Category: Sermons

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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And when he is come, he will reprove the world

It is a remarkable phrase that Jesus uses about the coming of “the Comforter, the Spirit of truth” who “will guide [us] into all truth.” What does it mean to “reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgement”? The word runs a gamut of meanings from ‘convince’ and ‘refute’ to ‘examine’ and ‘question’, from ‘put to shame’ to ‘accuse.’ To reprove is about a kind of critical assessment of something that is not ethical. It implies a kind of judgement upon the world. Things are not quite as they should be nor even as we would like them to be. An understatement, to be sure!

We would all like Covid-19 to go away, perhaps even more for the fear of it to go away and never come again. And yet the language of the Epistle and Gospel for today is about the comings and goings of God which is somehow expedient, good or beneficial for us, whatever the times or circumstances.

Every good and perfect gift comes down from above, “from the Father of lights,” James tells us, while Jesus in the Gospel talks about going his way to the one that sent him, going to the Father, which means going away from the disciples such that they shall “see [him] no more” and “sorrow hath filled [their] hearts.” Yet that is said to be expedient or good for us because only so can the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, be sent unto us. What, we may ask, is going on in these readings? A confusion of motions, comings down and goings up? The comings and goings of God, the Son to the Father, and the Spirit as sent by the Son? What does it mean?

It all belongs to the radical meaning of Christ’s Death and Resurrection and to our participation in the divine life through these motions. The way up and the way down are one and the same. The ascent of our souls to God as the true end and desire of our being and God’s descent to us both in Christ’s Incarnation and in the coming down of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, are really one and the same, differentiated in time but united in the eternity of God. Time, as Plato famously said, is but the moving image of eternity (Timaeus).  These Eastertide readings offer a wonderful commentary, perhaps, on that philosophical insight. It is simply and profoundly about how we are embraced and participate in the divine life. Our comings and goings are gathered up into the comings and goings of God to us and with us but, more importantly, as belonging to the comings and goings of God himself, so to speak, since we can only speak in these human ways. The mystery of Easter gathers us into the eternal dynamic of the love of God.

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“Your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you”

Really? Do we really believe this? It lies at the heart of the Christian understanding. “You now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice.” Death and Resurrection are the fundamental pattern of Christian life. That pattern marks the rhythm of the liturgy and of our lives of service and sacrifice. It is really all about dying to live, dying to ourselves and living for one another. It is only possible through our being alive to God, to Christ in us.

The lessons of the Resurrection are quite profound and poignant. They are all about the dawning awareness on the part of the disciples and by extension in us of the truth and power of the Resurrection. It changes our understanding and outlook. The Gospels of Eastertide show us how we come to learn the things which matter most. And far from being a flight from the past, they reveal the redemption of the past and show us the power of memory.

Jesus makes himself known on the Road to Emmaus not just in the opening of our understanding about his Passion through the Scriptures but “in the breaking of the bread.” Jesus tells us Mary Magdalene not to touch him but “go and tell” the disciples about his mission and ours in his going to “my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Yet in the same chapter he tells Thomas to touch and see and so believe. Jesus proclaims peace and forgiveness behind closed doors to all of us huddled in our fears about Covid-19, our fears, I am afraid, of one another and our world, our modern fears of death and uncertainty. Jesus bids us “come and have breakfast” at a barbecue on a beach – Oh, don’t we wish!

All of these encounters have this point in common. They are all about what Christ teaches. They are all about the radical presence of God with us, not as collapsed into the world, but as raising us and our world into its real truth and meaning in God. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (Jn.1.4).  The recurring theme is signalled here in today’s Gospel when Jesus says, “I will see you again.”

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Ye were as sheep going astray, but are now returned unto the Shepherd
and Bishop of your souls

“All we like sheep have gone astray,” the sentence from Isaiah (53.6) for Morning Prayer on Good Friday reminds us (BCP, p. 1). “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,” the General Confession bids us pray (BCP, p. 4 & 19). Such are the ways of our being “returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls.” God “governs us as masters of ourselves,” Aquinas notes, but that presupposes a deep awareness on our part about human sinfulness. We can only be masters of ourselves through divine governance, the one who rules us as the Shepherd of our souls, the one who returns us to the radical truth of ourselves and of our humanity precisely because we have erred and strayed and are lost to ourselves.

Such is the significance of the Gospel of Christ as the Good Shepherd. We have a far too sentimental and emotional attachment to this concept, I fear, and often fail to recognise its radical meaning. Yet it is there before our eyes and speaks to the darkness and the dangers of our current world whether it is Covid-19 or the rampage of mindless madness in the mass shooting in Nova Scotia which we are suffering through with broken hearts. It speaks to the darkness of our hearts and minds.

We can’t possibly grasp its significance without realising how deeply embedded it is in the Christian understanding of the Resurrection, on the one hand, and in the transformation of images in the Hebrew Scriptures, on the other hand. The Second Sunday in Easter is known as Good Shepherd Sunday. The image of Christ the Good Shepherd belongs inescapably to the doctrine of the Resurrection, to the fruit of the Passion of Christ, to the radical meaning of God’s love for our wounded and broken humanity, and so to our province of the broken-hearted.

Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd. He tells us that the Good Shepherd gives his life for the sheep. Such is sacrifice, such is love, God’s love for us. “Herein is love,” for God’s love for us is the ground of our love towards one another. But the background images from the Hebrew Scriptures are needed for a fuller understanding. Principal among those is the 23rd Psalm, the Shepherd’s Psalm. “The Lord shepherds me” or “the Lord is my Shepherd” or “the Lord rules me,” Dominus regit me, as the name of one of the familiar hymn tunes puts it. As Aquinas notes, “he who shepherds, rules.” The real rule and governance in our lives is Christ the Good Shepherd. It is one of the dominant images of Resurrection love.

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Jesus came and stood in the midst

It was, we are told, “the same day at evening,” meaning Easter. It is as if time stopped and yet even that doesn’t quite capture the wonder and the mystery of the Passion and the Resurrection. It is more like being in the eternal now of God, in the moment which gives time its meaning and without which time and our lives have no meaning. That is the power of the readings for the Octave Day of Easter. They speak profoundly to our current crisis. The world, it seems, has stopped. There is not the same hustle and bustle of frantic and busy lives. Every day has a certain quiet but anxious sameness to it. And like the disciples in John’s Gospel we, too, are behind closed doors. Like the disciples, we, too, are perhaps in fear and worry about our suffering world and about ourselves.

Yet the Epistle reading from 1 John (5. 4-12) makes the extraordinary statement that “whatsoever is born of God, overcometh the world.” What is born of God is faith, he says. “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” As he explains, it has altogether to do with Christ’s sacrifice by which “God has given us eternal life; and this life is in his Son.”

The Resurrection changes everything because it changes how we think and feel about ourselves and our world. When we are in fear and anger about the world and about being cut off and isolated from one another, then those things define us. We grant them a total power over us. That is to be defined by the world of suffering and death. What is our faith? It is simply that Christ is in the midst with us. “Jesus came and stood in the midst.” That changes everything, if we will let it. At least that is what the Gospel shows.

It is a powerful image that signals the radical truth and nature of God. God’s love is present in the midst of the sufferings of the world. That has been the stark meaning of the Passion of Christ that now carries over into the Resurrection. We have seen over and over again how Christ is in the midst of everything: in the midst of the crowd shouting “hosannas” in joy and then crying, “let him be crucified,” in hostility. Such are the contradictions of our hearts and our world. He is crucified between two thieves. Such are the cruelties and enmities in our hearts and our world. The whole of the Passion has been about his being in the midst of the chaos and confusion of our wounded and fallen world. He suffers for us and with us. Why? One word. Love. The one thing that doesn’t die. Love is forever. That is faith, a deep insight and trust in God as love. Such is the Resurrection, too.

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Jesus himself stood in the midst of his disciples

God, we have suggested, is in the midst of the sufferings of our world and day. Never more so, than in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ which shows us exactly that. What is of the greatest interest with respect to the essential Christian teaching of the Resurrection is that it is something which we learn from Christ. He comes into our midst. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us.” That statement from 1 John 4.10 which we heard/ read in the Good Friday anthems (BCP, p.173) reverberates throughout Eastertide. Divine love conquers sin and evil. It is the life of the Resurrection in us but it has to be learned.

That is the point of the Resurrection appearances of Jesus to the disciples. It is about opening their understanding to see the principle and truth of reality in their very midst. It is a demonstration of the ultimate ‘lordship’ of Christ and it bears witness to Christ as true God and true man. The Lucan Gospel for Easter Tuesday is poignant and touching,  even if touch is now persona non grata in our world.  Yet there are ways of being touched by words, a kind of transmutation of the sensible into the intelligible.

Christ comes into our midst but the initial reaction is one of terror and fright even after Jesus’ first word of peace. “Peace be unto you.” They thought they were seeing a ghost. One of the important teachings of the Resurrection is that it requires us to think about the body in a new way or, perhaps, we might say, just to think about the body. For as something thinkable then it is already more than though not less than physical and material. Thinking after all is a kind of act of de-sensing; it removes things  from simply the tangible. It is an act of abstraction, a necessary and critical feature of what it means to be human.

This is the power of Jesus’ response to their reaction. “Why are ye troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?” Thoughts that are negative and sceptical. “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me and see;” Jesus says, “ for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” This is a strong testimony to the reality of the Resurrection. The humanity of Christ is not a chimera, a mere appearance. It is very real and yet its reality is more though not less than what we see and imagine. Why? Because of the way in which we are wedded to the world and to ourselves. We struggle to learn how to think about ourselves and our own bodies in their deeper truth as grounded in God’s will and purpose. We are more, not less than our bodies.

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“And they rose up … and returned to Jerusalem”

They were running away from Jerusalem in fear and perplexity about the events of the crucifixion, about everything, we might say “concerning Jesus of Nazareth”. The Resurrection changes everything. It literally turns us around. They rose up and returned to Jerusalem. How and why? Because Christ runs out after us.

The Passion of Christ is God’s suffering with us in our suffering world, God in the midst of our confusions, our sins, our fears, our tempers; in short, our evil and unloveliness. The whole of the Passion is about Christ in the midst. He is even crucified between two thieves. The Resurrection is the same. It is about Christ in the midst, making himself known in the radical truth of his being with the Father.

Easter Monday presents us with one of the classic stories of the Resurrection, the story of the Road to Emmaus. Two unnamed disciples are fleeing Jerusalem. Jesus runs out after them and “himself drew near, and went with them,” unrecognized by them. They were not, after all, expecting him. They were, after all, consumed and preoccupied in their confusions and uncertainties, not altogether unlike us in the face of Covid-19, clinging to our ‘technologies’, worshipping them in our idolatry even as they are at the heart of the problem of globalization, itself a technocratic artifice.

Jesus draws near and enters into their conversation. Why? To draw out of them precisely their confusion and perplexity. The two unnamed disciples give us a very complete account of the crucifixion, its immediate aftermath, their dashed hopes and expectations about Jesus, and their bewilderment about the empty tomb, about the testimony of angels, and even about the witness of the women! “We trusted,” they say, “that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.” His crucifixion and death they were not expecting and cannot understand. The paradox is wonderful. It is precisely through his Passion and Death that Christ redeems Israel, the greater Israel, we may say, of our humanity, for such is the greater vocation and meaning of Israel.

“Foolish ones and slow of heart,” Jesus says to them and proceeds to unpack the radical meaning of his Passion and Death. He opens out to them  “in all of the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” In a way, it is very much about how we read, how we think and understand God and his dealing with us. In a way, God has to break us in order to make us, to make us new. “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” as the poet/ preacher John Donne says, evoking the extravagant language of violence and even rape. It is not enough, it seems, for God simply to “knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend,” the gentler forms of some of the more sentimental biblical images of God’s care. No. “Break, blow, burn, and make me new,” the poet demands of God. For only so might we be able to stand. And if that were not troubling enough, he cries out “imprison me, for I except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” Extravagant language, indeed, and yet language that complements the wonder of the story of the Road to Emmaus. Why?

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