Category: Sermons

“Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people”

So the Angel says unto the shepherds. Two things stand out for us on Christmas morn, the words, “fear not” and “good tidings of great joy”. We are much in need of both, to be not fearful and to hear good news. This is Christmas.

In the lovely quiet of Christmas morning, we hear the classic and familiar Christmas story about Christ’s holy birth in Bethlehem. The details are intriguing. In the turn and churn of worldly powers, of Joseph taking Mary being great with child to Bethlehem in obedience to the civil powers of that day to be numbered, enrolled, taxed, something else of greater meaning is accomplished. “She brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn”. The story touches us with the realities of the poor and the displaced in our own times, of those who are caught in the machinations of our global world. And yet, that sad commonplace of human hardship and suffering is eclipsed by a sense of wonder. Something else is being set in motion and among the little ones of our world and day, the shepherds.

They are not the great ones in executive power and will. Indeed, the shepherds contrast completely with the elites of every age. They care for the sheep, “keeping watch over their flock by night”, we are told. It is an image of care and one with a deep resonance of meaning about the real nature of political leadership. Thrasymachus, in Plato’s Republic, argues that justice is only “the interest of the stronger”, that might equals right because they can get away with it, that shepherds are really only business men driven solely by profit, only in it for themselves. But Socrates points out that no leader can simply be in it for himself, that political order radically depends upon the common good, that justice is for all and not simply for the few. This ancient insight and idea continues to challenge us in our own world and day. The care of the sheep is the shepherd’s primary and defining task or vocation to which everything else is but secondary.

And so it is fitting, if I may use a term beloved by medieval theologians, that the news of Christ’s holy birth, the birth of Mary’s son, should be made known to the little ones of the world and not to the magnificoes, the great ones. The shepherds are a standing criticism of political misrule and injustice by leaders in every age. They are especially receptive, we might say, to the higher form of justice that Christ’s birth portends and establishes. Such is the wonder of the Gloria which the angels sing and teach to the shepherds and through them to us. Peace on earth and good will toward men is the opposite of a world of abusive power and the domination of the few over the many.

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“In him was life, and the life was the light of men”

The words of life and light counter our world of death and darkness. This is Christmas. God is life and we have no life apart from God in himself and God in us. God is light, the light which “shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not”, cannot overcome nor overwhelm the light. Darkness and death are overcome and understood only in the life and light of God. This is Christmas. The mystery of God is the mystery of God with us.

This is Christmas, the counter to our fears and hatreds masked as care and compassion or, vice versa, care and compassion masking our fears and hatreds of one another. In the mystery of Christmas we behold one another in a new and deeper way. We behold one another in God and that makes all the difference.

Christmas makes known to us with a kind of simple clarity the abiding and eternal truth of God as life and light. Word, life, and light all spiral down to the nativity or birth-day of Christ, to the making known in the world of time and space the eternal nature of God as life, light and love. God gives himself and is none the lesser for it. God’s life and God’s light belong to the self-diffusive nature of the Good. “In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him.” This is Christmas. It counters not only the fears and anxieties of our world but also our enmities and divisions that separate us from one another in our fear of the other. Herein is love, the love which bestows dignity and meaning upon our lives in the embrace of one another in the light of God’s love.

Christmas is a rich collage of images both in terms of Church and culture. It is easy to reduce it all to sentiment and emotion, the feelings of the season. The greater challenge is about the lifting up of our hearts and minds to the light and truth that the story of Christmas presents to us. That is, perhaps, why on Christmas Eve we have such thundering and magnificent words in the Epistle reading from Hebrews and in the Prologue of John’s Gospel. Nothing about the babe in the manger, nothing even about Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. The entire focus is on the life and light of God made known in the Word made flesh and upon what we behold in that eternal word dwelling with us. “We beheld his glory”, we are told in parenthesis, “the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth”. The Word which was in the beginning, which was God and which was with God is the creative Word without which nothing was made that was made. The Word which is the life and light of God is Christ Jesus, unnamed but proclaimed in parenthesis, almost as an aside, as “the only-begotten of the Father”, as the eternally begotten of the Father. There was not when he was not.

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“My Lord, and my God”

The Collect for the Feast of St. Thomas in the week of the Fourth Sunday in Advent reveals the significance of Thomas for our approach to Christmas. It is about doubt leading to certainty. As such it helps us to think about doubt in a more positive and even metaphysical way that belongs to the larger traditions of philosophy and religion. The doubt of so-called doubting Thomas is really about the forms of intellectual inquiry, about wanting to know and in ways which challenge our assumptions about what we think we know. Thomas, the Collect observes, was “doubtful” about Christ’s Resurrection. No body, no incarnation, therefore no resurrection, we might say. Hence the reason for this feast and Gospel in the days leading to Christmas, to the Incarnation. Resurrection and Incarnation are indubitably and necessarily connected, it seems.

Descartes in the early seventeenth century uses doubt in an hyperbolical way in the quest for certainty. He highlights the uncertainties or the doubtfulness about what we can know simply through our senses in order to bring us to realize that our knowing anything at all depends upon the knowledge of ourselves as thinking things which in turn depends upon the knowledge of God as good and not a deceiver if we are to have any knowledge whatsoever whether of mental or physical things. Calling into question what we ordinarily take for granted leads us to a deeper understanding of the metaphysical principles upon which thought and being depend. Perhaps we can see the biblical Thomas as a kind of precursor of such forms of philosophical inquiry.

For the doubt of Thomas is really a kind of questioning about the reality of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity, an engagement which opens us out to the reality of the mystery of God who cannot be contained to the limits of human knowing, on the one hand, and to the spiritual truth about our humanity and its differing capacities to apprehend truth and meaning, on the other hand. The so-called doubting of Thomas provides “the greater confirmation of our faith,” as another Thomas, Thomas Aquinas, reminds us and which the Collect seems to suggest. The doubt of Thomas is “for the more confirmation of the faith”.

That “greater” or “more confirmation of [our] faith” is captured in Thomas’ words to Christ, “my Lord, and my God.” We are not told whether he reached out with fingers and hands to touch; we are only told what he says. Yet his words are testimony enough. They convey the reality of the encounter with the risen Christ. He can only be risen if he first was dead and he can only have died if he had a body. Christmas is all about the wonder and marvel of God becoming man, the Word made flesh. “Without forsaking what he was, he became what he was not,” as St. Athanasius puts the essential mystery of the Incarnation. With The Feast of St. Thomas we glimpse something of the larger nature of that mystery. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is not just about Christmas; it embraces the entire life and work of Jesus Christ, the work of the redemption of our humanity.

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Link to the audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-communion for Advent 4

“And he confessed, I am not the Christ.”

There is a certain wonder, a sense of excitement and intensity, in the readings for The Fourth Sunday after Advent. “The Lord is at hand’, Paul tells us, near at hand. “I am not the Christ”, John tells us while pointing us to the one “who cometh after me” who is greater than me “whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose”. The questions all seem to circle around the idea of Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah, upon whom the hopes of Israel all depend especially in the context of Roman oppression and persecution, but also taking on a more eschatological tone. Such things are seen through the lens of scriptural prophecy such as in Daniel and Ezra about the vindication of Israel by God. Yet the witness or record of John explicates those things through another register. “Behold the Lamb of God”, John says, upon seeing “Jesus coming unto him”, “which taketh away the sin of the world”, something more universal.

This ending phrase takes us back to the Gospel for The Sunday Next Before Advent, at least in our modern Canadian Prayer Book, where it is the opening or beginning phrase. We have come full circle. Yet that is the point of Advent and Christmas; it is all about our circling around and into the mystery of God and of the mystery of God with us. John’s witness is his confession of Christ as the expected Messiah albeit in a new and deeper register of meaning with the idea of sacrifice in the one who bears in himself all of the sins of our humanity and world. “Behold, the Lamb of God”, John says.

But what are we looking for? Advent is about the awakening to the desire for what is absolute, for God, without which all our other desires turn to conflict and animosity, to division and enmity. Nothing is more clear in the climate of endless division and self-certainty that defines our post-Christian secular culture. John is pointing us to something very different and yet universally significant. He identifies the one who comes as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Can we really delude ourselves about the sin of the world? Can we really imagine that the sin of the world is everybody else except us? In a way, this is our modern dualistic dilemma. We demonize the other in order to assert ourselves and in so doing deny God. What you have done unto the least of these my brethren, you have done unto me, Jesus says in Matthew’s Apocalyptic vision. This is the contradiction of our age. The autonomous self confronts every other autonomous self. To put it simply, we are not self-complete but interdependent and dependent upon God.

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Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Advent 3

“Art thou he that should come?”

“How shall this be?” Mary asks the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation. Advent, too, is all annunciation, we might say. “Art thou he that should come?” John the Baptist in prison asks Jesus by way of two of his disciples. Jesus in turn asks the multitudes with repeated intensity about John the Baptist, “what went ye out for to see?” The questions of Advent call us to account because they call us into the presence of God at once always present and yet always coming to us. The question the city asks in the Gospel for Advent 1, namely, “Who is this?”, is really the question about  ’who is God?’ and ‘who is God with us?’

At issue is our awareness of God, the divine light enlightening the darkness of our minds again and again in the ways of our coming to God. The questions illuminate an important feature of our humanity. They signal the desire to know, the eros, the passionate desire to know, as Plato teaches. We are created to know ‘each in accord with the capacity of the beholder to behold’. Man desires and delights to praise God, Augustine teaches (“laudare te vult homo… ut laudare te delectet”). It belongs to our nature to know, Aristotle says. That in turn presupposes that there is something to be learned, something to be known. “For thou hast created us for thyself, and our hearts are restless – inquietum – until they find their rest in thee” (Augustine, Confessions 1.1).

This goes a long way towards countering several different modern dilemmas about whether education is in any way possible. The question that John the Baptist has his disciples ask Jesus informs the wonderful and beautiful Matin Responsory of Palestrina, sometimes sung at the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, quoting the Gospel directly, “Tell us, art thou he that should come?”

The great readings of the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols are all prefaced by introductory phrases that give the service a clearly Christian context and meaning. The two readings from Genesis, the three readings from Isaiah, and the reading from Micah all locate certain themes in terms of their fulfillment in Christ signalled in the readings from Luke, Matthew, and John. The whole sequence forms a narrative arc going from the story of the Fall to the radical meaning of redemption in the Word made flesh, from separation to restoration, as it were, but all through a kind of meditation on the meaning of God with us, Emmanuel. But that idea of the Word made flesh coming to us through the pageant of the Word written and proclaimed belongs to a larger consideration about the nature of education and about our lives in faith. In other words, though the service is explicitly Christian, it is not exclusively so since it touches upon the logos-centric nature of God as Word, as intellectual-principle, as it were, summed up in the 9th Lesson from John’s Prologue, itself the great Gospel of Christmas.

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Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Advent 2

“My words shall not pass away”

Today’s strong and rather disturbing words seem to complement the apocalyptic nature of our current times. “There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring”.  They seem to speak to our fears and worries, “men’s hearts failing them for fear”, to our anxieties on account of “looking after those things which are coming on the earth”. How, we might ask, is this comforting? How is this good news if even “the powers of heaven shall be shaken”? Such things must surely unsettle us. They seem to convey the opposite of hyggelig, the Danish word for coziness and material comfort, the cuddle and huddle of the sentimental and the sensual that seems to define our age.

There is a profoundly cosmic quality to these Scriptural warning notes which signal the Advent theme of judgment at once coming to us and ever present. Yet these disturbing warnings about judgement are intended to provide us with patience and comfort and, even more, with hope. Such is the burden of Cranmer’s Collect which derives from the Epistle and from Jesus’s claim in the Gospel that “my words shall not pass away”.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all religions of the Word. They are all logos-centric. They are all quite explicit about the primacy of the Word of God as revealed to our humanity. They are all revealed religions which place a high value on the Word of God as mediated to us through written texts, through Scripture, whether the Scriptures are the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, comprising the Torah or Law, the Prophets and the Writings for Jews, or the Arabic Quran for Muslims, the recitation of Allah’s will by the Angel Gabriel (Jibril) to Mohammed, or the Scriptures for Christians which embrace the Old Testament (largely written in Hebrew) and the New Testament written in Greek. Scripture means that which is written. What is revealed is for thought, for serious philosophical reflection.

“Whatsoever things were written aforetime”, St. Paul states, “were written for our learning.” He is referring to the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures and not what will come to be the New Testament, the Christian Scriptures, the greatest number of which will paradoxically come from him. He states an important principle about revealed religion. It is something written down for our learning. This grants a priority to reading, especially reading out loud such as in our liturgy because God, as Cranmer puts it, “has caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning”.

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Link to the audio file for the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for the First Sunday in Advent

“Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light”

“The real desire of our soul is for what is greater than herself,” the pagan philosopher, Plotinus tells us. Augustine, in a similar vein, begins his Confessions with the observation that “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee”. Confession is really about conversion, our turning to God, our turning back to the one from whom we have turned away.

Advent is our awakening to the Word and truth of God at once ever present and yet always coming to us. It is the awakening to what is always prior and always greater than us. Such an awakening is the movement of God coming to us and our coming to God. This twofold movement is really one. We can only turn to God because of God’s turning to us. Such is the awakening to what is greater than ourselves.

Advent awakens us to hope even in the face of darkness and despair, of hope against hope, we might say. “Because I do not hope to turn again,” begins T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday, the day which marks the beginning of the penitential season of Lent. It explores from the side of the negative the necessity of our being turned illustrated from the side of the positive in the gradual psalm for today. “Turn us, O God our Saviour,/ and let thine anger cease from us” and with greater intensity, “wilt thou not turn again and quicken us,/ that thy people may rejoice?” The psalm complements both the Epistle and the Gospel. God’s turning to us means both a casting off and a casting out, casting off “the works of darkness” and casting out of “all them that sold and bought in the temple,” a misuse of the things of God. The casting off and casting out reveal what is prior and positive, the nature of the Good that is God which ignorance and sin deny.

God’s Word is light and freedom. This is shown in the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle recalls us to the pageant of God’s Word as Law which enlightens and frees just as Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem marks the beginning of the pageant of human redemption in his Passion. There is an awakening to the desire of our souls in the question “Who is this?” at the same time as there is the awakening to the awareness of our misuse of the things of God. We are being called to account but this is our freedom and real dignity.

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Link to the audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Sunday Next Before Advent

“Then Jesus turned”

Times of transition are times of renewal. There is a wonderful and profound complementarity in the turning of Jesus to us in today’s Gospel and the repeated refrain of turning in the Introit and Gradual Psalm for this day. “Turn us, O God our Saviour,” and with greater intensity, “Wilt thou not turn again and quicken us, / that thy people may rejoice in thee?” In Psalm 80 appointed for Morning Prayer, we also pray that God may “turn us again”. It is a repeated refrain with an increasing degree of intensity culminating in the phrase, “turn us again, O Lord God of hosts;/show the light of thy countenance, and we shall be whole.” Jesus turns his countenance, his face, towards us and that both sums up the whole course of our lives and inaugurates a renewal of our lives in the God in whom we find our wholeness.

We neglect the wonder of this Gospel passage. It belongs to the beginning of John’s Gospel and yet we read it at the near end of the Christian year. In John’s Gospel it is the first time in which Jesus speaks to us directly. It is the directness of his address that is so compelling. Jesus steps out of the background and into the foreground of our lives. He is highlighted by John the Baptist: “Behold, the Lamb of God.” He is our ending and our beginning.

“In my beginning is my end,” begins T.S.Eliot’s poem East Coker in his Four Quartets yet it ends with “In my end is my beginning”. There is a necessary kind of reciprocity and interchange between endings and beginnings. As he puts it in Little Gidding, “The end is where we start from.” This states simply but profoundly a philosophical commonplace, especially in terms of Aristotelian causality. The end, purpose or goal, is the necessary starting point for the understanding of any and all forms of change and development, and for the understanding of what things are.

And so this Sunday marks an ending and a beginning. That is its wonder and its beauty. It is redire ad principia, a return to a principle, a kind of circling back to the one from whom all things do come and to whom all things return. Is that return just about the same old, same old, the dreary rut of our usual patterns and our usual complaints, our sins and follies? Or is it about the possibility of a new and deeper understanding of who we are in the sight of the God who turns to us? This Sunday looks back and looks ahead only because it grounds us in the eternal abiding of God with us. Jesus turned to the disciples, to us. God turns us. The two movements are more than complementary; they are two movements in one. God’s turning to us is our turning to him.

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Link to the audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 23

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

This ethical teaching speaks directly to the nature of our obligations towards one another and towards God. It seems straightforward and clear but as with most ethical teachings it is more about a way of thinking and acting regardless of circumstance and situation. Hence it is necessarily challenging. It is a kind of Solomonic judgment akin to Jesus’ equally famous words in the story of the woman taken in adultery: “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” In other words, this ethical teaching calls us to account with respect to the love of God and the love of neighbour. It is about a distinction within a unity like the two tablets of the Law, the Ten Commandments. Duties to one another are bound up in our duties to God. Such things belong to self-knowledge.

But what does that mean in our post-Christian culture and world? This New Testament saying becomes a critical part of a later discourse about the relationship between the sacred and the secular which plays out in such different ways at different times. There is, for example, Ambrose’s rebuke of the Emperor Theodosius, or the Investiture Controversy of the Middle Ages, or the Erastian mode where the church is a department of the state with or without restrictions on its teaching. Theology and politics are more often than not bound up with one another as the phrase cuius regio eius religiowhich defined early modern Europe reminds us – ‘whosever the region his the religion.’ But here in North America, Christ’s words usually refer to the so-called separation between church and state which is mostly misunderstood. In its modern and particularly American context, that separation means nothing more than that no ecclesiastical denomination, religious organisation or group would have any privileged standing politically speaking. In other words, no established church, state sponsored and with a certain special status. It doesn’t mean no religion or no sense of the idea of God or of ethical commitments. It is an endeavour to counter the sectarian forms of religion that have sometimes contributed to division and hatred.

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Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 22 on the Octave Day of All Saints

“Shouldest not thou also have had compassion?”

This Gospel question complements and even intensifies the teaching which is at the heart of the Beatitudes. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” The various readings provided for the Octave of All Saints along with the readings for today have very much to do with mercy. You get what you give, but if we are not merciful? Then there can be no mercy for us. As with all of the Beatitudes, the question is about what is moving in us. The question is about the inner qualities of soul, about the matters of character. What kind of person are you?

As such these readings speak to the contemporary confusions about the self and show us once again that the knowledge of the self is bound up with the knowledge of God. Character is about our lives as lived for something greater than ourselves without which we cannot be a self. Mercy lies at the heart of the story even in the denial of mercy.

Mercy is not about being nice. This is one of the common misconceptions about mercy. Being nice doesn’t really mean much of anything. A more serious misconception is to suppose that mercy overrides justice, that mercy and justice somehow stand in opposition to each other. One of the readings provided for services in the Octave and on patronal festivals is the Matthaean Apocalypse. It is a vision that seems to be harsh and judgemental in the separation of the sheep and the goats but really belongs to the mercy of being called to account. It provides the scriptural basis of what becomes the seven works of corporal mercy. In being called to account we discover that our actions towards one another reveal our relation to God. “Inasmuch as ye have done this to one of the least of these my brethren,” Jesus says,  “ye have done it also unto me.” Our actions reveal our hearts and minds. That is exactly the point of the Gospel of the unforgiving servant. It is an example from the negative about the importance and the necessity of showing mercy.

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