Category: Sermons

“I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”

Jesus’ famous words to Mary in the stories of the Resurrection already point us to the culmination of the Resurrection in the Ascension of Christ. Such is the mystery of God’s essential life opened out to us precisely through the words of the Rogation Gospel on Sunday past. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father”  (Jn. 16. 28). God is made known to us and for us in the comings and goings of Christ, the Word and Son of the Father. There is the going forth of the Word in Creation and now there is the return of the Word in Redemption signaled most completely in the Ascension.

The Ascension is the homecoming of the Son to the Father. The idea of homecoming is a rich and arresting idea. Home has such a powerful resonance and meaning. It speaks at once to the places in which we live but even more to the sense of spiritual identity and purpose. Who we are is grounded in Christ, in his going forth and return to the Father in the bond of the Spirit, the ever-present third, which belongs to the dialogic structure of all thought and reality. The Ascension marks the end, in the sense of purpose, of all creation. Its end and thus our end is found in the return of the Son to the Father. We abide in those eternal motions of heavenly love. Exitus et reditus. A going forth and a return. Everything is gathered back to God and has its meaning and purpose in God.

The Ascension teaches us the deeper meaning of prayer: “God’s breath in man returning to his birth,” as Herbert puts it. Creation redeemed has its crowning expression in the Ascension of Christ. Yet this feast, almost invariably lost to view falling, as it does, on the fortieth day after Easter and, thus, on a Thursday, highlights the radical and deep meaning of prayer. Prayer belongs to our homecoming in Christ’s homecoming. “We ascend in the ascension of our hearts,” as Augustine wonderfully puts it. Prayer is the motion of the Ascension in us. “Lift up your hearts.”

Far from being a flight from the world, it celebrates the redemption of all creation as returned to God in whom it has its being and meaning, its beginning and end. The very structure of some of our church buildings, such as Christ Church, architecturally speaking, illustrates the very motion of the Ascension. We go from the font to the altar in a kind of ascension that leads us up through the nave to the chancel steps and under the Rood Screen (under the Cross) to the sanctuary and altar. Such a movement in space and structure is the form of our participation in Christ’s going to the Father. The very beams of the building proclaim Christ as the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of all things. We are embraced in those wooden beams symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice and life and its culmination in the return of the Son to the Father. Such is the Ascension.

Our liturgy, too, in its ritual acts symbolizes the going forth of God’s Word proclaimed in the Gospel and the gathering of our souls to God’s Word made visible in the Sacraments. In every sense, there is the lifting up our souls and our world to God in prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament, in service and sacrifice.

In the conditions of the latest lockdown, we may not be able to gather together in person but my hope is that we are together in prayer, the prayer that gathers all things to the care of God and that places ourselves in that care for one another. We live in the endtimes of all things by abiding in God’s eternal life opened out to us through the comings and goings of Christ. That is our joy and our strength even in difficult and uncertain times.

“I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”

Fr. David Curry
Ascension 2021

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Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Rogation Sunday

“And the Lord showed him all the land”

Rogation Sunday celebrates the redemption of creation and our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The Resurrection is cosmic in scope. It concerns the whole world as ordered to God. This acts as a kind of corrective with respect to our modern attitudes and approaches to the natural world as something which is just there to be manipulated and used. Rogation is prayer. Prayer does not separate us from creation but belongs to the gathering of all creation to God.

Thus prayer is an activity of redeemed humanity and happens in the land where we have been placed. Our places in the land are to be the places of grace. How? By prayer. Rogationtide embraces the world in prayer. The world is comprehended in the relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit, as seen most wonderfully in today’s Gospel and which culminates in the Ascension. What is overcome is sin, the world as turned away from God and as turned against God, the world as infected and stained by our sinfulness, by our forgetfulness of our place and of ourselves in the landscape of creation redeemed, and of our forgetfulness of one another. The consequences are our disrespect for the land and the sea, for the world in which we have been placed, and for one another. We make a mess of it. We forget the place of creation in the will of God; we forget the redemption of creation and our place in it.

Rogation Sunday recalls us to a kind of theology of the land. In the story of Creation, the earth, the dry land, is said to be good (Gen.1.9,10) and the whole of creation not only good but “very good”. Such is the creation which God the Creator sees. And we, who are made in the image of God, are also formed out of the dust, “from the ground” (Gen.2.7). We are placed in the garden of creation. The garden is the land of paradise.

In the story of the Fall, our disobedience not only alienates us from God but also from the land. The land of paradise becomes the land of sweat and toil. “Cursed is the ground because of you … In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to the dust you shall return” (Gen.3.17,18). “And the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken” (Gen.3.23). That means to work with the land in accord with the will of God in creation. In the story of Cain and Abel, the land becomes the land of blood. Cain slays Abel in the field: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God says (Gen.4.10) in a particularly powerful and poignant image. These stories are altogether fundamental to what unfolds in the story of salvation in the Old and New Testaments.

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

“Behold, I make a covenant”

The lesson from Exodus recalls us to the Covenant that God makes with our humanity even in the midst of “a stiff-necked people”. It provides the ground for the marvel and wonder that is the further extension of that Covenant in the Resurrection. In the parade of readings today we see the wonder of God as essential life and what that means for us in our lives.

It is a challenge, of course, to read and think these readings particularly given the tendencies of a culture of many who are largely ‘unreaders’. If nothing else during the ups and downs of the pandemic, however, we might just learn to sit and think. ‘Don’t just do something, sit and think’ could be the most important lesson for us. It is ancient wisdom that contemplation is really the highest activity of our humanity. We need to ponder the wisdom that is more than knowledge and information and certainly more than the idolatry of the practical which so often consumes and destroys us. When ‘science’ becomes technology, science as knowledge is diminished and lost. Even more the philosophical wisdom that it presupposes is lost to view.

This is just to suggest that pondering these readings speaks profoundly to our current culture. It is, to use Jesus’ saying to Martha, the one thing necessary, unum necessarium, the better part that Mary has chosen. The Mary of the Martha and Mary story complements the Mary who is the mother of God, the Mary who sets the agenda and vocation of our humanity: “Be it unto me according to thy word.” That captures in nutsche, in a nutshell, the underlying logic of the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer in the patterns of reading that belong and have developed within that tradition.

So what do we see in the readings at Matins and Ante-Communion on the Fourth Sunday after Easter? The reading from Exodus presents the idea of the Covenant between God and Man written on two tablets of stone a second time. Why the second time? We are meant to recall our disobedience and betrayal of the Covenant of the Ten Commandments after they were initially given to us through Moses. That is the story of the golden calf, the story of our refusal to contemplate what is made known by God for our humanity. It led to Moses breaking the tablets of the Law because of our idolatry. We deny the universality and truth of the Law by turning to our immediate interests and concerns. The image of that betrayal is quite revealing. We make images of cows as the symbol of deliverance from slavery in Egypt. Why cows? Because they pulled the carts of the Israelites in the Exodus from Egypt. But a golden calf is simply a dead cow. This idolatry ignores and denies the active will of God moving in us that belongs to the deeper truth of the Exodus and which ultimately takes expression in the Ten Commandments; in short, the Covenant between God and man.

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“For they were afraid”

The Easter stories all show the overcoming of fear and uncertainty through the encounter with Christ’s Resurrection. Sorrow is transformed into joy. “Be not afraid” is the message of Easter in the second Gospel provided on Easter Day read from St. Mark (Mk. 16.1-8, BCP, p. 185). We have seen in various ways the process of dawning awareness in the disciples about the essential life of God that is greater than sin and evil, greater than darkness and death, whether it is Mary Magdalene coming in her early morning sorrow to the empty tomb or the disciples huddled in fear behind closed doors as in a tomb or in the arresting and dynamic image of Christ the Good Shepherd. His laying down his life for the sheep is precisely about his going “through the valley of the shadow of death” for us, with us, and in us such that we need not fear “for thou art with me.” On the Third Sunday after Easter, we see the new birth of the Resurrection in us by way of the image of child-birth, the idea of sorrow and pain transformed into joy and delight.

Thus there is something rather fitting about the conjunction of the Feast of St. Mark with the Third Sunday after Easter today. Mark is the Easter saint par excellence. His feast day always falls within Eastertide. The Easter Gospel from Mark helps to explain today’s Gospel and Feast. “For they were afraid” complements “be ye not troubled.”

It is known as the short ending to The Gospel According to St. Mark. Why? Because some of the earliest texts of St. Mark’s Gospel that we possess end at verse eight of the sixteenth chapter rather than with the accounts of the Resurrection that take us to verse twenty. To be sure, the canonical Gospel, the gospel that is authoritative for orthodox Christians, includes those twelve verses. The shorter ending does not mean that Mark does not believe in the Doctrine of the Resurrection or that those twelve verses are somehow unrelated and disconnected to the rest of his Gospel and unfaithful to it. Quite the contrary.

And yet, what are we to make of that shorter ending? From a literary point of view, I think it is a powerful and poignant ending, and serves to highlight the doctrinal point about the Resurrection even more strongly. After all, it is only in the light of the Resurrection that the story of Jesus makes any sense. The Resurrection has captured the imaginations of the Gospel writers, such as St. Mark, and has compelled them to see things in a new light without which the Gospels themselves could never have been written.

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“I am the good shepherd”

It is the classic Christian image of care and compassion and yet it is so often misunderstood in ways that diminish and deny human dignity and agency by rendering us passive and subject to the tyranny of others. In other words, care and compassion easily become the kindness that kills. This is contrary to the radical nature of care and compassion that belongs to Christ the Good Shepherd. The radical nature of the image shows us the care that has cure in it and that belongs to the dynamic of essential life in us. In this sense it is not simply about being taken care of. It is not about who is going to take care of me so much as how am I going to take care of others and myself. The care of others is not about controlling others for that would be to use others for our own ends. Such is manipulation and abuse, the care that is uncare. It makes us victims and victims twice over when we think that we are victims. We lose the agency that belongs to the image.

The radical care of Christ the Good Shepherd has altogether to do with the Passion and the Resurrection. We forget that this image is a resurrection image. It is about the triumph of life over death and about living in the meaning of that overcoming of sorrow and sadness, of evil and death. Why? Because of the essential life of God. “God is the beginning and end of all beings but especially rational beings,” as Aquinas notes. As the Epistle reading from 1st Peter puts it, “ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.” That return is God’s grace moving in us, alive in us through our awareness of both our waywardness and of our redemption.  We return to the truth of ourselves in God.

The Gospel makes this clear. Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine” and grounds that saying in his relation to the Father. “As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.” The care here is self-giving love, the love which is greater than death, the love which gives entirely of itself and is never exhausted. Such is the radical meaning of the Resurrection in and through the Passion. We are known in God’s eternal knowing and loving. That is essential life and the radical meaning of the image.

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“There are three that bear witness”

The week of Easter immerses us in the accounts of the Resurrection just as Holy Week immersed us in the Passion. In both the Gospel of John plays a crucial role as providing the underlying logic to the accounts of both Passion and Resurrection. This is simply to recognize what we see or know through the eyes of John whose Gospel helps to illuminate what belongs to the unity of the Scriptures of the New Testament and in its relation to the Jewish Scriptures; in short, to what is known as the Canon of the Scripture, and by extension to the development of the Creeds. The Bible did not just drop out of the sky. To call it the Word of God does not deny in any way how it has come together in its parts and as a whole through human agency precisely in our engagement with the things which are written and passed on.

It is important to mention this with respect to the Resurrection since the readings both in Easter week and throughout the Easter season show us the way in which the idea of the Resurrection comes to birth in us. John’s Gospel is particularly helpful in highlighting the unity or balance between ontology and epistemology, how we think about being or reality, and how we think about thought or the forms of knowing.

It is known as the Johannine Comma. It is not about punctuation – itself a most helpful innovation that helps to clarify the relation of phrases and words. The term here refers to a phrase or clause either added to the fifth chapter of I John or removed from it. It is one of the notorious mysteries about the transmission of texts. While not found in the earliest New Testament manuscripts known to us which don’t predate the second and third centuries, it seems to have been received and accepted by some theologians such as Origen. And it appears in much later texts and entered into the later translations such as the King James Version of 1611 which, following Tyndale, drew upon Erasmus’s third critical edition of the Greek New Testament which included it. It doesn’t appear in Luther’s Deustche Bibel since he based his German translation of the New Testament upon Erasmus’s second critical edition of the New Testament which excluded it.

The classical Book(s) of Common Prayer which have used the King James Version for the Epistles and Gospels since 1662 have therefore included this phrase right up until fairly recently. It was in the 1918 Canadian Prayer Book but absent from the 1928 American Prayer Book and quietly disappeared in the 1959/1962 Prayer Book. Some of you are just old enough perhaps to remember this. What is the phrase and what is the controversy?

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“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

The readings for Easter Tuesday belong to the logic of the Resurrection. It is not a single simple event so much as a process of thinking. The Resurrection accounts all focus on the process by which the disciples come to the knowledge of the Resurrection. The lessons all turn on the interpretation of the Passion and upon our assumptions about the body and about death.

Easter celebrates “the death of death,” as it is famously said. Learning how to die equally means learning how to live. That really means the celebration of the radical nature of life which is nothing less than the life of God. God is essential life. The lesson from Acts shows how the idea of the Resurrection comes out of the confusion and chaos of the Crucifixion and death of Christ whom “God raised from the dead,” and out of our broken hearts. It also confirms a new and deeper idea about God as borne out of a new way of reading the Scriptures. This is partly what we saw yesterday in the story of the Road to Emmaus which immediately precedes today’s Gospel reading which builds upon the same logic.

Here Jesus makes himself known to them first by his words of peace. The initial effect is that “they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.” As on the Road to Emmaus, they have no expectation of seeing Jesus. He makes himself known to them as someone real, not in the breaking of the bread but in eating “a piece of broiled fish” and some honey-comb. It serves as testament to the reality of the body. But as with the breaking of the bread, so here there is the strong emphasis upon Jesus “open[ing] their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures.”

The point turns on the interpretation of the sufferings of Christ and to his life in us by way of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. Such concepts belong to the radical nature of the divine life which cannot be contained and constrained to the limits of human reason but transforms and perfects our understanding. Thus are we raised up to participate in God’s life in and through and not in spite of the things of the world and in and through the transformation of our hearts and minds. The body is not nothing but neither is it everything. The Resurrection is all about the transformation of our minds and about the radical nature of divine life and our participation in it.

Christ is Risen. Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia! Alleluia!

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Easter Week

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“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

The Road to Emmaus is one of the most interesting of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection. It shows us the transformation of grief and sorrow into joy and understanding. It shows two of the disciples in flight from Jerusalem in perplexity and confusion about Christ’s crucifixion. It shows Jesus running out after us, as it were, in our confusion and uncertainty to engage our minds with the radical meaning of his Passion as seen through the witness of the Scriptures, on the one hand, and through the forms of Christ’s identity and presence with us sacramentally, on the other hand.

The story has a wonderful narrative force. We sense the dismay and broken-heartedness of these two unnamed disciples. Their expectations have all been shattered. Their world has been turned upside down. They are in a state of confusion and complexity. They are “talk[ing] together of all these things which had come to pass.” But where there are two, there is always a third. “Who is the third who walks always beside you,” Eliot asks in The Waste Land (Death by Water). Jesus himself drew near, and went with them.” As Luke puts it, “their eyes were holden, that they should not know him.” This is not really so strange and unbelievable. After all, their confusion and uncertainty is because they saw Jesus crucified and dead. They have no reason and no expectation of seeing him.

The exchange is what is most telling. Jesus draws out of them what belongs to their confusion and uncertainty. Such things are not hidden, they are clearly and unambiguously acknowledged: the crucifixion, the empty tomb, the testimony of the woman about the witness of angels to his being alive. Only then, does Jesus embark upon the teaching. It is done in an objective manner, in third person narrative. “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” The phrase challenges their expectations and their thinking. And ours, too. The teaching is by way of “expound[ing] unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself,” again in third person narrative. He is providing them with a way of understanding, a way of thinking the deeper meaning of all that has transpired. It is through the rebirth of images, we might say, in terms of the interpretation of the Scriptures which here refers necessarily and only to the Jewish Scriptures. He is opening out to them and to us the radical idea and meaning of the Resurrection. As we argued at Easter, Passion and Resurrection go together.

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“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

This text has carried us throughout the pageant of the Passion. Yet it belongs equally to our celebration of the Resurrection. To know ourselves as the broken-hearted is “to reckon ourselves to be dead indeed unto sin and thus alive unto God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The Resurrection does not eclipse the Passion anymore than the Passion eclipses the Resurrection.

Sorrow and joy, not either sorrow or joy but both / and. Both sorrow and joy belong to the deep truth of our humanity in union with God. The joy of the Resurrection intensifies to the greatest extent imaginable what we have, in our poor fashion, endeavoured to go through in the sorrows of the Passion during Holy Week. The sorrows of the Passion intensify the joys of the Resurrection. Sorrow and joy mark the deeper meaning of the Resurrection.

The simple truth is that the accounts of the Passion are and could only have been written in the light of the Resurrection. It is not a fairy tale, and certainly not the Disney version of any of the classic fairy tales. It is not a feel-good, happy-clappy ending to an otherwise grim and gruesome spectacle. In other words, Easter is not some desperate attempt to gloss over the realities of human sin and the sufferings of the world. It is not some astral flight of gnostic fantasy. It is not an older, benighted and unenlightened, and, ultimately, superstitious form of positive thinking and of the desperate attempts to be ‘kind to yourself’ which unfortunately appears to be where the cultural mantra of ‘be kind, be calm’ has taken us in the current pandemic. The deep truth of the Passion and the Resurrection is the same. We only live when we live unto God. Be kind to others and be kind to yourself is too small a vision especially when so easily it turns into a focus on ourselves, a distortion of the nature of sacrificial love which both Passion and Resurrection teach us.

The whole point of Easter is not the contrast with the Passion but the illustration and demonstration of its essential logic. It is altogether about the radical nature of God and the fullness and the mystery of divine life. It is all God and all God in us just as it is all us and all us in God. The new life, the new birth is the renewing of the life of God in us without whom there is no life. Prayer, as Herbert puts it, is “God’s breath in man returning to his birth”(Prayer (1)). Such is the Resurrection in us, the renewing and returning of our souls to God. The Paschal feast recalls Paradise but only to deepen our understanding of the purpose and truth of Creation. It does not take us back to some imaginary Garden of Eden which so easily turns into some utopian fantasy on our part from which there are any number to choose, especially in the techno-fantasies of contemporary culture.

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“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

Our text has carried us throughout Holy Week and brings us to this moment, to the wonder and mystery of the great Vigil of Easter. The Praeconium in its words and music captures the mystery of Easter. “This is the night.” This ancient prayer and hymn gathers up the rich imagery of the Exodus and the Passover and focuses it on the meaning of Christ’s Passion. What is that meaning? It is actually Resurrection.

The new fire, the blessing of the Paschal Candle, the singing of the Praeconium, the readings of the prophecies of the Resurrection, the renewal of our baptismal vows, all of these things belong to the sense of joy and life. Christ is Risen, we proclaim. Life is all alleluia.

It is not an add-on to the dismal drudge and trudge of Holy Week. It is its underlying truth. We can only contemplate the Passion through the Resurrection. And yet the Resurrection is meaningless without our contemplation of the Passion. The Vigil service is powerfully moving even in this simplified country service, shortened yet comprehensive of all of the elements  except communion that belong to the Easter Vigil in its more elaborate forms.

God is life essential. Easter is about our life with God in and through all and every trial and circumstance of human experience. The great meaning of Easter is the radical nature of God’s life made our life in its fullness. “I am come,” Jesus says, “that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” That more abundant life is the meaning of the Resurrection.

The great joy and wonder of the Vigil is the dynamic of that new and abundant life arising out of the forms of death and darkness. It is dramatic but the drama is the drama of dogma, the drama of redemption in the ways in which God gathers us to himself in his abundant life. The sacrifices of God turn out to be more than a broken spirit. That something more is the abundant life of God accomplished through Christ’s sacrifice and the way in which that life lives in us. Easter is about joy in the midst of sorrow even as Holy Week was about sorrow in the midst of joy. The two are interrelated and intrinsic to each other as the essential form of our participation in the endless life of God.

Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia. The Lord is risen, indeed.

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2021

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