Category: Sermons

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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Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted

The Feast of All Saints embraces the Solemnity of All Souls. This is our comfort and consolation. We are reminded that the great multitude which no man can number includes the vast array of souls who have died and gone before us. True enough. But the Solemnity of All Souls confronts us with the limits of human memory.

Our memories are fragile and finite. We have in our parishes various ways in which we try to remember those who have gone before us in our churches, our communities and our families signalled in memorial plaques and window dedications and so forth. The sad and bitter truth is that our memories are poor and fragile things. At the time, there is the feeling of the intensity of loss but in the course of time that fades away like the leaves of autumn. We confront the sad failing of our memories.

This is hardly a comfort. Yet All Souls is the strongest possible counter and comfort to our failing memories. It reminds us in no uncertain terms that God’s remembering is not like our remembering, fragile and incomplete, more about forgetting than unforgetting. All Souls signals the profoundly comforting idea that all souls are known and loved in God. That is surely our comfort, our strength and our salvation.

It belongs to the radical meaning of the second Beatitude. “Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted.” Not only do we need not be defined by suffering or sorrow, by loss and death, but neither are we defeated and discouraged by our failures to remember those who were once so dear to us. Why not? Because they are remembered in God, known and loved in God. And so are we. The remembering of All Souls recalls us to who we are in God’s eternal loving and knowing of us. That is a great comfort and consolation in our shattered and broken world. All Souls is about God’s remembering love moving in us. That is always greater than our sorrows and loss.

Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted

Fr. David Curry
Solemnity of All Souls (transf.)
November 3rd, 2020

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Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for All Saints’/Trinity 21

“And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed…”

There is a nugget of truth in every form of nonsense, even a nugget in the nonsense of Halloween in our contemporary culture however far removed from its pagan and Christian origins. The nugget lies in the very idea of dressing up in masks and costumes which are about a kind of playful imagination about the self, about who you are. At the very least, it presupposes that you are a self, a person, a ‘you’ that is more than the forms of appearance that you might present. And as we saw last week, in considering the ways in which God calls us to account both in terms of the marriage-feast of the only-begotten and the story of Cain and Abel, we are taught the great lessons of an ethical understanding at the heart of which lies the insight that self-knowledge and the knowledge of God are inseparable and belong to the nature of our fraternity and life together in the body of Christ.

In that time of year when leaves lie scattered on the ground in heaps of burnished gold, and in the culture of scattered souls and minds, we are recalled to the wonderful vision of the unity of the spiritual community of our humanity. Who we are is seen in what we are called to be. We are called to the Communion of Saints, to who we are in the will of God. Here is the great redemptive vision of our humanity, the counter and the corrective to all of the fearful divisions and uncertainties of our confused world endlessly caught in division and animosity precisely through the assertions of diversity at the expense of unity.

Halloween means the Eve of All Hallows’, all the Saints, “a great multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues,” as John the Divine tells us in his marvellous vision. We are part of that great company in and through our liturgy and life in Christ. This feast provides the true spiritual ground for our human freedoms and rights, our freedoms and rights as persons irrespective of the assertions of identities and particularities of race, religion, gender, whatever. Ultimately, there is a greater truth and unity to our humanity expressed in and through the diversities of personality but not because of the competing identity claims of contemporary culture. The true sense of self is found in our life in God and with one another in the communion of saints which includes those who have gone before us with the mind of Christ. In some places we have a visual reminder of this in churches situated in a churchyard. The original Christ Church, for instance, was placed within what is now known as the Old Parish Burying Ground. The churchyard reminds us of the greater community of spirit to which we belong.

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Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 20

“Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.”

The days are evil, Paul tells us in Ephesians. It is a sombre sounding note in what otherwise seems to be a rather encouraging exhortation about being “filled with the Spirit”, about “speaking…in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs”, about “singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord”; referencing directly the cultic practices of our liturgy in the Holy Eucharist, “giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”. The ethical imperative of this is clearly signalled. It is about “submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God”.

This requires constant vigilance and instruction. “Be ye not unwise but understanding what the will of the Lord is”. We are at once fearful and anxious about our world and day and yet complacent and indifferent to the things which matter most. As such we acquiesce and contribute to the evil of our days. This is perhaps the tragedy of the Church in the failure to attend to the principles that belong to its truth and witness.

Something of what that means is seen in the rather disturbing scene presented to us in the Gospel story of the marriage-feast of the only-begotten. This Gospel reminds us in no uncertain terms about the seriousness of the invitation to the banquet of divine love and the consequences of our casual indifference; about our being “cast into outer darkness” with “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. Cast out even when you think you are in. Why? Because of our unreadiness which is nothing less than our indifference and complacency about spiritual things especially with respect to our corporate life in Christ, to what belongs to our fraternal and social friendships in their deepest meaning, as Pope Francis suggests in his latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. Simply put and I think obviously so, we don’t take church seriously because we don’t take God seriously. Ours is the culture of the shrug ‘whatever’. Where God does not matter nothing matters including ourselves. We neglect the idea of human agency and responsibility which is grounded in our life with God.

Something is required of us. What is required is our active attention to God in Word and Sacrament. Being serious about God is about being serious about ourselves as moral and intellectual agents; in short, an ethical understanding which shapes our thinking and doing. We are being called to account. This is something profoundly positive which is why this Gospel story figures so prominently in the second exhortation to Communion (BCP, pp. 90-92). We are “to consider the dignity of that holy mystery, and the need of devout preparation for the receiving thereof, so that ye may come holy and clean to such a heavenly Feast, in the marriage-garment required by God in holy Scripture, and be received as worthy partakers of that holy Table.”

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Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for St. Luke/Trinity 19

Then opened he their understanding

St. Luke is the Church’s spiritual director especially during the Trinity season, it seems to me, at least in terms of the quantity of readings from his Gospel appointed for the Holy Eucharist. But more than just the quantity of readings, there is the quality of these readings, captured best, perhaps, in Dante’s lovely phrase about St. Luke as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. This captures wonderfully something about the quality of the man and his writings. Today is the Feast of St. Luke.

In the Gospel reading, we are told that: “He opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures.” As with the Epistle and Gospel for Trinity 19, the emphasis is one what Jesus wants us to know; “that ye may know,” in the context of the healing of the paralytic in the face of animosity and skepticism. But then, what is that understanding? The Gospel is emphatic: “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer, and rise again from the dead the third day; and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name among all nations.” Powerful words which provide us with a sense of the tenor of his Gospel. Death and resurrection, repentance and forgiveness. Could anything be more concise, more clear, and more complete?

We know very little about St. Luke. His “praise is in the Gospel,” the Collect tells us, meaning that St. Luke is mentioned in the Scriptures of the New Testament, quite apart from the traditional attribution of the Third Gospel and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles to his mind and pen. The Epistle reading specifically places him in the company of Paul. “Only Luke is with me,” he says in the context of a discourse about evangelism. Elsewhere Paul identifies him as “the beloved Physician” (Col. 4.14).

The Collect, drawing upon these Scriptural hints, identifies St. Luke as both “an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul”. A healer, to be sure, but by way of something which must strike us as rather strange. The healing is by way of “the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him”. Healing is by way of teaching.

Health care and education are two critical areas of concern in our contemporary culture. The traditions of medicine and education have been strongly and profoundly shaped by Christianity. Hospitals and schools in our western world have their roots and being in explicitly religious institutions arising out of the medieval European world, however much they have become secularised.

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Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 17

Walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called

And what is that vocation? “Friend, go up higher,” as the Gospel suggests, pointing to the idea of life as an ascent to something more, to something better, to what is the Good. Yet Epistle and Gospel concur that the way up higher is by way of humility “with all lowliness and meekness,” and even “with long-suffering,” as Paul puts it. “He that humbleth himself shall be exalted,” Jesus says. The way up seems to be the way down.

The way up is only accomplished through humility not presumption. And so this loaded phrase is the antithesis of presumption and pride at the same time as it sets us on a pilgrimage to God and places us with one another and with God. It counters all of the obstacles of human perversity and self-righteousness. Jesus here challenges a narrow and restrictive understanding of the Sabbath. It is made for man, not man for the Sabbath, as Jesus memorably says elsewhere. Something of what that means is captured in the phrase, “Friend, go up higher,” which in turn signifies the vocation of our humanity. It is about our life to God, in God and with God and so with one another in “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

To go up higher is to enter into what God seeks for our humanity. It means a certain kind of conversion of the soul – our being turned around and turned to God. The turning here is through dialogue, even if it is one sided. “They could not answer him again to these things,” Luke tells us about the Lawyers and Pharisees who appear to disapprove of Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath. Like Socrates, the questions of Jesus confront us with ourselves. Only in that confrontation can we begin to make sense of the positive injunctions of the parable which follows this encounter between Jesus and the Lawyers and Pharisees.

“Friend, go up higher” has nothing to do with the overrated and disastrous pre-occupations of the idea of endlessly upward mobility in our world and day. The most over-used phrase in our current discourse is “going forward.” We might be better off in going back to what we have lost if ever we might hope to be going higher. Higher, though in what sense? Does this mean a repudiation of our quotidian lives, our lives as lived in the messiness of the everyday? Quite the opposite. But it does suggest a far different orientation than what is implied in the false idol of endlessly expanding economic growth and the even more disastrous illusions of the ideology of progress which has so bedeviled our culture.

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There was war in heaven

In a world of wars and division, it may be too much to contemplate the idea of war in heaven. The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels reminds us of the spiritual warfare between good and evil. But it doesn’t simply leave us with opposition and division, with war and enmity. In a way, we are saved by grammar. “There was war in heaven, “ not there is! But on earth? In human hearts? That is, I am afraid, another matter. This remarkable feast reminds us of the struggle for the good in human hearts and human lives. The struggle, as Revelation suggests, is cosmic, a struggle against spiritual forces, as Paul indicates, against principalities and powers.

Angels belong to the created order. They are, we might say, God’s thoughts in creation. The Gospel reading touches upon an important intellectual consideration: “angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven,” Jesus says. The Gospel reading recalls us to the biblical witness to angels as spiritual beings that are with us in some sense. They are, as the long philosophical tradition of reflection teaches, pure spiritual beings, sempiternal, defined by their will and attention to God. But Revelation reminds us of the fallen angels, of sin and evil as the principle of the denial of God and of their own creation. It is expressed in a series of terms: “the great dragon”, “that old serpent, called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.”  Such images take us back to Genesis and to the conditions of creation in the commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and to the subsequent story of the Fall with the wiles of the serpent whose questions insinuate doubt and denial of what is called emphatically “good”, indeed “very good.”

The questions of the serpent to Adam and Eve deceive by suggesting an alternative explanation at the expense of what God has actually said. Thus, the Genesis story sees sin and evil as rooted in disobedience. The further ramification of such disobedience is seen in the angelic revolt of that great dragon, that old serpent (recalling Genesis), called the devil and Satan. Another term is Lucifer, meaning the light-bearer who becomes the prince of darkness because he literally turns his back on God and on the vocation and truth of his own being. Such is the radical nature of evil, a denial of the Good upon which our being and knowing utterly depend. It is absolutely self-contradictory; it depends upon that which it rejects. Such is the folly of sin and evil. It means to live in contradiction to the principle of the Good which is by definition greater and prior. The passage from Revelation shows us the victory of St. Michael and All Angels over all that opposes the truth and goodness of God. The victory is through the blood of the Lamb, a reference to Christ and his passion and sacrifice for us, a victory which is cosmic in its extent and force.

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