Category: Sermons

“For ye were sometimes darkness”

How do we face the darkness of ourselves and the darkness of our world? Do we seek to deny the darkness of sin and evil, the darkness of despair and depression? Do we seek all manner of distractions to escape the things which we confront outside us and within us?

In a way, today’s Gospel is rather dark and disturbing. We are asked to think about evil not as something out there in some sort of Manichaean manner – as if COVID-19, or the world itself in the physical phenomenon of wind and storm, of disease and sickness is evil or that evil is other people. That is to divide the world into good and evil in a simplistic and dualistic way and to judge oneself to be good and others evil. We are challenged to consider the divisions and contradictions in ourselves and our relation to them and to ponder the darkness of despair and depression that are very much about how we think about ourselves and others.

As Shakespeare’s Hamlet says, “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet, Act 2. 2) Everything turns on our thinking. C.S. Lewis in The Discarded Image, itself a neglected (or discarded!) book, nicely paraphrases the great insight of Boethius (6th century AD): “the character of knowledge depends not on the nature of the subject known but on the knowing faculty,” on us as knowers, as thinkers. How we face the darkness is about our thinking. That is what this Gospel story sets before us.

But the Gospel, as we have it in our Canadian Prayer Book, is incomplete; it is an abbreviated form of the slightly longer and more complete pericope which had been read for centuries. Paul in his Epistle reading says that “ye were sometimes darkness,” only to go on to say “but now are ye light in the Lord; walk as children of light.” It is as if the Gospel, as presented in its abbreviated form, attends only to the first clause and ignores the second which is illustrated in the more complete version.

“The last state of that man is worse than the first,” the Gospel reading ends. A kind of ending, to be sure, about the deep darkness of our despair really, but that is not the real ending of the Gospel passage. As Luke tells us, “and it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it” (Lk. 11. 27-28). These last two verses complete the reading and help us to face the darkness.

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“For this is the will of God, even your sanctification”

The Book of Leviticus is the least read and least known book of the Scriptures. And to be sure, it is a daunting task to make one’s way through its myriad of regulations and directions many of which are quite puzzling, though, perhaps, rather intriguing. What does it mean, for instance, “that they shall no more slay their sacrifices for satyrs, after whom they play the harlot”? (Lev. 17.7). In the Canadian Prayer Book lectionary system, readings from Leviticus are very few; never in the Sunday Office readings, and only four times in the appointed readings for the Daily Offices; three times in the week of the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Friday evening, Saturday morning and evening), and once in Holy Week on the Wednesday evening of Holy Week in the story of the proverbial scapegoat understood as an symbol of Christ bearing our sins in his Passion.

Chapters 17-27 of Leviticus is known as the Holiness Code, best expressed in Leviticus 19. 2. “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” The Holiness Code is a collection of injunctions dealing with a wide range of behaviours and actions: social, moral and ritualistic. Set within the context of Israel as God’s chosen people, they express the sense of Israel’s separation and uniqueness over and against other peoples and nations. Yet, while some of the injunctions seem culturally dependent, others are universal and ethically compelling. The injunctions about not trimming beards and not being marked with tattoos may seem trivial and irrelevant but other injunctions seem ethically compelling and binding for all times and in all places, such things as behaving honestly, treating workers fairly, the rights or duties towards those with disabilities, doing justice, loving your neighbour as yourself, working as much for others as for yourself, and fair trade. In the light of those injunctions other things such as reproving and correcting your neighbour and allowing not only the poor and destitute but also the resident stranger to gather the gleanings after the harvest offer an ethical vision of what belongs to the good of all over and against the interests of the few.

As one theologian (Mary Douglas) puts it, the code is the idea of holiness as order not confusion, as rightness or rectitude of behaviour, as honesty and straight-dealing in contrast to the forms of contradiction in double-dealing, theft, lying, false witness, cheating in business, dissembling in speech, degrading and putting down others, hating your brother in your heart; in short the contrast between what we seem to be and what we are, the hypocrisies that belong to all our lives.

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“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered”

Learning through suffering is hardly new. It is a central feature of Homer’s Odyssey, for example. Many people at different times have been graduates of the proverbial school of hard knocks. Necessity is one mother of a teacher. Perhaps, too, this is one of the lessons of the current pandemic in the various forms of suffering that it occasions.

But what is it that is learned through suffering? What is the lesson? For the ancient Greeks, it was to know the order of the cosmos and our place within that order. For modernity, the lessons are more ambiguous, mostly because of the abstract individualism of our age in the forms of autonomy, isolation, and separation from one another, like so many cosmic orphans cast adrift in an empty and indifferent universe. At best, there is the ambiguous quest for meaning but as bound up in the modern sophistic of our solipsistic selves – the idea that the self is the only knowable or existent thing (OED). Perhaps, just perhaps, COVID-19 may serve to awaken us to our care and concern for others and not just our fears for ourselves. Perhaps, just perhaps, it may serve to awaken us to our lives in community and to the limitations of our technocratic world and its assumptions. We make the machines that make or unmake us, after all.

The lessons of Lent go beyond knowing the order of the cosmos and the ambiguities of our contemporary confusions, self-obsessions, and assertions. The Letter to the Hebrews spells out the lesson which Lent illustrates. The lesson is mindful obedience. The illustration is the life of Jesus Christ concentrated into the intensity of forty days. Mindful obedience means obedience to an authority, in this case God as the ultimate author, the root meaning of authority. Somehow suffering belongs to this relation to authority. Not an easy lesson for our contemporary culture where authorities in every sphere, it seems, betray trust often in blatant forms of hypocrisy and arrogance.

“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered, “ Hebrews (5.8) tells us in what is one of the lessons for Morning Prayer on Lent I (Year 2). “Although he was a Son” – this is who Jesus is, the Son of the Father. The Son is defined by his relation to the Father. He is the eternal Son of the everlasting Father – “there was not when he was not.” He is, therefore, always the Son of the father. His whole being is defined by his love of the Father’s will. Such is obedience. The obedience is not just doing what one is told, blindly and ignorantly. It means doing what he is in his love for the Father. A knowing and loving obedience is the nature of the eternally and only-begotten Son of the Father. As such, this obedience is not learned; it is simply who he is. It is not something acquired. He is what he is; he does what he is; his act is his being. A knowing and loving ‘obedience’ belongs to the act of his essential being.

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“Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”

Psalm 51 is the quintessential penitential psalm. One of the seven penitential psalms, as they came to be known (psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143), it captures wonderfully the longing of the soul for God’s goodness out of the profound awareness of sin. “Against thee only have I sinned.” However exaggerated this may seem, it states the truth about all sin. All sin is against God. When we sin against one another and against ourselves, we sin against God and the goodness of his creation. It is in this sense that “against thee only have I sinned” is to be understood, much in the same way as we pray, “Almighty God of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding”. All sin is against God in the same way that all wisdom is of God. Every sin opposes the good that is God himself.

Such is the great insight of this penitential psalm which is front and centre on Ash Wednesday. Dust and ashes symbolise creation and redemption. Ashes are imposed on our foreheads, the seat of the rational will, as a sign of repentance. Repentance is our turning back to the one from whom we have turned away. The ashes are imposed with the words from Genesis: “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” We are recalled to the humble ground of our creation. We are the dust into whom God has breathed his spirit but whom we have spurned in the arrogance and presumption of all our sins. We are recalled to creation in the awareness of our separation from creation.

But as sinners who know that we are sinners means to embrace the disciplines of repentance, literally “to decline from sin and incline to virtue” (BCP, p. 614). That means the heartfelt turning back to God “by self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word” (BCP, p. 612). This is not a list from which we may pick and choose. It means all those things.  Together they signify the deep desire of our souls for the truth of our being in the rejection of all the things which stand in the way of ourselves in union with God and in the acquisition of what properly belongs to our life with God. Lent concentrates wonderfully the three-fold nature of the pilgrimage of the soul: purgation, illumination, and union or perfection. These are all present to us in the programme of Lent and in its beginning on Ash Wednesday.

We begin in ashes but not so as to end in ashes. Our beginning is with God even as our end is in God. We seek his will and power and truth to make us new. We only live in this divine activity of being renewed. But to be renewed is to know that we are broken, not whole. “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit.” Nothing could be more counter-culture; no greater contrast possible between this and the therapy culture of emotional well-being. We are meant to feel troubled and to know our brokenness; “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou shalt not despise.” Contrition, confession, and satisfaction form the underlying spiritual patterns of our liturgy in relation to the three-fold pilgrimage of our souls to God.

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“Charity never faileth”

There is a pleasing coincidence to the conjunction of Quinquagesima Sunday, commonly called Love Sunday, with Valentine’s Day, however dubious St. Valentine as Bishop and Martyr might be. In the Prayer Book calendar, this “ancient memorial” is bracketed indicating that its historical character is obscure, however popular its commemoration has been over many centuries. It has, of course, become highly commercialized and monetized in our secular culture. Nonetheless its coincidence with Quinquagesima Sunday is instructive and belongs to an essential feature of the pilgrimage of our souls concentrated in the season of Lent which begins on Ash Wednesday. Somehow these coincidences of commemoration belong to that pilgrimage.

Love is in the air, to be sure. But what do we mean by love? Paul’s great hymn to love in First Corinthians, one of the great literary and spiritual classics especially in the King James version, belongs to a long and profound tradition of spiritual and intellectual reflection on the nature of love. Coincident with the sentimental, romantic and sensual effusions of Valentine’s Day, it helps to redeem such aspects of love and to deepen them into something spiritual and intellectual. There is more here than simply the contrast between the sacred and the secular; there is the idea of a connection signalling the redemption of all our loves. “If I have not love,” Paul tells us ever so bluntly and strongly, “I am nothing.” Love is all. “Charity” – meaning love – “never faileth.”

What is this love? One of our hymns captures in a phrase Paul’s meaning: “Love Divine, all loves excelling/ Joy of heaven, to earth come down” (# 470). The divine love, the love that is God, is not only beyond and above, but perfects all and every form of love, from the lowest to the highest. Thus Valentine’s Day belongs to something greater than what appears in the sentiments and feelings of the day, something which the poets emphasize over and over again. The spiritual idea is that every form of love ultimately participates in that which is greater. Our all too imperfect human loves find their perfection and truth in God’s love. As our opening hymn teaches (# 475), the whole life of Christ is the story of love written out for us to read.

Thus the more challenging feature of this conjunction of Love Sunday with Valentine’s Day is that love is something to be known, to be grasped intellectually. We are meant to be like the blind man sitting by the way-side near Jericho, the Biblical image of the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem which becomes the image of the heavenly city. He knows three things: first, that he is blind; secondly, that he wants to see; and thirdly, that the restoration of his sight is a mercy, a grace or a gift from God which he ‘knows’ is in Jesus. Wanting to see is wanting to know. And it is about healing and thus wholeness or completeness. Knowing and desiring or loving, we might say, are intimately and necessarily intertwined, a point which Plato makes in the Symposium, his great dialogue on the nature of love as the eros, the passionate desire to know. This is what we see in the blind man. In a way, he sees, like us, “in a glass darkly.” His ‘seeing’ is in what he knows and seeks. Without that there is no healing, no sight.

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“If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities”

Temperance is the virtue that concerns the mastery of our appetites, of our bodily desires. It is about self-mastery, but to what end?, we might ask, which is why it was coupled with parable of the labourers in the vineyard last Sunday about what is right; in short, justice. Courage, highlighted wonderfully and to the point of deliberate exaggeration, is set before us in today’s Epistle from 2nd Corinthians. It is complemented by Luke’s parable of the sower and the seed which considers the virtue of prudence; necessary, we might say, in relation to courage.

Courage speaks to our hearts. Cor is Latin for the heart. The cardinal or classical virtues belong to a way of thinking about the constituent elements of our humanity, about what it means to be human in terms of the activities of the soul. Thus temperance pertains to the body; courage to the heart; prudence to the mind; and justice to the proper relation of each of them without which, as Augustine suggests, the virtues become splenditia vitiae, splendid vices. Paul suggests something of this in his litany of courage, noting that he is speaking foolishly, even recklessly, even with a kind of madness. He is alluding to the problem of courage. Courage can be reckless folly if it is not tempered by prudence and justice. You can be brave but foolish.

Yet even that is not enough. The virtues undergo a kind of “sea-change into something rich and strange” (Shakespeare, The Tempest, I. ii) in these ‘gesima’ Sundays and in ways that belong to the itinerarium of our souls in the pilgrimage of Lent, itself the concentration of the journey of our souls to God within the span of forty days. In other words, these readings speak profoundly to the entirety of our lives in relation to God and one another. They reveal the deep struggles of the soul in the awareness of the limitations of its own activities. In that lies the awareness of the principle of the Good upon which all our doings depend and to which all our doings are ordered. As the Collect trenchantly puts it, “we put not our trust in any thing that we do.” This opens us out to the power of God and to the movement of God’s grace in us. Such is the transformation of the virtues into the forms of love. Divine love seeks the perfection of our human loves in and through the reordering of the virtues to their end in God.

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“The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple”

Candlemas is a wonderfully multi-layered feast of interrelated concepts and themes. It marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter. It celebrates the intersection of what will become the Old and the New Testaments. Thus it complements the truer meaning of last week’s feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, which belongs at the very least to the beginnings of the emergence of Christianity yet happens entirely within the context of Israel.

Even the title is a conjunction of themes: “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple commonly called The Purification of the Saint Mary the Virgin,” at once a feast of Christ and of Mary. Its proper name for Eastern Orthodox Christians is hypapante, meaning meeting: the meeting of Old and New, of young and old, of men and women, of aged Simeon and old Anna, of a child and a mother, of Joseph and his mother in wonder, of prophecy and fulfillment, of suffering and revelation. There is a wonderful complexity to the images of this feast. We should be glad of its contraction into the simplicity of Candlemas, a blaze of light in the bleak midwinter signalling life and joy.

Yet the meeting of themes all happens in one place, the temple in Jerusalem. The lesson from Malachi highlights the theme of the preparation of the way for the Lord who “shall suddenly come to his temple,” a coming which portends judgement and purification; in short, redemption. “They found him in the temple,” the Gospel for the First Sunday in Epiphany tells us in the story of the child Christ. Here at the age of forty days is his first journey to the temple in Jerusalem and like the childhood journey it, too, is in accord with the customs of the Law, the ritual practices of ancient Israel. These are not simply superseded but transmuted or transformed. In a way, Candlemas, like the Conversion of St. Paul, highlights the vocation of Israel in the universality of its mission. It is signaled here in Simeon’s words, quoting Isaiah, but with a startling emphasis upon the infant Christ as the embodiment of those words: “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel,” words which become the Church’s evening canticle, the Nunc Dimittis.

The temple itself takes on a whole new meaning. It is at once the sacred space that encapsulates and intensifies the teachings of Israel but extends to the sacred space that is the womb of Mary, itself an habitaculum dei. She, too, is the temple even as Christ’s body is the temple, and our bodies, too, are to be the temples of the Holy Spirit. The temple carried the temple into the temple, as a preacher once put it. There is this wonderful sense of the necessity of the embodiment of ideas, a wonderful sense of the ways in which ideas are bodied forth, the ways in which we are gathered into the light and life of God through the forms of mediation.

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Go ye also into the vineyard”

It is a suggestive and powerful image that belongs to the essential qualities of the itinerarium or spiritual journey of the soul upon which we embark this Sunday known as Septuagesima Sunday. Along with the other ‘gesima’ Sundays, it seems that we turn to the landscape of creation, literally to the vineyard, to the ground, and to the road near Jericho. Yet in all these ‘gesima’ Sundays, we are being turned to Jerusalem, to the image of the heavenly city, the city of God, in which the true yearnings of the soul are realized. What follows immediately from today’s Gospel, for instance, is Matthew’s account of what we have in the Gospel from Luke on Quinquagesima Sunday about “going up to Jerusalem” and which continues on to form the Gospel for Passion Sunday from Matthew.

In every way, these ‘gesima’ Sundays belong to the spiritual pilgrimage of Lent. As such they speak directly to the forms of spiritual discipline necessary to the quintessential itinerary of the soul to God. Something is required of us. The spiritual journey is an activity of the soul in relation to God imagined here in terms of our relation to nature, to the landscape of creation, presented as a vineyard in which we labour.

As the Epistle teaches, that labour requires self-mastery or temperance in terms of the ultimate goal which is not a perishable or “a corruptible crown” but “an incorruptible”. What we strive and labour for is not something transitory and passing but everlasting. Such is the true yearning of the soul. “For it has become clear,” as Boethius puts it in his itinerary of the soul, The Consolation of Philosophy, “that all perfect things are prior to the less perfect.” All our desires are but shadows of the human longing for what is absolute, the great all-good, as it were.

Thus the ‘gesima’ Sundays are more than mere prelude to the play of Lent and are really part of the Lenten pilgrimage but with a certain sensibility about the land; in short to our relation to the land. But vineyards? Hardly so, it might seem, in the cold of January, however much vineyards have become such a distinctive feature of Nova Scotia, particularly here in the Valley. But in looking to Jerusalem in the itinerary of these ‘gesima’ Lenten Sundays, we look to the spring of our souls even in the throes of winter.

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