Category: Sermons

“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind”

The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul more often than not falls within the scope of the Epiphany season. Paul’s phrase from Romans is part of the epistle reading for the First Sunday after the Epiphany. It captures an important feature of the Epiphany and indeed of the nature of Christian life. Epiphany as teaching, as education, and as healing is also about epiphany as conversion.

But about conversion there is no end of difficulties. We have perhaps a rather skeptical if not negative view of conversion particularly in terms of religion. Paradoxically, it is really much more a feature of contemporary culture in terms of the ‘woke’ generation demanding that things be said and thought about only in one way and in complete contempt for any other way. We assume that it means a radical break from one position to another and as such retains a sense of opposition. We forget or overlook the more interesting and more comprehensive character of conversion. It really involves two moments: first, repudiation, and second, recapitulation. In other words, the apparent dramatic change from one position to another leads to a reappraisal and a recapitulation of the former position, a way of transcending simply the oppositional.

The story of the Conversion of St. Paul, the so-called ‘Damascus road experience’, is told by Paul three times in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. In one sense, the story is personal and, in another sense, it is more universal. It belongs, I think, to the idea of epiphany as conversion in the sense of the break-through of the understanding. It is about coming to see things in a new and deeper way but that does not happen without a struggle, the struggle of the soul to grasp and understand. In other words, conversion is not a passive event, not something which just happens to us arbitrarily or inadvertently. It happens because of an intense struggle in the soul or mind. In this sense, conversion is an on-going affair. It belongs to education, to the constant transformation through the renewing of our minds, to use Paul’s pregnant, provocative and powerful phrase.

The word ‘transformation’ is literally metamorphosis, a radical change in our entire outlook and attitude of mind. That can happen dramatically or it can happen more gradually, it seems to me. Learning is about the activity of knowing in us that leads inescapably to changes in how we understand and see things. It means the willingness to see things differently, to challenge our assumptions and our attachments. This is wisdom; the realization of the problem about our attachments is a feature of the cultures of ancient Greece, of Confucianism, of Hinduism and Buddhism as well as a feature of the ascetic disciplines of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is intrinsic to the journey of the soul as a constant series of conversions of the mind to a deeper appreciation of truth. In other words, conversion is the dynamic of the mind’s engagement with the ideas that matter and which change us, the constant conversion to truth.

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“I will; be thou clean … I will come and heal him.”

How wonderful that the Epiphany season this year ends with this Gospel story of a double healing! It signals the idea of epiphany as healing. And what is the healing? Simply the Word of God which reaches out and touches us whether near and at hand or far away and at a distance. The Word is the divine Word. Epiphany makes Christ known as the eternal Word and Son of God; the Word which comes near to us. That Word which comes to us in Christ’s Incarnation is ever present and ever near and yet ever coming to us. At issue is our relation to it; in short, our awakening to its transforming presence.

Epiphany as healing highlights another truth which is being made manifest to us. It is the awareness of our brokenness, our incompleteness, and therefore the awareness of our need for healing. This is a profound spiritual truth that belongs to the doctrine of original sin. As G.K. Chesterton notes, paradoxical as it may seem, “it is profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.” Why? Because it locates the good of our humanity not in ourselves but only in God and with God in us. “There is none that doeth good, no, not one”, as the Psalmist says (Ps.14.3) and as Paul came to realize (Rom. 3.12) in the face of the self-righteousness of the Pharisees for example. The New Testament ground for the doctrine is Paul’s insight that “the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Rom. 7.19). As he goes on to say, “sin dwelleth in me.” The paradox is that to know this is to know the good from which you are separated. This Gospel shows us the next step: the desire to be healed which is the movement of God in us.

“Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean,” the leper says to Jesus and as the scene indicates, he is Jewish. After healing him, Jesus bids him go and “show thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded”. The healing happens within the context of Israel. “Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented,” the centurion says to Jesus in Capernaum. That is all he says, a simple description of his servant’s condition. Yet he has come to Jesus on behalf of another, his servant for whom he cares and towards whom he feels some responsibility, a sense of regard and concern for another. The centurion, of course, is a Roman officer in charge, nominally speaking, of one hundred soldiers. He expresses to Jesus his concern for another who is in need of healing. But he is from outside the context of Israel.

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“Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it”

This too is epiphany, “this beginning of signs,” as John tells us. It is a wonderful encounter again between Mary and Jesus, a most intriguing exchange. But what is the epiphany? What is being made known in the encounter between Mary and Jesus and between us and Jesus? How is this encounter philosophical? I want to try to redeem the idea of this encounter from what is simply existential or personal but only so as to give a proper place for the personal and the existential. It has really altogether to do with the universal which is made known through the particularities of this encounter.

Epiphany complements Advent in terms of the importance of the give-and-take of questions. Questions are about our active engagement with the idea, the quintessential philosophical idea, that there is a principle of intellection. This is the idea of knowledge itself, that things in principle are knowable. All our claims to knowledge hang on the idea of a prior principle of knowledge. How we know that we know and what we claim to know presupposes that there is knowledge, something to be known in some sense or another. I say in some sense or another because that principle is known only as the principle upon which our knowing, being, and doing depend. That, I think, is what this remarkable story shows. The encounter between Mary and Jesus is about our encounter with truth, the truth of God which is always there, always present. This story is about our awakening to that truth and its meaning for us in our lives.

Thus, the encounter is in this sense philosophical. It has to do with our coming to know what is wanted for us to know, indeed, what God wants us to know. Such is the radical meaning of the entire Epiphany season. The questions are paramount and necessary because nothing can be known except through the activity of knowing. “Knowledge is intermediate between the knower and the known because it is the activity of the knower concerning the known” (Ammonius, 6th c. AD.). This ancient insight, itself a kind of summary of Hellenic and Greek thought, challenges us. The burden of the teaching church is that it counters the dreary passivity of the consumer culture, the victim culture, and the entitlement culture, all of which are a denial of an essential feature of our humanity.

Mary’s anxious questions to Jesus on Sunday last lead us logically to this exchange. Both Gospels are read every year regardless of the length of the Epiphany season which like the Trinity season varies in length according to the movable date of Easter. Thus, these Gospel stories taken together are significant for our understanding of the radical meaning of Epiphany. This story suggests that Mary has learned what we too are meant to learn about the essential divinity of Christ, namely, what it means for him to be “about [his] Father’s business”. Here is “the beginning of signs”. Here is Mary’s response to Jesus, her openness to the divine will by way of what belongs to the radical truth of our humanity symbolised and realised in her. It is captured in our text. “Whatever he tells you, do it.”

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“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”

Did you not know? Jesus says to Mary and to us. There are things which God wants us to know. In a way that is the burden of the Epiphany season. It is about the manifestation of the essential things of God, about what is being made known to us through the humanity of Christ. Through God being with us, God himself is made known to us. The mystery lies not in what is hidden but in what is made known, an inexhaustible mystery that commands our attention and reflection.

Nothing says education quite like epiphany. It is one of many words about knowing that have been bequeathed to us from the richness of Greek philosophy in the intensity of its investigations into what it means to know. I teach a course in the International Baccalaureate Programme called The Theory of Knowledge, ToK. It focuses on the question: ‘how do we know?’ The question presupposes that there are things to be known.

Epiphany means manifestation or making known. It is altogether about the making known of the essential divinity of Christ. It marks the transition from the Christmas emphasis on the humble birth of Christ in Bethlehem to his being the Word and Son of God, to the idea of God himself, to what is being made known through his humanity. The emphasis is emphatically on teaching. The church which is not a teaching church is not the church. Epiphany recalls us to the primacy of teaching as belonging to worship.

We meet today on the First Sunday after the Epiphany within the Octave of the Epiphany. Thus the Epiphany story in all of its evocative and exotic wonder is still very much before us. With the coming of “the Magoi from Anatolia”, the wise ones from the East, from the vast expanse of Asia Minor and, perhaps, even Persian, (the term encompasses what we now know as Turkey but extends in antiquity beyond the modern boundaries of the nineteenth and twentieth century nation states). There is something wonderfully intriguing about these celebrated ‘come-from-aways’ who make the great journey, first, to Jerusalem and, then, to Bethlehem, highlighting for us the twin centers of Christian contemplation. Their journey has a twofold aspect: first, an investigative journey to find out “where is he that should be born King of the Jews” and,  secondly, a reflective journey, after having been directed to Bethlehem by the prophecy of Micah recalled by the chief priests and the scribes and by Herod who has another and more sinister motive. Beholding the child and his mother, “they fell down and worshipped him”, and, opening their treasures, “they presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” They are “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, gifts which teach us about the radical meaning of the one whom they have sought.

With the coming of the Magi the tableaux of Christmas at Bethlehem is complete but it inaugurates another journey, the journey of reflection signalled in their gifts and their departure from Bethlehem. “They departed into their own country another way.” Very little is said about the identity of the Magi. They are unnamed and unnumbered but they have had an enormous impact upon holy imagination especially in literature and in art. Legends and stories grow up around Matthew’s sparse account.  They soon come to be seen in one way or another as representatives of our humanity: one young, one middle-aged, and one elderly; and one European, one Asian, and one African, for example. In every way, the Magi themselves signal the strong doctrinal point of the Christmas mystery that Christ’s birth is for all people; it is omni populo, universal. With the coming of the Magi, Christmas goes global, we might say.

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“They presented unto him gifts”

One of the most beloved aspects of the Christmas scene is the image of the Magi-kings coming to Bethlehem. There is something intriguingly strange and exotic, something mysterious and wonderful in the coming of “the Magi from Anatolia” that complements and completes the tableaux of glory that surrounds the infant Christ in the humble lowliness of the stable scene. The Magi have captured the imaginations of the artists down throughout the centuries both in terms of the literary arts and in terms of the visual arts. Legends and stories have gathered around the Magi-kings both in numbering and naming what is otherwise unnumbered and unnamed by Matthew in his Gospel. In these works of holy imagination, something of the universal aspects of our humanity are signified with the Magi imaged as young, middle-aged, and elderly or as representative of the peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Such are the traditions of the holy exotica of the Magi.

What is said about them scripturally is sparse and yet so suggestive. Yet nothing says education quite so clearly as epiphany which is what the Magi are all about. Epiphany has to do with the making known, the manifestation of things worth honouring and worth knowing. The whole scene is about their coming to see, their coming to know, their willingness to enter into the arduous quest to know, the passion or eros to know, as Plato puts it. The Epiphany Gospel begins with an investigative journey, we might say, and ends with a reflective journey about what has been seen and heard, worshipped and honoured. They return not to Jerusalem but to their own country another way, “no longer at ease”, the modern poet T.S. Eliot suggests, because they have been changed inwardly by what they have seen.

They journey first to Jerusalem inquiring about “where is he that is born King of the Jews?” They have followed his star, following the light into the greater light. Herod in Jerusalem is troubled and worried at their coming. He gathers the chief priests and the scribes to find out the answer to the birth of this “King of the Jews”. For Herod it is really about a potential rival to his own power. The chief priests and scribes recall Micah’s prophecy about little Bethlehem. And so, paradoxically, at Herod’s direction the Magi set off to Bethlehem where they see “the young child and Mary his mother”. They fall down and worship him and, opening their treasures, “they presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh”. The gifts are, as one of the great hymns puts it, “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, gifts that teach and illuminate our understanding.

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“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass”

Christmas is more than a three-day wonder or even a nine-day wonder. The festival of Christmas extends to twelve days, an octave and a half, as it were. The readings from the Octave Day of Christmas are appointed to be used until the Epiphany. The Gospel reading from St. Luke continues directly from the Christmas morning Gospel. The shepherds, having heard the angelic Gloria, make their way to Bethlehem.

Along with the poetic, prophetic and philosophical reading from Isaiah, these readings bid us ponder more carefully and more thoughtfully the wonder of Christ’s holy birth. The shepherds say one to another, quite literally, “let us now go even unto Bethlehem and see this saying which has happened”, capturing something of the very idea of the Word made flesh, the very wonder of Emmanuel, the great Christmas name of Jesus, we might say. The emphasis of these readings is on that which is heard and seen and which occasions two things: the “mak[ing] known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child”; and the sense of wonder “at those things which were told” by the shepherds.

The quiet focus of this Gospel reading is on the activity of Mary in relation to the making known and to the sense of wonder. Her activity is the profoundly spiritual activity of the Church. It is, first and foremost, about contemplation, the highest activity of the human spirit, as Aristotle teaches. Mary is the theotokos, the God-bearer, the one who bears God into the world, the mother of God, as the orthodox faith confesses. Not the source of divinity which she cannot be but the human source of God becoming man in Jesus Christ. What that means concerns the more radical meaning of what it means to be human and in ways that challenge and counter our contemporary assumptions about the autonomous self. That more radical meaning is captured wonderfully in Mary’s fiat mihi at the Annunciation, “be it unto me according to thy Word”, her willing acquiescence, her ‘yes’ to God so central to the mystery of God with us. But it is equally captured in this Gospel reading: “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”. That is to attend to God in his Word and in his Word with us.

Pondus meum, amor meus. “My love is my weight”, Augustine famously says in his Confessions (Bk. 13). The entirety of his being, he has come to recognise, is defined by the love of God, just like Mary. Her activity here is the activity and mission of the Church. It is about our constant and steadfast attention to the Word of God and to the motions of his grace in our lives. To keep all these things and to ponder them in our hearts is to pay serious attention to all that is said concerning this child.

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“His name was called JESUS”

Christmas is more than a three-day or even a nine-day wonder. There are the proverbial twelve days of Christmas, an octave and a half, as it were. Only so, it seems, can we begin to unpack the mystery of the Incarnation and its radical meaning of human redemption. The blood of the Holy Innocents on Monday past anticipates and participates in the blood of this day. The Octave Day of Christmas locates the story of Jesus and his sacred humanity concretely within the cultic and cultural realities of ancient Judaism. The Octave marks the Circumcision of Christ, the first blood-letting of Christ in the Christian understanding, circumcision is the Old Testament ritual that has its Christian counterpart in baptism.

We are apt to be squeamish about such a direct and emphatic insistence on the physical reality of the body and that of a male, to boot. But it belongs to the logic of the Incarnation itself that Christ is “made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law” as Paul in Galatians puts it. Only so might we receive the adoption of sons, our being made partakers of God through God’s Word and Son made man. Circumcision was the ritual of Jewish identity signifying a bond with the God who is beyond all nature as its principle and signifying that in the most particular aspects of the human male. Yet such is the logic of redemption. “Christ was man born of woman to redeem both sexes,” as John Hackett (17th c.) wonderfully notes.

The readings for the Octave focus on a further signifier in this ritual, the idea of naming. In Christian contexts, baptism is sometimes called Christening. It has entirely to do with our being incorporated individually into the body of Christ. More significantly, Christian baptism has to do with our being named individually in the giving of God’s own name as Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Here on the Octave Day of Christmas, the theme of naming is emphasized by way of Isaiah and Luke. Isaiah in a lovely passage which highlights the various titles or names of the expected one who comes as child and son and whose “name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, the everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” All of these connect to Luke’s Gospel reading where Jesus at his circumcision “was called JESUS”. The name Jesus is all in capital letters, thus screaming out to us the meaning of Jesus as saviour, on the one hand, and then reminding us, on the other hand, that he was “so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” He is JESUS from eternity. This name conveyed by God to the Angels is conveyed in turn to Joseph who “called his name JESUS,” as Matthew notes.

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“Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not”

The aggressive atheist and neo-Darwinist, Richard Dawkins, argues that the God of the Old Testament is a most horrible character, to which the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks replied, much to Dawkins’ discomfort, “Ah, I see you are a Christian atheist.” The use of the term Old Testament for the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures is characteristic of the Christian understanding because of the New Testament writings.

Dawkins’ view of the Old Testament is not new and belongs to a common misconception of the relation between the Old and New Testament which overstates the differences and overplays the contrast. This is seen, for instance, in the idea of the Law versus Grace, forgetting that the Law as given by God is therefore also grace; or the similar idea of justice versus mercy or love, forgetting that mercy is just as intrinsic to the Hebrew Scriptures as it is to the New Testament. Overstating the contrasts between the two testaments belongs to a conflict narrative which pits Jew against Christian. In turn, the aggressive and naive atheism of Dawkins assumes the same conflict narrative between modern science and religion. Such is a profound distortion and misconception.

Dawkins has his precursors, ranging from Marcion in the 2nd century to Thomas Jefferson in the late 18th century. Marcion could not reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament and so conveniently edited out large swaths of the Old Testament and as well great chunks of the New Testament. For him the contrast was between love and judgement. It is a tendency that has infected many over the centuries. In the case of the 3rd President of America, Thomas Jefferson, the concern was about reason versus revelation, particularly the miracle stories of the Christian Gospels. Jefferson took his scissors to the New Testament to excise all such things leaving merely the husk of a kind of moralizing Jesus in accommodation to the precepts of human reason.

All such things reveal an attitude and a set of assumptions about God and human good. But surely, Dawkins could just have easily found the ‘Christian’ God of the New Testament equally repulsive simply in terms of this disturbing and disquieting story that is an essential part of the mystery of Christmas. If the martyrdom of St. Stephen was not enough of a wake-up call and shock to our thinking about the wondrous birth of Christ, we have the very shocking story of the slaughter to the little ones of Bethlehem, whom Herod slew in his fury, as the carol, puer nobis nascitur puts it.

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“The world itself could not contain the books that should be written”

The three holy days of Christmas illuminate our understanding of the Christmas mystery in wonderful ways. The Feast of St. Stephen on the day after Christmas reminds us that love is sacrificial and nothing less than the love which is God moves in us even in and through the sad realities of human suffering and evil. The Feast of the Holy Innocents tomorrow teaches us about innocence and purity as properties which ultimately belong to the Incarnate Christ and to the forms of our participation in his holy life, even by way of anticipation such as in the disturbing yet profound story of the slaughter of the little ones of Bethlehem. It is a hard but deep and radical saying that “thou madest infants to glory thee by their deaths” – yet how else to think about human life without its ground in God? How else to conceive the radical nature of the goodness of God who alone can make something good out of our evil?

But in between the martyrdom of Stephen and the slaughter of the Holy Innocents there is the Feast of St. John the Evangelist. With it we have the divine ground of human lives in all of their complexity. With it we are returned to the wonder of Christmas Eve in the pageant of God’s Word and Son in the Letter to the Hebrews and in John’s Prologue. With it we contemplate the radical mystery of the Incarnation by way of John’s first letter and the ending of the very last chapter of his Gospel. These endings and beginnings are nothing more than the ways in which we are enfolded in eternity, enfolded and embraced in the love of God toward us.

Our Parish tradition on the Sunday after Christmas at the 10:30am service is to have the Christmas Service of Nine Lessons. It is a glorious parade of words, of words written and proclaimed. It complements the Feast of St. John the Evangelist with its emphasis on the witness of John by way of his Gospel and letters, and perhaps his Revelation. Certainly the life of the Church and the doctrine of the Christian Faith is greatly influenced and shaped by “the doctrine of thy blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint John”. Once again, the Divine Word signals life and light communicated to us through what has been seen, looked upon, touched and handled concerning the Word of life, and heard and declared, but importantly, “these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.”

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“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

They are familiar words from the liturgy known as the Benedictus. It follows immediately upon the Sanctus and then carries us into the Anaphora, the prayer of consecration in our modern Canadian Book of Common Prayer, which begins with the words “blessing and glory and thanksgiving.” Here words which echo the Gospel of the First Sunday in Advent (and Christ’s triumphal Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of his Passion), are equally the words that end the Gospel for the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr. Such words illuminate for us the radical meaning of Christmas, the radical meaning of Christ’s holy and blessed birth.

What is always God, always with God, and always of God, is with us. Such is the meaning of Christmas. God’s Word and Son is the Word made flesh. The God who ever is is God with us. We are being gathered together under the wings of Christ’s mothering love in spite of our sins and its destructive follies. The Gospel thus complements the powerful and disturbing lesson from Acts about the martyrdom of Stephen.

He is the proto-martyr, the prototype of all martyrdom or witness to Christ, not by being stoned to death, but as revealing the qualities of loving sacrifice which are at the heart of Christmas and at the heart of the meaning of Christ as Saviour. For centuries upon centuries, this feast followed immediately upon Christmas Day, memorialized in the carol, Good King Wenceslas, “on the Feast of Stephen”. Yet in our contemporary culture, the Feast of Stephen is better known as Boxing Day. The contrast is striking. It is the contrast between endless acquisition and loving sacrifice.

What began as a tradition of care for the servants of the aristocrats who were allowed to take the left-overs of the Christmas feast in boxes for themselves on the day following Christmas has become a day of special sales, a day of getting and spending which contrasts with the idea of sacrificial giving symbolized in the reversal of roles in the carol. The king goes out into the winter snows to bring Christmas cheer to the peasant in the woods. Christmas is for all, omnipopulo, and not just for the rich.

It means the sacrifice of oneself to the good of others and it signals a change in attitude. Stephen’s death imitates Christ’s death; thus his life, the life of Christ. “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”, he says even as Christ prays on the Cross, “Father, forgive them.” The blessings of Christmas are about the qualities of Christ’s life in us; he in us and we in him, just as at Communion we pray “that we may evermore dwell in him, And he in us,” not on the presumption of our own righteousness “but in thy manifold and great mercies.” We come in the name of the Lord and not on our own. That is the blessing.

Stephen as the first martyr and proto-type of every form of Christian witness points us to the one in whom we live in the face of the world’s enmities and disorders. He shows us a new and better way, the way of endless love. Such is the love of God. With Stephen, we may say as Perpetua, a later saint, puts it, “another lives in me.”

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

Fr. David Curry
Feast of Stephen, Christmastide 2020

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