Category: Sermons

“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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“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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