Category: Sermons

“The night is come”

“The night is come,” the Paschal Praeconium proclaims exultantly. This night marks the beginning of something new, a new creation, not through the destruction but by the renewing of creation. What is new is what the great Easter proclamation, known as the Paschal Preconium, signals. Resurrection. That is the new creation. That is God’s great work of making something out of nothing, indeed, out of the greater nothingness of human sin and evil.

How can there be a greater nothing? Only as a figure of speech, it might seem, and yet in another way, that is exactly the great joy of the Vigil and of Easter. We wait expectantly for God’s great second act; such is the Resurrection. Sin and evil seek to unmake the creation and even, folly of all follies, to unmask and dismiss God from every human horizon. Sin and evil try to make creation and God nothing. God takes human sin and evil, and out of its greater nothingness, out of its vanity and folly, makes a new creation. There is Resurrection not by a denial of the past of the Passion and Death of Christ but by its transformation. God makes something out of the suffering and death that we have caused. “The night is come.”

“The night is come” when we can shout with exceeding great joy that Christ is Risen. Alleluia! Alleluia! What that means is signalled in the liturgy of the Vigil. It means that death has been completely changed, overcome; it has undergone a radical make-over. Death is no longer the terminus ad quem, the end of the road, the end to which all must succumb; death has been transformed into a transitus, a means to greater end. We pray that our “corrupt affections,” our sins being “buried with Christ,” “we may pass to our joyful resurrection”  “through the grave and gate of death.” The grave cannot hold him and God seeks something more for us. We only live when we live in him.

“The night is come” that out-nights all other nights including the love-duet between Lorenzo and Jessica in the Merchant of Venice, each seeking to gain an advantage over the other in references to the ancient stories of love and its powers. “The night is come,” the Paschal Praeconium says “wherein thou dividest the sea and madest the children of Israel to pass over as on dry land”,  the night, too, in which the people of Israel are led and guided by a pillar of light. The imagery recalls God’s deliverance of Israel from Egyptian slavery in the Exodus. So this night builds upon that story and its importance for the understanding of Israel. Christ’s Resurrection is framed in terms of God’s deliverance of the ancient people of Israel from death and slavery and extends it to the whole of humanity.

“The night is come,” then, when “all that believe in Christ upon the face of the earth” are “delivered from the shadow of death” and “are renewed and made partakers of eternal life.” Such is the radical nature of the Resurrection and its universal extent.

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“Christ hath once suffered for sins … that he might bring us to God”

The quiet of Holy Saturday is the peace of paradise. All has been accomplished. All of the horror and noise of Good Friday is past. Christ is dead. The fury and rage of our disordered humanity in all its evil force is spent. There is a kind of stillness to Holy Saturday and to our service of Matins and Ante-communion. All is at rest, it seems, at least in terms of the destructiveness of our humanity in the vain folly of trying to kill God.

Yet God has let us have our way with him. Christ is crucified and now lies buried. We meet at his tomb and while all is quiet there are some disquieting rumours. The human spirit in its confusion is never quiet, it seems. There are rumours and talk of conspiracies about stealing Christ’s body and claiming that he is still alive. The Gospels do not hide from view the variety of opinions already in circulation about the mystery of the resurrection. But apart from the restlessness and inconstancy, folly and gullibility of our world, there is something else which is also stirring on Holy Saturday. We wait at the tomb of Christ in the sorrow of mourners. We wait in the quiet stillness of the morning.

But already something else is happening. The readings from 1 Peter hint at the deeper meaning of Holy Saturday. They hint at the creedal principle of the descent into hell, of Christ going and preaching to the spirits in prison, as Peter puts it, drawing upon the imagery of Zechariah about release and liberation. This will ultimately have its visual representation in the icon of the Resurrection in the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy which depicts Christ bringing Adam and Eve up out of the prison house of Sheol, of Hades, of Hell, of death.

1 Peter points us to the further dimensions of the theory of the atonement. God seeks to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation past, present, and future. Such is the radical nature of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. He suffered for our sins to bring us to God. The reconciling love of God in the sacrifice of Christ has a long reach both backwards and forwards since it seeks to gather all time back into itself without which time has no meaning.

We rest while God in his unceasing activity seeks the good of the whole of our humanity. That should in like manner challenge us about our dealings with one another. It would seem, however, that even in the quiet stillness of Holy Saturday, stones will not be able to contain or constrain the love of God in Jesus Christ

“Christ hath once suffered for sins … that he might bring us to God”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, April 11th, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak

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“It is finished”

Yes. “It is finished.” And yet, in another way it is never finished. What is finished? All that belongs to the reconciliation of God and man through Christ’s atoning sacrifice. What is never finished? That reconciliation in us is a life-long project; it is only finished in us when we are finished and gathered to Christ. Here we are a work in process. The process is about our continuing efforts to realize who we are in Christ in our lives. Our justification, the truth of our being, is fully and perfectly in Christ; not so in us. For us there is the constant struggle to realize in ourselves the reconciliation between God and man in Christ.

Central to that constant struggle is what belongs to the Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, namely our contemplation of the Cross and our hearing, as it were, the lamentations of Christ, his words to us about the meaning of sin and grace, the “reproaches.” Our Solemn Liturgy has four parts: first, the liturgy of the Word beginning with the general confession but no absolution, the Good Friday anthems (BCP, p. 173), the Good Friday Collects, Psalm 22, a Lesson from Isaiah 50. 4-10, the Salvator Mundi, the Epistle reading from Hebrews, and then the Passion according to St. John; second, the Solemn Intercessions; third, the Reproaches of Christ to us in the words of the Lamentations of Jeremiah in which we contemplate our betrayals of God’s love; and fourth, our communion with the dead Christ. On Good Friday, there is no absolution nor any celebration of the Holy Eucharist; there is only communion through what was consecrated and kept from Maundy Thursday. On Good Friday, we identify with Christ in his death for us.

All pretty somber and serious, and rightly so. In the context of our suffering world where there have been and continue to be an escalating number of deaths through the Covid-19 outbreak, the Good Friday service allows us to place our suffering world, and the deaths of so many, in the sufferings of Christ. He suffers even unto death, Why? That love may accomplish what belongs to the truth of our humanity as reconciled with God.

“It is finished,” Jesus says. It is the last word of Christ on the Cross in John’s Gospel. It signals a kind of end, a sense of accomplishment, of purpose realized. It signals atonement. All that belongs to the reconciliation of God and man is accomplished. Such is the divine love which seeks our good, our salvation, our completeness. Yet, in another sense, love is never finished. Divine love is ever active and never static. God is actus purus, pure act, as the theologians say. Love is ever in motion. That eternal motion is about the constant love of the Son for the Father in the bond of their mutual and indwelling love, the love of the Trinity.

And that love is what we seek to realize more and more in our lives even as we know only too well that our sins constantly beset us. There is no end, it seems, to our sins. But the good news of Good Friday which makes this day “Good Friday” is that nothing, absolutely “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.” Knowing that means striving to live it in our lives with one another. Such a striving is for God in us. It is “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” What makes that prayer so powerful is Christ’s word to us on the Cross. “It is finished.” It is all there in him and so we can seek it for us in our lives. That is our constant challenge: to realize in ourselves what has been accomplished for us in Christ’s sacrifice. Such is the cross in our lives. We seek to bear witness to what he has done for us.

“It is finished”

Fr. David Curry
Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, April 10th, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak

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Christ Crucified: Good Friday Meditations 2020
Fr David Curry

Introduction:  “We preach Christ crucified.” (1 Corinthians 1.23)

Paul’s words go to the heart of the Christian religion. Like it or not, the Christian Faith is  religio crucis, the religion of the cross. What does that mean? It means that the mystery of the Cross is the mystery of love. We easily forget this and even reject it. The great English mystery writer, P.D. James, in her rather unusual novel, The Children of Men, acutely observes that the contemporary churches at the end of the last century had “moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism” which leads in turn to the virtual abolition of “the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross.” To some, if not many, “the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man’s ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable symbol.”

Yet the Cross for all of its disturbing qualities is the essential symbol of the Christian religion. It sets Christianity apart from other world religions and yet, more importantly, connects with them in terms of  the realities of the human experience. This is especially true with respect to suffering. The Cross symbolizes redemptive suffering. It is crucial to how we think about suffering and to the forms of our engagement with other world religions including the culture and religion of secular atheism. The Cross speaks to our present distresses, to our fears and worries about all the forms of suffering in our global world, not the least of which are our current concerns about Covid-19.

Preaching Christ crucified has always been central to Christian witness and practice. The traditions of Lent, of Holy Week and Easter belong to a deep and profound reflection upon the Passion of Christ and to the ways in which the Christian Faith is represented artistically and aesthetically. It may surprise you to know that the practice of preaching or meditating upon the Seven Last Words of Christ, something deeply embedded in the modern Protestant and Catholic imaginary since the eighteenth century, was actually a service devised in the Americas, in Lima, Peru, by the Jesuit missionary, Fr. Alonso Messia Bedoya, just after the devastations of the terrible earthquakes of 1678 and 1687. The devotion inspired eighteenth century composers such as Haydn in Europe.

The Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross complement the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, though not in any systematic sense. The words from the Cross begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father. Both the Our Father and the Cross are essential to the Christian understanding. Simone Weil, the 20th century passionate philosopher of attention and an activist devoted to the poor and the suffering, says that “the Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer which is not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each word, without a change … taking place in the soul.” The theologian Anthony Boers observes the intimate connection between the Our Father and the Seven Last Words of Christ. Both “ably condense and collapse into one set of short passages the essentials of our faith.”

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“Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit”

“A new commandment, I give unto you, that you love one another,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel. That new commandment is the novum mandatum in Latin; the word mandatum being then Englished to Maundy. Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the Sacrum Triduum, the three great and high Holy Days of this Holy Week. We have emphasized that Holy Week is all about our participation in the Passion. Maundy Thursday brings that sense of participation to its highest expression. It is a day of many rituals and liturgies, all of which serve to underline two things: service and sacrifice.

Service to others is about the sacrifice of ourselves for others without which we are nothing and far less than the truth of ourselves. We really only live when we live for God and for one another; each is implicated in the other. To love God means to love one another. To love one another is to love God. It is almost as simple as that. And yet so difficult. Why? Because of sin.

The liturgies of Maundy Thursday are greatly circumscribed and reduced to a nullity this year owing to the Covid-19 outbreak and the fears thereof. All of the liturgies of the Church and especially in Holy Week and most especially on Maundy Thursday involve us with one another and significantly in bodily ways. There is, for instance, the service of the washing of the feet, recalling Jesus in the Upper Room bending down and washing the feet of the disciples. It recalls the Passion Sunday Gospel about Christ coming “not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many.” The ministers of the Church are called to serve.

That idea of service is sacrificial and as such sacramental which is why on Maundy Thursday we recall that “on this night,” the very night in which he was betrayed, Jesus provides us with the means of his being with us. Such is the institution of the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Communion, the Mass, to use some of the names for this essential and defining liturgy of the Church. It is grounded in the Passion. “He took bread … he took the cup. Do this…. Drink this in remembrance of me.”We are apt to take someone’s last words rather seriously. Here are some of the last words and deeds of Christ and they are all about service and sacrifice, all about providing for us on the very eve of his going from us into the valley of the shadow of death, our death.

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Our Parish Holy Week custom has been to pray the Service of Tenebrae on the Eve of Maundy Thursday. Tenebrae is the liturgy of anticipation. It is about praying the Matins of the Sacrum Triduum, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday on the preceding evenings. The word means shadows or darkness. It is a way of going in and through the Passion in part through the psalms with their antiphons. The antiphons are scriptural passages that frame each psalm and provide an interpretative matrix for the understanding of the Psalm in the context of the Passion. In other words, the Psalm is seen in the light of the Passion through the antiphon even as the Passion is further illumined by the Psalm. There is a kind of to and fro in this, a kind of back and forth between the images of the Old Testament and those of the New Testament.

Holy Week is unsettling and disturbing; everything is out of whack, out of joint. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; / my heart also in the midst of my body is even like melting wax,” as Psalm 22 so powerfully puts it. But it is about us. We are bent out of shape, as it were, turned in upon ourselves and away from God, incurvatus in se. But it is that sense of darkness and disarray that we sense the transformation of images, the transformation of the nature of our relationship with God. It means going through the Passion in this intensely focussed and rigorous way, constantly exploring a great range of images that turn in one way or another upon the reality of our life with God. The challenge of the Holy Week liturgies is about accepting the rich confusion and complexity of things and finding that what holds everything together is God and God alone. Anticipating the Passion only serves to heighten its intensity and its meaning in us.

Tenebrae is one way in which we pray the Passion and find ourselves in it, finding in the darkness something of the light of Christ.

Fr. David Curry
Tenebrae, Wednesday, April 8th, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak

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“Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness”

The lesson from Hebrews complements the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer. We pray “Our Father” to “forgive us our trespasses even as we forgive them that trespass against us.” Forgiveness is a dominant feature of Luke’s Gospel whose Passion account we read on the Wednesday and Thursday of Holy Week. Luke gives us the first and the last word of the Crucified. They are both words of the Son to the Father; the first word is forgiveness. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Allied with Luke’s emphasis upon the theme of forgiveness is the idea of sacrifice and healing, the idea of the giving of oneself for the good of others. That theme is critical to the idea of atonement, our being made at one with God. That implies our separation and the overcoming of that separation. The lesson from Hebrews provides us with the deep theology of redemption, at once reaching back to the Old Testament story from Numbers about the bronze serpent being raised up for sinful Israel to see and in seeing healed, and in the idea of sacrifice which requires the shedding of blood.

What is the story of the bronze serpent about? It is about human sin and disobedience. In this case, Israel’s constant complaining against God results in the punishment of serpents which destroy them. They repent and beseech Moses to intercede to God. He does and is told to make a bronze serpent and to hold it up before the people. It makes their sin visible to them at the same time as healing them. Jesus picks up on this image in John’s Gospel. “As Jesus lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Such is salvation, our being healed and made whole.

But only through the brokenness and agony of Christ. Luke, of all the evangelists, gives us the most moving picture of Christ in his care for us. Christ in the agony of Gethsemane prays “as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” It anticipates the blood of his passion. What does the shedding of blood mean? Simply the giving of life for the good of others. That is the insight of Hebrews. It sees the former sacrifices as having  their fulfillment in Christ’s sacrifice, in the shedding of his blood. It is imaged for us here in terms of his commitment to the will of the Father. “Not my will but thine be done.” We have no life apart from God.

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“I am the vine, you are the branches … abide in my love”

John’s Gospel, we have said, provides a strong underlying foundation for the movement of the pageant of the Passion throughout Holy Week. Today’s readings from the fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel are especially powerful. We are presented with the last of the so-called seven “I am” sayings of Jesus, metaphors that identify Christ with the God revealed to Moses in the burning bush and that envision the forms of our participation in the divine life. “I am,” Jesus says, “the bread of life,” “the way, the truth, and the life,” “the Resurrection and the life,” “the door of the sheep,” “the good shepherd who gives his life for the sheep,” “the light of the world,” and here, “the true vine.” Powerful images that belong entirely to our life with Christ. “Our whole life says Our Father,” Origen notes, because of the Word and Son of the Father who bids us pray, “Our Father.” We are drawn into an intimacy of the relation of the Father and the Son. “I have called you friends for all that I have heard from the Father I have made known to you.”

And yet, in the Continuation of the Passion, the one word from the Cross which Mark and Matthew give us is Christ’s cry of dereliction, of desolation. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is not, it seems, a cry to the Father. It is as if the intimacy of that relation is utterly hidden in the agony of the Passion. But it is a prayer, a prayer to God. A quote from the beginning of Psalm 22, it underscores for us as no other word does the full meaning of the desolation of sin. Sin is about our separation from God. Christ voices that sense of alienation and its devastating desolation in this word, what will come to be known as the fourth word of Christ from the Cross.

The readings from John’s Gospel highlight the organic nature of Christ’s relation to us. That is the power of the seventh “I am” saying. It is about God living in us, about the life of  Christ in us without which we have no life. But this chapter is also about the dynamic of the Son’s life with the Father. We place Christ’s word of desolation in the love of the Son for the Father. “He who hates me, hates my Father also,” Jesus tells us. We are to feel something of the radical nature of sin in this word, in the suffering of Christ for us in this word. He suffers in this word the radical nature of our sin. And all because, as Isaiah tells us, the suffering servant did not turn back but embraces “the shame and the spitting” out of confidence that “the Lord God will help me” even when he feels to the fullest possible extent the alienation of sin.

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“I knew you in the wilderness; in the land of drought”

Holy Week is the week of our betrayals of God and of one another. To contemplate such betrayals is the good of this week. Why? Because it is only possible through the love of Christ. We immerse ourselves in all four of the accounts of the Passion starting with Matthew’s Passion on Palm Sunday followed by the Passion according to Mark today and tomorrow, then Luke on Wednesday and Thursday, and ending with John’s Passion on Good Friday. This is one of the remarkable features of our Anglican Prayer Book tradition.

But the readings at Morning and Evening Prayer also contribute profoundly to our meditation and understanding of the Passion of Christ in all of its scriptural fullness. The Gospel of John is read at Morning and Evening Prayer throughout Holy Week until Holy Saturday. It functions like a basso continuo, an underlying bass line which grounds and holds together all of the chaos of Holy Week, the chaos of human sin and evil. What we contemplate is the dynamic between sin and love. Such is the agony of Holy Week, wonderfully encapsulated in George Herbert’s poem, The Agonie. Who would know Sinne, the poem asks, and answers “let him repair Unto Mount Olivet” to the garden of Christ’s agonie, to see “a man … wrung with pains” and all “bloudie be,” a reference to Christ’s tears coming down like great drops of blood on the one hand and an anticipation of the actual blood outpoured on the Cross, on the other hand. Herbert gives us a very powerful image of sin. “Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain/ To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.” Such is the ugly intensity of the Passion.

But we are to know Love in and through Christ’s Passion and to know that love intimately and sacramentally, that is to say in terms of our incorporation into the life of Christ, he in us and we in him. His sufferings freely bearing our sufferings and showing us his love. “Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, /Which my God feels as bloud, but I, as wine.” Such is the beauty of the Passion.

Hosea is the great Love prophet of the Old Testament whose words in the 13th and 14th chapter contribute to our reflection upon the Passion. “I knew you in the wilderness,” God says (Hosea 13.5). Holy Week is about our going into the wilderness of sin and suffering. It is from Hosea that Paul takes the famous words that have become part of the funeral liturgy, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” Hosea bids us “take with you words and return to the Lord thy God,” words which are echoed by Luke in last evening’s second lesson about hanging on the words of Christ.

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