), the powerful lesson from Hebrews about the community of faith reminds us that “they”, reaching back to the saints of the Old Testament, we might say, as well as the great pageant of souls over the centuries who have gone before us, “seek a country”, indeed, “they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”. Paul, building upon such an understanding reminds us that “our citizenship is in heaven”.

But that does not mean a flight from the world nor does it mean its contrary, collapsing the things of God into our world. It is more about how we participate now in heavenly things through our desire and longing for what is everlasting. November, in all of the fading glory of nature, reminds us of what does not pass away. All Saints’ recalls us to who we are with God in the Communion of Saints. Such is the true dignity and freedom of our souls. We are freed to God.

That freedom does not mean ignoring the constraints and laws that belong to the various forms of the human community; constraints, laws and regulations which are often arbitrary, annoying, inconsistent, questionable and even prejudicial. There are and have always been bad laws. There can be no doubt about the anti-Christian bias in some sectors of our country. But we don’t get to be anti-nominians, those who reject law. Rather it means tolerating all manner of things precisely because they are limited and finite. To put it in the language of today’s Gospel, Caesar is not God; worldly powers are not omnipotent however much they presume to such pretensions. Jesus says to Caesar’s man in Jerusalem at the time of his capture and passion and in response to such pretensions to absolute power that “thou couldst have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (Jn 19.11).

Our prayers for those in authority over us is always that they not abuse their power in the overreach of authority or in the attempts to coerce our thinking. Our actions may be constrained out of some sense of the common good; that is one thing. It is quite another to require us to think only in a certain way, to try to compel our thinking by proscribing the use of language, and to demand not our toleration but our celebration of the agendas of identity politics and policies that are inherently divisive. That is intolerable and runs the risk of rendering unto Caesar the things of God.

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“And he opened his mouth and taught them saying, blessed … are you”

Golden October declines into sombre November, a T.S. Eliot puts it (Murder in the Cathedral) but it does so in such a gentle way on this glorious day, a day made far more glorious by the Feast of All Saints, the vision of the glory of redeemed humanity. The wonder and the glory lie in what is seen and taught as presented by John in the lesson from Revelation and by the Beatitudes from Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount.

It can only be seen and taught. The vision and the teaching speak to the end and purpose of our humanity as belonging to the Communion of Saints and to our participation in that Communion by having “come out of great tribulation”. In other words, the glory only comes through the experience of the miseries of our fallen humanity in its sinfulness. Redemption is accomplished, not in flight from the world, but through its radical transformation by grace perfecting nature.

In this sense, the Beatitudes do not simply turn the world on its head, as I am fond of saying, but signal the much more profound idea of the redemption of the world and the perfection of our desires. The Beatitude about hungering and thirsting after righteousness “for they shall be satisfied” complements the theme of those who have come out of great tribulation, for “they shall hunger nor more, neither thirst any more”. They shall be fed by the Lamb “in the midst of the throne” and be led “unto living fountains of waters”, and, as if to sum up the theme of redemptive love, “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” The vision and the teaching are one.

Such is revelation, to be sure, but it has to be taught and seen. Such is the significance of All Saints’ Day and why it has an octave, an eight day period of meditation and reflection on the transitory nature of human life and of our end in glory. The whole focus and emphasis is on the spiritual community of which we are integral parts. In other words, we find the truth of ourselves as selves because of an awareness and a respect for others without whom we cannot truly be ourselves. To think about the radical nature of this spiritual community takes us beyond ourselves in our immediate concerns and preoccupations; we are made aware not of the “unreal city” of human presumption but of the real city of God, the kingdom of heaven which is at once the promise for “the poor-in-spirit”, the humble ones, and for those “persecuted for righteousness’ sake” in the first and last Beatitude. We are more though not less than the circumstances and happenings of our world and day.

To be reminded of this is comforting strength precisely in the face of the persecutions that confront the contemporary churches and in a culture of division and enmity. It will do no good to be defensive. The challenge is to be the confessing church, confessing at once our shortcomings and failings, on the one hand, and the wonder and glory of God, on the other hand, in which we find the true communion of our humanity united in the praise of God. The Beatitudes complement Revelation by showing us how God’s grace lives and moves us in the true realization and perfection of our desires, the true redemption of our humanity. But it has to seen as in the vision of John and it has to be taught as in the Beatitudes.

“And he opened his mouth and taught them saying, blessed … are you”

Fr. David Curry
All Saints’, 2021

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“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge
and in all judgement”

It is, as Shakespeare puts it, “that time of year … when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet 73), the time of scattered leaves which lie in abundant heaps upon the ground, scattered leaves too many to number. “I had not thought that death had undone so many,” T.S.. Eliot says in the Waste Land, written just after the devastations of the First World War but also after the greater devastations of the Spanish Flu. He is channeling Dante’s observation about the souls in the vestibule of Hell. Numbers beyond numbers.

Yet in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering, the spiritual gathering of All Saints’ and All Souls’. Today, the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity marks the Eve of All Saints, Halloween. Rather providentially, the Epistle and Gospel complement and prepare us for All Saints and its Octave of commemoration. Paul, in our text, prays “that [our] love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement”. In response to Peter’s question about how often shall I forgive the one who has sinned against me, suggesting a limit, “till seven times?”, Jesus says “I say not unto thee, until seven times; but seventy times seven.” It is a deliberate exaggeration to teach that love in forgiveness is without limit. He uses number to point to what is beyond number.

In the lesson for All Saints’ Day, John the Divine in his Revelation beholds “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” who along with angels, and the elders (numbered earlier in Revelation as four and twenty), and the four living creatures, are all engaged in the ecstatic praise and worship of God. It is a marvellous vision of redeemed humanity, a vision of the Communion of Saints.  As the Apostles’ Creed wonderfully reminds us, the forgiveness of sins is the connecting link between the Communion of Saints and the Resurrection of the Body which belongs to our participation in that spiritual community.

The parable of the unforgiving servant is a strong indictment of our failure to act out of the abundant love of God in Jesus Christ. He is the forgiveness of sins and as such serves as a strong incentive to forgive even as we have been forgiven. We are recalled to the infinite love of God which is greater than our finite loves but in which by grace we are called to embrace and enact. Here is the love which properly defines us and belongs to the vision of the redemption and perfection of our humanity, come what may in the ups and downs, the confusions and uncertainties of our fallen world where we are scattered in our worries and fears like leaves on the wind. Our being gathered together can only be through the forgiveness of sins.

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“O Lord, I believe; help my unbelief”

Mark alone records this phrase in his Gospel (Mk. 9.24). It arises in the context of the healing of a boy who has what we might call epilepsy and his father’s request to Jesus, “if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.” Jesus reacts to the conditional, “if you can” with a certain asperity. “If you can! All things are possible to him who believes.” That is the occasion for this response, “O Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” which leads to Jesus rebuking the unclean spirit and thus healing the child.

The story and the phrase go to the issue of faith and to the struggle of faith in all of us. Ours is the culture of little faith. “O ye of little faith” ((Mt. 6.30), Jesus says to us about our fears and worries, our anxieties and our over-carefulness, our being too full of cares about the world. We are caught in the ambiguities and confusions of competing certainties and uncertainties in contemporary culture and especially with respect to faith. What do we believe and how strong are we in our faith? This text, I suggest, speaks to today’s Epistle and Gospel. Paul in this powerful passage from Ephesians bids us “put on the whole armour of God” and “above all, taking the shield of faith.” The Gospel story of the certain nobleman who seeks the healing of his son sick at Capernaum illustrates what “taking the shield of faith” really means.

He has asked that Jesus “come down and heal his son” who is “at the point of death.” Jesus simply says to him, “go thy way,  thy son liveth.” The wonder and the miracle is not simply the healing, a healing at a distance by way of the power of the divine word, but that “the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken and went his way.” He further learns as he returns that his son was healed “at the same hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth.” In other words, he had faith in the word of Jesus but not according to his own demand that Jesus come down. He does not let his own assumptions get in the way of God. He has faith in the word of Jesus, an insight into what truly abides, in what is truly substantial (υποστασις), as Hebrews defines faith.

This Gospel story of a miracle of healing was, we are told, “the second sign that Jesus did.” The first sign or miracle in John’s Gospel is, most significantly, the story of the turning of the water into wine at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee. What makes that story so significant is that it signals the true meaning of all of the Gospel miracles, namely, that God seeks our social joys as found in our communion with God and with one another.

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“Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out”

The Prayer Book provides a rich collection of scriptural readings and prayers for services of “Thanksgiving for the Blessings of Harvest” at Morning and Evening Prayer and for the Holy Eucharist. It is well worth taking a look at them in ‘A Form of Thanksgiving for the Blessings of Harvest’ (BCP, pp. 617-621). The suggested lessons from Deuteronomy in particular open us out to a theology of the land, of the places in which we find ourselves whether it is in the city or in the country. “Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field.”

The Canadian Thanksgiving weekend mostly focuses on the theme of Harvest Thanksgiving, though it is tied to the idea of a national thanksgiving day for Canada. The former is more ancient and universal and at once reminds us of the original rural aspects of the nation though not at the expense of the urban. In our current distresses and anxieties, Thanksgiving in itself and in terms of the harvest is a profound spiritual reminder of our connection to the land and to one another. It is a counter at once to the endless narcissisms of our age and to the utilitarian logic that results in our dominance and destruction of nature and ourselves. Harvest Thanksgiving which we celebrate today is actually a movable feast in our country parishes depending on the timing of the  harvest in its various moments. It is, more importantly, a strong affirmation of the goodness of creation and a reminder to us that the goodness of the land and of human labour derives entirely from the goodness of God.

We are blessed in our comings in and our goings out because of the going forth and return of God’s word in Creation and Redemption. In other words, our lives in and through our engagement with the order of creation (without which there could be no harvest) is really about our relation to God, the source and the end of all good things. And as the lessons from Deuteronomy teach us, the blessings of the fruits of creation depend radically upon our heeding the commandments of God. What does that mean? Nothing less than that the world we engage in is fundamentally intelligible and orderly; in short, good. God’s commandments are not arbitrary. In God, power and wisdom are one quite unlike what we experience in ourselves and in the disorders of our world and day.

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“Jesus saw that he had answered intelligently”

This remarkable scene from Mark echoes the gospel setting for Luke’s Parable of the Good Samaritan. Yet one of the scribes hearing Jesus reasoning with others asks not “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” but rather “which is the first commandment of all?” There is a difference in the tone and intent of the questions. Unlike the scene in Luke where Jesus, asking two questions about “how readest thou?” and “what is written in the Law?” draws out of the cynical lawyer the truth itself, here Jesus responds himself and gives us the actual form of the words which we know in our liturgy as the Summary of the Law, part of the Jewish Shema.

Unlike the lawyer in Luke’s account, the unnamed scribe is genuinely interested in the truth of what is being said and responds with a kind of commentary which brings out the understanding of the radical nature of the unity of the love of God and the love of neighbour. In other words, the scribe explicitly draws out the meaning of what Jesus calls “the first commandment” and “the second as being like it” about which “there is none other commandment greater than these.” The scribe recognizes that this ethical teaching is the truth of the spiritual life “better than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices.” It is this ethical insight that impels Mark’s  statement, “Jesus saw that he had answered intelligently,” meaning wisely or prudently.

The dialogue here and in what follows points out that God’s commandment to love is not arbitrary. It challenges the underlying premise of the ideology of liberalism, the reigning world-view of our times, which sees freedom entirely in terms of something negative, a freedom from all and every form of restraint and limitation. The paradox is that such a view leads to despotic authority that negates the true authority of divine reason. What is absent is any kind of positive freedom, a freedom to the good; such is the point of the Mosaic law which has to be the good for all and not just for the benefit of the few, as Plato, too, teaches. The struggle is to understand what the good is. That requires a true openness to the spirit of the law so that we may be, as Paul puts it, “enriched by [Christ], in all utterance, and in all knowledge.” The commandments here reveal the eternal truth of God as the truth for us in our lives as spiritual and intellectual beings. It is to be grasped by our minds. It is there for the understanding as shown by the scribe. It is itself wisdom.

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“And they overcome him by the blood of the Lamb”

The serpent of the Genesis story has become “the dragon,” “that old serpent, called the devil and Satan which deceiveth the whole world.” These are key images that reach back to the serpent’s cunning question, “Did God say?” The question seeks to undermine the truth that is known. Sin and evil is about that contradiction and division within ourselves between what we know and what we do, between our reason and our will. We are made in the image of God and are called to act accordingly. But what happens if we don’t?  We are rational creatures to whom God gives a commandment. But what happens if we disobey?

Both Genesis at the beginning of the Scriptures for both Jew and Christian and Revelation at the end of the Christian Scriptures show us that all evil is a negation and privative of the Good. It has no power in itself; it is always a distortion, a deception. The various terms for what opposes the truth of God reveal this contradiction either in terms of Satan as the tempter, trying to insinuate and undermine the order and truth of things, or the deceiver, trying to trick us, or Lucifer, the light-bearer who denies his very being, turning away from the light of God to be the Prince of Darkness. Evil arises from the turning away of rational creatures from God, the source of all being and knowing.

The lesson from Revelation is especially powerful because it makes it abundantly clear that “there was war in heaven,” not there is, and that evil has been radically overcome “by the blood of the Lamb,” a reference to Christ in his sacrifice and love for us. The strong reminder is that the Good is greater than all and every evil. What that means for us is to will that Good in our own lives as the counter to the sins and follies that so easily beset us. Michaelmas signals the victory of Good over evil and reminds us of the company we keep, “the angels moving the imagination and strengthening the understanding,” as Aquinas puts it.

To think is to think with the angels who are the thoughts of God in creation. They are the invisible reasons for the visible things of the created order. Paradoxically this reminder to us of the larger spiritual community of which we are a part “with Angels and Archangels and all the Company of heaven” is not a denial or a flight from the concrete world of our embodied existence. To think with the angels is to affirm our creation, our bodies, and our world, and not to be alienated from nature or our bodies through some sort of illusion. The Genesis point is emphatic; creation is good in its parts and as a whole. Evil comes from us when we put ourselves at the centre and try to will a lie, a deceit.

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“Friend, go up higher”

It is not about ambition or pretension. It is about the hope of transformation. It conveys the sense that we are called to something more, that we have a destiny beyond what we know is before us but will not face, namely, the grave and gate of death. We are more though not less than our bodies and the circumstances of our lives which does not mean that we are in flight from either. Somehow going up higher happens where we are in our souls and bodies.

The operative words are “friend” and “go up higher.” These words speak to the intimacy and nature of our identity in Christ, to the true form of our humanity in God, transhumanised, as Dante puts it, inventing a word in Italian (trashumanar) that has been transposed into English but now co-opted by contemporary identity politics in very different ways. But we are not what we might imagine in the vanity of our minds through the mechanics of re-imaging and refashioning our bodies as constituting our identities or in some sort of biological determinism which equally negates our freedom. Our identities as persons are not simply biological nor are they merely social constructs that shift and move like leaves on the wind. “Friend, go up higher” is about our vocation to Christ and in Christ. Through the sacraments of Baptism and Communion, we are identified with Jesus in his free-willing identity and sacrifice for us. It is about reclaiming the integrity of our being in Christ through the community of God and man realized in Christ.

Jesus calls us “friends” elsewhere in the Gospels, too. It is an especially potent statement that changes the nature of the relationship between God and man. He does so not just by way of a parable but more directly. He calls us friends at the height of his passion, on the night of our betrayal. The wondrous thing that passes human understanding is that God has made us his friends even when we are his enemies. This turns the ancient world on its head. Friendship with God rather than a cowering fearfulness of God? It turns our world on its head. To suppose that we can create ourselves?  Sheer illusion. Yet we live in a hopeless and fearful world precisely because of such illusions. Here is the antidote to our hopelessness, our fear, and our illusions.

We are called out of ourselves and we are called to God. We are called to the service of God in our life together with one another in the body of Christ. It is really the purpose of our being here today, a purpose which extends into every aspect of our lives.

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“God hath visited his people.”

It is an intriguing phrase. The Greek verb translated here as visited also means to look upon or to watch over in the sense of having oversight from which derives the idea of bishops. Here it is about God’s oversight of our humanity.

Today’s readings offer an interesting sense of the dynamic interplay between abiding and visiting that belongs to a larger Scriptural and cultural understanding about the nature of our humanity. Paul prays that “Christ may dwell in [our] hearts by faith”, that we may be “rooted and grounded in love”; in short, in that which abides. In the Gospel Christ comes near the little city of Nain, visiting it, as it were, and yet something abides in and through that encounter. Both readings invite us to consider the nature of lives with one another and with God.

Is God simply a visitor? One who comes and goes, here today and gone tomorrow? A welcoming presence or something more disturbing? Ishtar, the ancient Sumerian goddess of love and war (an interesting combination!), wants Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk, to be her boy-toy, her lover. But intimacy with the gods is not always a good thing. Gilgamesh rejects her advances because he knows that she turns all of her lovers into animals. In other words, you lose your humanity! Encounters between humans and the divine can be terrifying. “Our God is a consuming fire,” as Hebrews reminds us, recalling the sense of distance between God and man. “No one can see God and live,” as Exodus puts it.

Owing to the pandemic, there has been considerably less visiting among friends and family. Social distancing is the mantra for our isolation and separation from one another, tainting the forms of public interaction with fear and suspicion, with anxiety and even animosity. Perhaps, though, this may ultimately help us to reclaim the primacy of our lives as essentially social creatures in our care and concern for each other rather than radically autonomous beings whose relation to each other is merely instrumental, using each other for our own ends, trapped in the illusions of our self-completeness. This Sunday speaks to these deeper truths.

Visitors come and go. Yet, in the momentary intersection of their lives and ours, there is an abiding truth. There is the recognition of the common bond of our humanity. There is the opening out of our souls to each other, a sharing of our lives however fleeting, however brief. Visitors come and go but we, too, are visitors.

This leads to the ancient insight about hospitality as a moral obligation. The stranger, the foreigner, the alien is to be welcomed into our midst and treated with courtesy and grace. The sojourner, the visitor, is the one who has come near to us. He is, in fact, our neighbour. The stranger is owed what we owe our neighbour. The Old Testament makes this abundantly clear. “When a stranger sojourns with you in the land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself;  for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God,” as Leviticus states (Lev. 19.33,34). And it is further emphasized in the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament.

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“Be not anxious”

“Take no thought,” the King James Version following Tyndale puts it. Other translations have the disconcerting phrase “be not careful.” “Be not anxious” is a more modern rendering and reflects the contemporary therapeutic culture in its various nostrums. But are we really to be without thought and without care? Is anxiety simply about our emotional and psychological state of being? No. I think the readings for today speak very directly to the question about how we think about nature and thus ourselves. They counter some of our modern obsessions and preoccupations; in short, our worries are the things in which we over-invest ourselves, thinking about things in the wrong way. Hence Jesus bids us three times to be not anxious as part of another way of thinking about ourselves and the world. It is about seeing the world in God and God in the world.

There are no end of worries and concerns, fears and anxieties that beset our troubled world: concerns about the environment and climate, about the economy and jobs, about adequate housing and food security, let alone the myriad of disturbing preoccupations with respect to identity politics that more and more are about a sense of alienation from the body and nature. For all of these worries and anxieties belong to a common problem: the sense of our disconnect from creation and nature and thus from one another and ourselves, even our bodies. The last two hundred and fifty years or so bear witness to what some have called “the great acceleration” referring to the forms of our technocratic mastery over nature and over ourselves that has altered the very world in which we find ourselves in destructive ways, a world which we sense is increasingly unlivable and threatening. This is to state the obvious.

Yet what is required has very much to do with our thinking, about how we think about nature or creationChanges. If we assume, as many have, that nature is just dead stuff there for us to manipulate and use however we wish, we can only discover that this is ruinous and destructive of the natural world and ourselves.  There are, it seems to me, three conflicting modern approaches to the natural world which in their separation from one another contribute to our contemporary dis-ease. One approach is this idea of our complete mastery or dominance of nature that ultimately fails to respect the natural order. It arises out of a sense of our separation from nature that leads to an instrumental manipulation of nature, the consequences of which are now more fully before us. It is, however, an overstatement about ourselves as distinct and separate from the natural world in its externality.

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