Category: Sermons

And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me

The shadows of the Cross reach forwards and backwards, it seems. It is the central and defining image of the Christian Faith; everything is concentrated on the Cross. There we behold the realities of sin and love.

I am struck by the wonderful coincidence of the Feast of the Holy Cross on September 14th with the early beginning of the School year and the return to academic studies. The Feast itself as marked in the Prayer Book Calendar as Holy Cross Day refers to either the Invention of the Holy Cross associated with the celebrated visit of Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine to Jerusalem, and to her purported discovery of the Holy Cross in the early 4th century, or the 7th century celebration of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. These are, obviously, post-biblical events that belong to the living tradition of the Church, and yet reveal something about the symbolic significance of the Cross in the Christian understanding.

For some the Cross is an uncomfortable and disquieting symbol of human cruelty and civilisational barbarism. Yet it is something more than just that “strange and uncouth thing,” as George Herbert calls it (‘The Crosse’). Somehow there is in the idea of the Cross and in its representations a “beauteous form,” as John Donne suggests (‘What if this Present Were the World’s Last Night’). It is, in the Christian understanding, the meeting place of lovers. As Lancelot Andrewes beautifully puts it, the cross is liber charitatis, the book of love opened for us to read. It is the great symbol of God’s reconciling love in the redemption of our humanity, the recovery and restoration of our fallen being; of creation restored to God, we might say. The title, ‘invention,’ is suggestive of what belongs to intellectual life, to the discovery of truth and goodness. Invenio crucis. And in the exaltation, the lifting up of the Cross, we are reminded of Christ’s great teaching about the Cross. “And I, I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me” (John 12. 32).

Whether or not, Helena actually discovered the actual cross or pieces thereof upon which Christ was crucified is beside the point and unknowable. Who could possibly know and upon what evidence? There are things which can’t be known empirically or historically; things which are lost in the shadows of time.

We see but in “a glass darkly,” in enigmas and mysteries, in the shadows. The great wonder of Holy Cross Day is that something is glimpsed and known in and through the shadows of our broken world. If creation is revelation then so too is redemption. Something is made known under the shadows of the Cross.

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Link to Audio File for Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 14, 2020

“One … turned back, giving him thanks;  and he was a Samaritan”

Living in the Spirit means walking in the Spirit, Paul says in Galatians. It is an interesting distinction. Living means more than merely existing, it seems. Walking suggests something intentional, something more about our lives, something more that moves in us without which we are not fully alive. That is what is shown in the Gospel. Walking in the Spirit is about the Spirit of God moving in us, living in us.

This Gospel story follows wonderfully upon last Sunday’s reading.. Once again it has to do with Samaritans, the outsiders within Judaism which Jesus often uses to criticize Israel in her failings about the Law. Last Sunday, as we saw, the so-called Good Samaritan is Jesus Christ. He unites the love of God and the love of neighbour, the divine and the human. The love of Christ living and moving in us is the unity of divine and human alive in us. What appears as a double motion: on the one hand, human; on the other hand, divine, is the same motion viewed from different standpoints. It is the same thing here: it is all the one turning back and all God in him. Such is the dialectic of human and divine which defines the Christian religion.

Today’s Gospel is the classic story of thanksgiving. This Gospel is appointed for Thanksgiving Day, at least in terms of national thanksgiving. In our more primitive and yet profoundly natural realities, thanksgiving is associated with the harvest, Harvest Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving in its larger sensibilities combines the natural and the spiritual, the political and the practical. Holding together the sense of the political with the sense of the natural belongs to the deeper understanding of thanksgiving, a moving from the natural to the political as embraced within the spiritual, we might say.

Voltaire, in his great classic of the Enlightenment, Candide, considers a utopia, a fictional place, an ideal society, in which the only religion is that of thanksgiving. The inhabitants of El Dorado give thanks to God who provides for them all that they need. Simple. And, in a way, profound. But it falls far short of the much more radical doctrine of thanksgiving which Luke presents to us here, and which in Luke’s telling occasions a kind of wonder in Jesus himself.

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Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 13

“Mary hath chosen the better part which shall not be taken from her”

The Christian ethic of compassion is illustrated most profoundly in the familiar parable of the so-called ‘Good’ Samaritan, so-called because the word, ‘good’, actually doesn’t appear in the text but rightly belongs to its meaning and interpretation. We take it for granted, perhaps, and don’t always appreciate its deeper and more radical meaning. “Go and do thou likewise” is our usual and immediate take-away but without realizing just what that means. In the illusions of our pragmatism and over confidence in practical matters, we oppose the practical to the theoretical and miss the nature of their necessary interrelation and reciprocity. As such our practical activities are often as not more like the distractedness of Martha as opposed to the collectedness of Mary.

A corrective to our simplistic approach to the parable of the Good Samaritan may be found in thinking about the connection between it and what follows immediately upon it in Luke’s Gospel here in Chapter 10. What follows is the story of Martha and Mary, a story which illuminates for us the reciprocity between action and contemplation which is so easily overlooked when considering the parable by itself. Yet the parable is set within a powerful ethical consideration about the understanding of the Law in its profoundest sense as God’s will for our humanity, our good in its deepest meaning. Thus Mary’s better part corresponds to the question and answer between Jesus and “a certain lawyer” about our reading and understanding of the Law.

“A certain lawyer”, “a certain man”, “a certain Samaritan.” The repetition of the word ‘certain’ is suggestive. It is the language of fable and myth but with an ethical purpose. The certain man and the certain Samaritan belong to the parable which is told in relation to Jesus’ encounter with a certain lawyer. In a way, these are all types or symbols. Jesus is being put to the test about the purpose and meaning of the Law.

The question asked to test him is “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” The question, even in the hostility of the encounter, reveals something profound about the Law. It is not simply about the ordering of our practical and worldly affairs; somehow it belongs to our life with God in his eternity and to our end with God. This brings out the implicit universality of the Law. Thus readings which pit Jew against Christian in the interpretation of the parable are limited readings. Jesus’ questioning response brings out the deeper and more radical truth of the Law. His immediate question in response to the “certain lawyer,” who is symbolic of the tensions and questions within late Judaism about the ethical extent and meaning of the law, is precisely about “what is written in the law” and about how we read or understand what is written. Ultimately, it results in the exchange out of which comes the parable as the illustration of the true understanding of the Law in its purpose and intent.

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Link to the Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for the 12th Sunday after Trinity

“Ephphatha”

This is one of two Gospel readings from Mark in the Trinity Season, one on Trinity 7 about the feeding in the wilderness, and this one today about the healing of “one that was deaf and had an impediment in his speech.” I know, one of you will remind me that there is another Gospel reading from Mark on the 18th Sunday after Trinity. That is true, but that was simply about substituting Matthew’s account with Mark’s in the modern Canadian Prayer Book of 1962, probably on the assumptions of biblical scholarship about Marcan priority, namely, the idea that Mark’s Gospel is the earliest of the four Gospels to be written. Such thinking came to influence preaching about that time. It is a modern concern which has very little to do with the way in which the Scriptures have come down to us, to what they mean theologically, and to how we read them. But never mind.

What is interesting about this Gospel reading is that it is entirely unique to Mark as is the word, “ephphatha”. It is an hapax legomenon, meaning that it is the only time the word appears in the Scriptures. It is an Aramaic word, one of a few Aramaisms that are found in the New Testament, and mostly in Mark’s Gospel. Aramaic is a Hebrew dialect which was probably spoken by Jesus. Here Mark gives us the Aramaic word and its Greek translation or transliteration, “be opened.” Words matter but in what way? Heidegger claimed that “language is the house of being”  but as one of my mentors, James Doull noted, the ancients knew that “language is not the house of being but needs its own interpreter”, a reasoning mind. It is the meaning of words that matters most and that always requires thinking and interpretation.

It is an intriguing and touching story about the nature of our engagement with God, an engagement which is at once sacramental and healing. The lesson learned is that “he hath done all things well; he maketh both the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak.” We are the deaf and the dumb, deaf to the Word of God in the witness of the Scriptures proclaimed in the liturgy and life of the Church; dumb in our speech about the grace and glory of God at work in human lives. Our sufficiency is not in ourselves “to think anything as of ourselves” but in our openness to the grace of God whose glory is at work in us. “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,” which is what we see in this story. Ephphatha is about our being opened to the life of God in us.

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Link to the Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for the 11th Sunday after Trinity

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself

We live in a world awash in hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement, a world ethically challenged and endlessly divided. This Gospel concentrates the ethical problem and its solution rather wonderfully.  “Two men went up into the temple to pray,” Jesus tells us in a parable. Luke’s introduction provides the key interpretation. Jesus says “this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous.” The whole point of the parable is to highlight our self-delusions about our sense of our own self-righteousness and thus to point us to the wisdom which is humility.

The key lies, I think, in the attitude of the Pharisee which, quite apart from the Pharisees, a strict and devout religious sect within Judaism which Jesus elsewhere commends, illumines the whole problem, a problem which is very much part of our age and world. He “prayed thus with himself”. To be blunt, that is not prayer. Prayer is not simply with ourselves. That is the problem, the problem of the narcissism of our age, the problem of our endless preoccupations with ourselves and our denials of one another and of God. No parable illustrates this problem more fully than this and no parable points us as a result to the much more radical and freeing nature of prayer.

The paradox is that when we are like the Publican, who “standing afar off, and wouldest not lift up his eyes so much unto heaven, and smote his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner,” then we are more truly ourselves and nearer God. Prayer, simply put, is not with ourselves but with God in whom we are with one another and with ourselves. Only as broken can we be made whole. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise,” as the gradual psalm reminds us (Ps. 51.17). It serves as the mantra for Lent from the great penitential Psalm 51; there it belongs to our turning back to God in repentance, here it is about our being with God in prayer, in humility, the ground of wisdom.

The illustration is heightened by the arrogant self-absorption of the Pharisee’s prayer. He calls attention to himself at the expense of another whom he puts down. In his self-absorption and braggadocio, he despises the Publican. Nothing reveals more profoundly the problem of being closed off to God and to his mercy and grace. Nothing reveals more profoundly the utter vanity and emptiness of ourselves when we are turned in upon ourselves. It is the definition of sin; incurvatus in se, turned in upon ourselves to the exclusion of God and one another, and even more to the putting down of others. Total self-delusion is the point which Jesus is making.

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Audio File for the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 10, 2020

“He beheld the city and wept over it”

“By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Sion,” the Psalmist says in a great and moving passage. A psalm of the exile, it captures vividly the sense of longing for what was and the difficulty of how to carry on in the face of loss. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” We cannot help but feel the pathos in the lines, the sense of remembering what was once deeply treasured and now seems utterly lost and gone. In another work of epic poetry, written by Virgil many centuries after the Psalms, Aeneas, ship-wrecked upon the Libyan shores of North Africa, comes to the great city of Carthage. He sees engraven upon the walls of Queen Dido’s palace the story of the destruction of Troy, from which he has fled to found the new Troy which will be Rome. “Is there,” he says to his comrade, Achates, “anywhere on earth that does not know the story of our troubles?” These are, he famously says, “the tears in the nature of things,” the human sorrows that touch our minds (Virgil, Aeneid, I. ll. 460-463). Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.

These moving passages from the Hebrew Scriptures and pagan antiquity contrast and illuminate the lacrimae Christi, the tears of Christ. “He beheld the city and wept over it.” What follows is viewed as a prophecy about the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD by the Romans under Titus and recorded by the historian Josephus. No doubt, that event was the occasion for the tears of many in Israel.

What are his tears? In John’s Gospel, “Jesus wept” at the grave of Lazarus, his friend. He enters into our sorrows and sense of loss. His tears are tears of compassion. In the story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain, “when he saw her he had compassion on her,” we are told. His tears which precede the raising of Lazarus are tears of compassion, too, it seems. But is it so here in Luke’s account of his weeping over the city of Jerusalem? Why does he weep? Because “thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” It is a poignant statement, an indictment of Sion, of Jerusalem. Why? Because of our ignorance of what belongs to our truth. The Gospel here needs to be seen not only in terms of the Gradual Psalm but in the light of the Epistle.

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Audio File of the Service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 9, August 9th, 2020

“Now these things were our examples”

These examples are found in the wilderness. It is where we are overthrown, defeated and in despair, on the one hand, and enlightened and redeemed, on the other hand. “I would not that ye should be ignorant,” Paul tells us. At issue is the question of discernment, itself a form of prudence. The question is about learning in the wilderness. How do we learn?

Some find today’s Gospel rather difficult and disturbing, confusing and bizarre, and, well, not particularly positive and uplifting, and understandably so. I rather like it partly for all of those reasons but even more because it challenges us about spiritual learning and discernment. There are things to be learned from wickedness and evil, even from the example of the one whom Jesus calls the “unrighteous steward.”

In a way, these readings are about the realities of the wilderness or the world in which we find ourselves and, more importantly, how we understand ourselves and our world; in short, how we think and learn. Paul, in a wonderfully mystical and rhetorical flight of theological insight, sees Christ as the abiding principle even in the Exodus wanderings in the wilderness of the People of Israel. God, in a lovely image, “stands over” and “goes before” the People of Israel “in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night” (Numbers 14.14); the cloud of God’s shekinah, the glory of his presence, is the sign of his providential care. It belongs to the story of the Passover and the Exodus of Israel, to the lessons in the wilderness which culminate in the Law given to Moses.

Yet the imagery is given a Christian form; it becomes all part of the greater Exodus of Christ, at least in a Christian understanding. The Exodus events prefigure Christian Baptism and the Christian Eucharist, the forms of our incorporation into the life of God through the sacrifice of Christ: “baptized unto Moses in the cloud, and in the sea;” eating “the same spiritual food,” drinking of “that spiritual rock that followed them; and that rock was Christ.” It is a remarkable tour deforce of imaginative spiritual reasoning that inaugurates a long tradition of interpretation which sees the Hebrew Scriptures as anticipating and participating in the story of Christ. What is veiled in the one is revealed in the other. Quod Moyses velat, Christus revelat, as the saying goes. Moses strikes the rock at Horeb and out comes water that refreshes the People of Israel; Christ on the cross is pierced by the centurion’s spear and out flows water and blood which becomes a Patristic commonplace as symbolic of the Sacraments of Baptism and Communion.

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Audio File of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 8

We are children of God

O sacred Providence, who from end to end
strongly and sweetly movest! shall I write,
And not of thee, through whom my fingers bend
To hold my quill? shall they not do thee right?

Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes,
And put the penne alone into his hand,
And made him Secretarie of thy praise.

George Herbert’s poem, Providence, begins with a scriptural text upon which the whole poem hangs, a text from the Wisdom of Solomon: “Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily and sweetly doth she order all things”, fortiter et suaviter, strongly and sweetly (Wisdom 9.1). It is also the only scriptural reference in Boethius’ great classic, The Consolation of Philosophy, written in 529 AD while in prison, falsely accused and awaiting his death; the work itself is a treatise on Providence for that is our great consolation regardless of the times and circumstances.

Herbert writes of Providence with the awareness that this is itself a providence. Providence bids him write and that bidding extends to all humanity. It belongs to us to write of Providence. It is our vocation as “children of God”. It is about who we are in the sight of God.  Writing here is a metaphor for living out what we believe and know.

Yet the question is not at first how well do we write but what and how do we read. After all, Solomon, Boethius, Herbert, and a host of other thinkers and writers have all read and learned something of God’s Providence whether in Scripture, history, philosophy, or people’s lives. Only so can they then write of it as what moves so strongly and sweetly. Only then can we read so that we, too,  might be the “secretaries of thy praise”. But what and how do we read?

To contemplate the Providence of God is to discover the will that wields the world and beyond. It is what we acknowledge in the Collect: “O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth”. But what does it mean to contemplate the Providence of God?

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Audio file of the Services of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 7

“How can anyone satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness?”

“I can’t get no satisfaction,” Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones sang way back in 1965 in one of the great classics of rock’n roll. Yet what he sang long ago, the disciples hinted at even longer ago. Even if the song is, well, ungrammatical, and, no doubt, sexually charged, we get the point. Whether it is “useless information” on the radio, or dubious advertisements on the television, or “ridin’ round the world,” “doin’ this” and “signin’ that” in the parade of worldly fame and in the pursuit of sensual pleasure, such things just don’t satisfy. The phrase captures the human situation rather well. It serves to point to what we need and want and which is shown in the Gospel. We seek something more, something which only God can provide.

Today’s readings are particularly suggestive and wonderfully instructive about the realities of human life. Slaves to sin become servants of righteousness. How? By being freed from sin, the wages or outcome of which is death. How are we freed from sin? By becoming the servants of God. How is that accomplished? By “the free gift of God [which] is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Thus the wilderness of the world becomes a kind of paradise where we are satisfied with what the Lord provides for us; “bread in the wilderness.”

From slaves to servants. The shift in words is entirely about translation. It is really the same word that Paul uses throughout this passage from Romans; doulos in its various noun and verbal forms. In short, we are slaves either to sin or to righteousness, even slaves to God. Yet the transition from sin to righteousness signals something profound. Being slaves to God is our freedom. The classic Collect at Morning Prayer for Peace echoes the Epistle: “O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom” (BCP, p.11). Perfect freedom is found in our slavery or service to God “in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life.”

We live in the now of God through his Word and Sacrament. This is the counter to the false satisfactions of the ideology of progress which assumes that we are always  making everything better and better; always progressing upward and onward, always going forward, as we constantly hear. But neither is it simply its opposite, namely that we are always making everything worse and worse, regressing, as it were. These are two complementary yet contradictory ideologies that are duking it out in our current discontents. They are overly simplistic civilisational narratives united in one thing: no satisfaction. Either we haven’t got there yet in our attempts at progress or we are utterly condemned, forever and always, to misery and death, the death of ourselves and the natural world. These are the two competing narratives. No satisfaction either way.

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