Category: Sermons

Link to the Audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 16

To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge

Paul in Ephesians lays out wonderfully the principle that will underlie the itinerary of the soul in what becomes the Trinity season in the liturgy of the Church. It is about our being “rooted and grounded” in love. We journey in love and bylove to love in the growing awareness of God and of ourselves, mysteries which by definition we can never fully exhaust. The journey of the soul is something inward albeit conveyed by our reflection upon things outward in creation and even through suffering and tribulation, our own tribulations as well as others. The love of God is learned through things positive and negative; both lift us up into the mystery of God which is always greater than ourselves and the world.

Love is learned, not just felt. The passage from Ephesians, like Paul’s great hymn to love in 1st Corinthians, belongs to the intellectual traditions of amor which in turn draw upon the Platonic eros, the passionate desire to know, so profoundly explored and explicated in the Symposium. Love leads us to the Good, to the knowledge of a principle of beauty and goodness upon which every part of the journey, from the very lowest to the very highest depends. It is what Paul speaks of here as “the breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of love, the love of God running through all things. In the Christian understanding, it means “to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge;” in short, to know what is beyond our knowing.

Such a way of thinking challenges our contemporary assumptions about an instrumental, mechanical, and technocratic reason which reduces us all to objects, to things. That is really a kind of anti-love, a betrayal of the love of God which is the ground of our very being and knowing. It is very much the dilemma and problem of our age. Yet “wisdom taught me,” the Wisdom of Solomon says, but are we teachable? Are we able to learn about the unum necessarium, the one thing necessary which has to do with our life in God and God in us, the very things which the Scriptures, the liturgy, and the Faith would teach us? And how will we learn the lessons of love?

In today’s Gospel, we have a story which teaches the meaning of our being “rooted and grounded” in love, the love that passeth human knowing at the same time as it is the truth of human knowing. What we are presented with is a healing miracle of restoration to life motivated by compassion, a very rich and powerful concept, however much it is misunderstood. The theme of compassion is rooted, even grounded, in something intellectual. “When Jesus saw her, he had compassion on her.” It is a recurring expression – seeing followed by compassion followed by love in action.

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Link to the Audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 15

I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus

Such marks in the body are like large letters. They tell a story. What is written in our lives? In the Gospel, Jesus tells us three times not to be anxious. Yet we live in a most anxious time. Tyndale’s translation, which shaped the King James version which came to be used in the Prayer Book in 1662, has Jesus bid us “be not careful.” This may seem strange until we realize that we are only too often full of cares, overburdened with fears and worries, “distracted with much busyness,” like Martha, literally unable to attend to the “one thing necessary.” In modern times, the older concept of carefulness has been replaced with a more loaded and psychological word, anxiety, the Englishing of the German angst.

That has, I think, a different kind of intensity. It belongs to a more modern preoccupation with ourselves and with a kind of dread, at least as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche see it, a fear about ourselves in having to commit, to think and to act in an alien and meaningless world. The anxiety is in us, in the negativity of our modern subjectivity and self-consciousness; incurvatus in se, as turned in upon ourselves we are in dread of ourselves, uncertain about how to act or how to be. The title of W.H. Auden’s 1947 prose poem, ‘The Age of Anxiety,’ has come to define our culture as the culture of anxiety, at once wanting to connect and be with one another in a kind of sympathy and yet altogether uncertain about how that can be accomplished. We are, perhaps, no longer “assured of certain certainties,” in Eliot’s phrase but sense the need to be taught as he puts it, “to care and not to care,” to learn to care in the right way. The current culture of outrage only adds to our anxieties and divides us from one another in endless antagonisms. Anxious about being anxious only adds to our anxieties.

In our obsessions and busyness, our fears and worries, we lose something of ourselves. The paradox of being too caught up in ourselves is a loss of ourselves, a forgetting of who we are in the sight of God and his providence.

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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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