Category: Sermons

Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 6

“Jesus said, Love your enemies”

Today’s Gospel ends where the Gospel for Trinity IV began. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” Both readings belong to the Lucan counterpart to the Beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel. Christ’s Sermon on the Plain in Luke complements Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. Mountains and plains, death and life, friends and enemies. It seems that  we confront a series of binary opposites in these readings and yet something greater overrides and unites. It is mercy.

The radical nature of that mercy is shown in this Gospel. It is about reconciliation and reciprocity which is a dominant feature, it seems to me, of the great philosophical religions of the world but expressed most clearly and emphatically here. “Love your enemies,” Jesus says. The Gospel opens us out to one of the commonplaces of the ethical understanding that appears in other cultures, namely, the ethic of the golden rule. “As ye would that men should so unto you, do ye also unto them likewise.” The underlying assumption is that we properly and rightly seek the Good for ourselves and for one another.

As Plato notes no one seeks what is evil, only what is good, however mistaken we might be about what we think is good. But to command us to love our enemies takes that thought much further because it implies that opposition and enmity, antagonisms and even hatreds, still persist. To love your enemies is to love those who hate you. Love is in the face of those oppositions, not in their overcoming. Or to put it another way, to love your enemies requires transcending ourselves. It means to see ourselves in a new light and consequently to see others not just as enemies but as friends, as companions, as one with us in our common humanity. I in the other and the other in me.

I am trying to place this radical and essential Christian concept within a larger ethical framework because it is, I think, at once a commentary on the universality of the golden rule and an intensification of it in a most remarkable way. It is, at first glance, an impossible ideal. The question is how can it be possible to love our enemies? How is this impossible to be made possible? For if it is not possible then Christ’s commandment is mere nonsense.

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Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 5

Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord

Peter’s confession here is paradoxically the condition of our abiding in the Word and truth of God. It signals the wonder of the grandeur of God in the beauty of the world and the beauty of human affairs but only through our awareness of our emptiness, our nothingness in and of ourselves which stands in such stark contrast to the abundance of the divine life. His confession complements his exhortations to us in the Epistle to “be of one mind” and to “sanctify Christ as Lord in [our] hearts.” Such things are only possible through his confession here.

Peter’s confession is usually understood to refer to his response to Jesus’ question, “Whom do men say that I am?” to which Peter replies, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” His insight into the divinity of Christ solicits, in turn, Christ’s words, “Blessed art thou, Simon son of John: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it  unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” But that doctrinal confession complements this confession of sin. Why? Because all confession of sin is equally a confession of the truth of God. Confession is equally praise, an acknowledgement of God’s truth without which there can be no acknowledgement of our sins and failings. As such Peter’s awareness of the gulf between himself and God is the condition of our being with God, of our abiding in the holiness of his Word. That theme of abiding in the Word and Truth of God belongs to our sanctification, to our holiness as found in our abiding in the holiness of God.

How does that work? Through our attention to the things of God in our midst. “The people pressed upon him to hear the word of God,” Luke tells us. Do we? Or we are caught up in all of the false forms of knowing that belong to our technocratic world? We are easily caught up in an instrumental reason that limits us to what we think is practical and useful only to find ourselves as the willing slaves to the devices and desires of our lives. The devices are even now quite literal and they so easily define us. But Jesus “sat down and taught the people out of the ship.” What was that teaching? “Master” Peter says, “we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing; nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.” What was that word?

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Audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 4 in Petertide

Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam that is in thine own eye,
and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye

The blind leading the blind is a common image mostly familiar to us from Luke’s ‘Gospel of Mercy’ in the parable where Jesus speaks about leaders leading others astray. It has its antecedents in the prophetic criticisms of the leadership of Israel such as “You have turned aside from the way; you have caused many to stumble by your instruction”(Malachi 2.8), or “Those who guide these people have been leading them astray” (Is. 9.16) and, “His watchmen are blind; they are all without knowledge”(Is. 56.10). The image has very much to do with a critique of our claims to know. “Eyes have they and see not” extends the image to all of us in our blindness about what we think we know when in fact we are ignorant, and, yet, judgemental about others, hence the moral point about hypocrisy; judging others while exempting ourselves from the same judgment, unable to see ourselves in the other.

The image of the blind leading the blind is not unique to Christianity. It belongs as well to Siddhartha Gautama’s strong critique of Hindu religion out of which arises classical Buddhism. For him the Brahmin caste, the gurus of the Upanishads, are the blind leading the blind. He rejects the Brahmins even as he rejects the caste system altogether in favour of a more inclusive ‘enlightenment’ available for all.

The image of the blind leading the blind belongs to a self-critique of reason and knowing. Perhaps nowhere is it better illustrated than in Sophocles’ great tragedy, Oedipus Rex (Wayne Hankey, Wisdom belongs to God), and in ways that speak to our current confusions about the self and the modern managerial technocratic culture which consumes us. Oedipus thought that he knew who he was both in terms of his parents and in his confidence about his form of knowing when in fact he was blind to both. The play is about how he comes to know that he didn’t know. He comes into collision with himself in thinking that his form of knowing, a kind of discursive reasoning, is absolute, only to discover that it is at best limited and partial. His discovery happens through the encounter with prophecy, in his case, the blind prophet of Apollo, Teiresias, who, though blind, nonetheless knows the truth about Oedipus. The play explores how Oedipus comes to know this truth and in so doing discovers that his form of knowing belongs to a higher form of knowing; it is incomplete and partial in itself. To use a later language (Boethius), he comes to know how ratio participates in intellectus.

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Rejoice with me

“The deepest impulse of the human soul is for that which is greater than herself,” the great 3rd century (AD) pagan philosopher, Plotinus observes. His statement looks back to the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and has its resonances in Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, and a host of others in the spiritual imaginary of the philosophical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It counters the narcissisms and obsessions with the self that are part of contemporary culture: ‘look at me looking at you looking at me,’ as it were. The point is that everything is not about you, about the sovereign self in its splendid isolation. You are not the centre.

What Plotinus highlights is intellectual humility signaled in the Epistle and illustrated in the Gospel. Humility is the condition of grace, our openness to what is greater than ourselves, the condition of being exalted in due time, “after that ye have suffered a while.”

Without this insight, we misunderstand the Gospel. The 15th chapter of Luke’s Gospel presents us with three parables, two of which we heard today: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and then there is the concluding parable of the prodigal or lost son. All three are about repentance, metanoia, a thinking after the things of God, the things that are greater than ourselves. The word metanoia is used several times here. It has very much to do with our being lost and found, being lost from God and the company of our humanity with God and then being found and restored to that company. The parables are told to convict the judgmentalism of “the Pharisees and Scribes” who murmur against Jesus because of the company he keeps with “the publicans and sinners.” Yet they are those who “drew near for to hear him.” They are seeking what is greater than themselves as opposed to the smug self-righteousness and conceit of the Pharisees and Scribes. What is a common complaint and failing of religion is now a defining feature of our culture in its obsessions with its “assurance of certain certainties” (T.S. Eliot, The Preludes IV) about self-identity which create endless division and enmity.

Metanoia or repentance is about our being turned back to what is greater than ourselves in which we find the deeper truth about ourselves. It is found in communion. The Church is not simply a human construct; it is, divinely speaking, an article of Faith, “the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,” as we profess in the Creed. The lost sheep and the lost coin are returned to the company of others. The most profound image for the Church is that of the body of Christ. Rejoice with me means to rejoice in “the blessed company of all faithful people” as our liturgy puts it (BCP, p.85), reminding us that salvation or being whole is not simply about the individual self but about our incorporation into the mystical body of Christ.

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What manner of child shall this be?

The birth and death of John the Baptist frame our summer sojournings. His nativity is celebrated just after the summer solstice; his death in late August, in the days of the closing down of summer, we might say, at least here in the Maritimes! Both celebrations are grounded in the witness of the Scriptures. Moreover, his nativity has a special cultural relevance for Canadians as marking the anniversary of the landing of John Cabot in Newfoundland in 1497 and carrying over into Dominion Day or Canada’s birthday celebrated on July 1st. He is the patron saint not only of Quebec but of Canada.

Such are some of the spiritual resonances of a very unusual and yet a most significant figure in the Christian understanding. What exactly do we celebrate in the nativity of John the Baptist? The Collect shows us: his “wonderful birth” which points to the greater wonder of Christ’s birth; his “preaching of repentance”; his “doctrine and holy life” concentrated on the themes of “constantly speak[ing] the truth, boldly rebuk[ing] vice, and patiently suffer[ing] for the truth’s sake”. It sums up eloquently and economically the whole of the scriptural story of John the Baptist.

Such themes belong to the life of the Christian Church and Faith. John the Baptist is the forerunner of Christ, vox clamantis in deserto, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, “prepare ye the way of the Lord.” whose unusual birth, itself a kind of miracle, points to the purpose of his very being. He is “the Prophet of the Highest” (Lk.1.76), a prophet and yet “more than a prophet,” as Jesus says (Mt. 11.9), pointing to John who is pointing us to Jesus. His ministry is summed up in the preaching of repentance. What is that except our turning back to God from whom we have turned away?

The feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist awakens us to the deep and true desire of our humanity for something beyond ourselves without which our lives are empty and meaningless. Plotinus, the great 3rd century pagan philosopher, observes that “the deepest impulse of the soul is for that which is greater than herself.” Such ancient wisdom looks back to the teachings of Plato and Aristotle yet resonates profoundly in the philosophical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It speaks to the dilemmas of our day wherein we are engrossed and wrapped up in ourselves, in our own sense of self and personal rights, privileges and sensual enjoyments. Such things betray this deeper wisdom and leave us in despair and sorrow.

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Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 2

Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God

You’re invited! To what? To the banquet of love. “Love bade me welcome,” as the poet, George Herbert, wonderfully says. “Come unto me, all that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you,” Jesus says. “Come and see,” he says to the disciples of John. “Come, for all things are now ready,” Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel parable. The whole of the Christian life is about the invitation to love. The kingdom of God is not about power and prestige; not some sort of patriarchy, even on ‘Father’s Day’. It is about the divine love which perfects and renews, refreshes and restores the broken loves of our broken lives. “Herein is love.”

And that love is powerfully made known to us. “Hereby we know love.” How? “Because he laid down his life for us.” And because he laid down his life for us, “we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” Thus we see the ever-present aspect of reciprocity and mutuality that belongs to the Christian Faith. Thus we see the paradoxical nature of sacrifice without which love is nothing. We are to act out of what has been shown to us and known by us in the story of Christ crucified, the book of love opened for us to read. Even more, as John again in his First Epistle tells us, we are to love not just “in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.” Something is required of us if love is to be real for us and in us.

Yet “my soul drew back” from Love’s invitation, as the narrative voice in Herbert’s poem says. Why? Why do we not respond to God’s invitation? Is it a failure to pay attention? To God? To the meaning of God in our lives? Such are our modern concerns. God, it seems, is irrelevant to us. Or is it the church which has become irrelevant both to God and to us?

In the current situation of Covid-19, the churches have been caught in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, it belongs to the Christian Faith to invite people to come and see, to come and be fed, to come and be refreshed by God’s Word and Sacrament; to be companions with God and with one another – companion literally means with bread, com panis. We are companions in the breaking of the bread; that is our blessedness. On the other hand, that has been refused by the civil and medical community as being dangerous because of the pandemic. And understandably so. How do we respond to the demands of the invitation which belongs to the Church’s essential proclamation? The last several months have been revealing on that score.

The churches have been effectively shut down both by the state and by the acquiescence of ecclesiastical authorities. It is not the first time that countries, communities, and churches have faced plagues and threats to human life. It may be the first time that the Church in the form of the churches has effectively been denied any real voice and any way of responding to such things pastorally and theologically. Never has the sacramental and pastoral ministry been so completely proscribed except in times of outright persecution. The ministry, being what it is, has, at times and in some places, endeavoured to find ways to honour the dictates of the state while also ministering to souls. Gone are the times when the clergy were often on the front-lines of care and in jeopardy of their own lives. Mercifully, there have been few fatalities of Covid-19 among the front-line health-care workers.

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Link to audio file of Matins & AnteCommunion for Trinity 1

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love

The great mantra for the Trinity season captures the divine self-relation which Trinity Sunday celebrates. That mantra is taken from today’s Epistle reading. The mantra, given as the opening Scriptural sentence for the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, is familiar. “God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God in him.” Since 1662, the Epistles and Gospels were taken from the King James Version of the Bible where abideth is translated as dwelleth, echoing perhaps the great Christmas Gospel in which we hear that “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” literally, “tented among us” which suggests something more transitory. “Abideth” suggests something more lasting which is most appropriate for the Trinity season which has very much to do with our abiding eternally in the love of God himself and in the interior realizations about the nature of that love.

In a way, the whole long Trinity Season is about the lessons of love taking root and abiding in us, growing in us, bearing fruit in us. So many of the images of the season, as we will see, are organic and agricultural. We are returned to the land, to the ground, as it were, and yet where we are is the ground where divine love is meant to be moving and living in us. Not because of any special quality in our wills and thoughts, but simply because of God’s love moving in us. God’s love is prior to our loves and without God’s love moving in us our loves are more than incomplete; they are, in fact, unlovely. That is the reason, I think, for this powerful Epistle reading from John that accompanies the equally powerful Gospel reading from St. Luke of the parable of Dives and Lazarus.

The argument and exhortation about God’s love in the Epistle is actually complemented by the Gospel story which highlights the problem of not loving God through our ignorance and indifference towards one another. In a way, it is all about paying attention, or not. “There was a certain rich man … and there was a certain beggar, named Lazarus.” The rich and the poor. These are the classic images of inequality which continue to bedevil our world and day and contribute to the current protests about racism and injustice. What could be more obscene than the grotesque wealth of the global transnational corporate elites, the wealth of a very few, who are virtually unaccountable to the political community? All white males, too, we might add. The parable is, to be sure, a critique of the privileged and the rich in relation to the poor and needy. But more profoundly, it calls attention to how we see one another and how we act or do not act towards one another.

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In thanksgiving for the reopening of Christ Church for worship: Laus Deo

“Behold a door was opened in heaven”

God is communion. God is dance. Because “a door was opened in heaven”, our doors too are opened and we enter into the dance of the Trinity. “This is none other but the house of God; this is the Gate of Heaven.” It is written on the very walls of our church.”Behold!” The whole point and being of the Church is about our being opened to God and to our lives in and with God. And God is communion, the communion of the Trinity, and God is dance, the dance of reason and love, the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology so wonderfully expressed in the Athanasian Creed; in short, the ways in which God is utterly other and beyond yet intimately connected to all reality. To think God is to know and love God in the mystery of God’s own being and life. The Creed we just proclaimed provides nothing more or less than a way of thinking about how God is at once more and beyond and yet present and with us. Here is the love that thinks and loves all things in its own loving and thinking. It is about the dance, the dance that connects Christianity to the insights and concerns of the world’s religions and philosophies about a divine principle whose self-relation is the ground of its relation to all else.

We have all gotten used to the strange and awkward dance of social distancing in these unusual times. But the greater dance is the dance of the Lord. “I am the Lord of the Dance” is the most favourite hymn of students at the Chapel at King’s-Edgehill, but even more radically, God is the dance. The technical theological term is perichoresis, the mutual indwelling or dance of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The doors are opened that we might celebrate the great wonder of God in himself without which God’s relation to us is mere idolatry and foolishness. How wonderful that our doors should finally be opened during the continuing concerns of the Covid-19 outbreak to celebrate God in himself. “Let us thus think of the Trinity!”

Think God. Nothing could be more counter-culture than this. We have missed out on the actual corporate celebrations of most of Lent, of Palm Sunday and Holy Week, of Easter and Eastertide, of Rogation and Ascension, of Ascensiontide and Pentecost, to be sure. But in the providence of God, we have been able to break our eucharistic fast, and never more wonderfully than on Trinity Sunday, the great feast of God in the majesty of himself, the feast which is the great gathering of all things into their source and ending, God as Trinity: God in the mutual indwelling life of Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Perichoresis signifies God in Himself, God in his own super-essential and utterly self-complete and self-sustaining life which is life essential for us and in every way.

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Click here to listen to audio file of the Services of Mattins & Ante-Communion for Pentecost

“If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father,
and he shall give you another Comforter”

“Another Comforter”, Jesus says, and one that “may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of Truth”. It is a wonderful and profound statement about God and about our life with God. Jesus is the Comforter who has redeemed our humanity by gathering all things into his love for the Father. In his redeeming work, we are recalled to our end in God. Why then “another Comforter”? A substitute for Jesus? A consolation prize? No. It is all about our life in the Spirit of God. Such is the great wonder and mystery of Pentecost or Whitsunday. It is not just God for us but God in us.

“To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace”, Paul wisely tells us, words which perhaps speak to the fears of death in our current Covid dilemmas. Pentecost looks back to the Jewish celebration of the giving of the Law on the fiftieth day after Passover; the Ten Commandments as the universal moral code of our humanity and our freedom, our freedom to and with God in his will for us. In the Christian understanding, Pentecost is the celebration of the descent of the Holy Ghost or Spirit upon the disciples gathered in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, a celebration of grace which does not annihilate nature and law but perfects them both. The Holy Spirit is the love-knot of the Father and the Son. What joins them now joins us with them.

Wind and fire. These are the sensible and physical images that convey something invisible and spiritual. Such too is the logic of the sacraments; outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. It is not just Christ who is the Alpha and Omega of our lives. “The Holy Ghost”, as Lancelot Andrewes says (Andrewes, Whitsunday Sermon 1610), “is the Alpha and Omega of all our solemnities”, all our rituals of remembrance, all our life sacramentally in memoria. “In His coming down all the feasts begin”. He goes on to highlight the essential presence and work of the Spirit in the mysteries of the Faith. “At His annunciation, when He descended on the Blessed Virgin, whereby the Son of God did take our nature, the nature of man”, the beginning of the Incarnation. “And in the Holy Ghost’s coming they end, even in His descending this day upon the sons of men, whereby they actually become ‘partakers of the divine nature’, the nature of God”. Pentecost is the Spirit’s “last and greatest coming”, he suggests, for in this text by Jesus we have “the promise and the performance”, the accomplishment of what belongs to the truth of our humanity. In the coming down of the Holy Spirit we are made “partakers of the divine nature”, if we keep his commandments.

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“The end of all things is at hand”

We have been living in apocalyptic times, it seems, times of certain uncertainties and of a kind of wariness and outright fear. Certainly, things as we have known them socially, economically, and politically have come to an end; things have changed and will have to change with respect to the global world. In what way remains unclear. We are, it seems, no longer “assured of certain certainties” and perhaps not so “impatient to assume the world”, as T.S. Eliot puts it in Preludes IV, written in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1911. That world would be shattered by the First World War and the Spanish Flu. How do we face this sense of the ending of all things?

Lady Juliet D’Orsey offers sage advice to the narrator and to us as readers in Timothy Findley’s classic novel, The Wars: “You have to clarify who you are by your response to when you lived”. That requires thoughtfulness and reflection, a kind of active waiting. Ascensiontide Sunday is very much about a sense of ending but with a kind of joyful expectancy. The ending of all things is not always negative and fearful. It is not static and inert. It is not death. It is both ending and beginning, a return to a principle in which we find life and meaning.

Ascensiontide helps us think about the end-times which is really about our end in God and with God. “I go”, Jesus says, “to prepare a place for you” that “where I am there you may be also”. These are wonderfully comforting words, used not only in Burial Service (BCP, p. 591) but also in the Supplication for the Dying (BCP, p. 588). The Ascension is the homecoming of the Son to the Father and it signals our home, our end with God. It is our spiritual home that embraces and orders all that belongs to our daily lives. It clarifies who we are in the sight of God. Ascension marks the ending of the story of Christ incarnate, having come forth from the Father, and come into the world and now having left the world and returned to the Father. It marks an ending in the sense of completion and fulfillment of purpose, consummatum est for us and for him (Andrewes, Whitsunday Sermon, 1614). His return to the Father is our joy and exultation, “the exultation of our humanity”, as the Fathers of the Church constantly emphasise. We are given a vision of our end in God, a vision of the homeland of the Spirit.

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