Category: Sermons

Sermons, Theology

Lenten Programme on The Lord’s Prayer III

This is the third address in this series. The first is posted here and the second here.

“Give us this day our daily bread”

Who are we asking? Our Father. Not our Lord. It is perhaps important to remember that all of the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are addressed to God as “Our Father.” As with the first three petitions, so too with the last four petitions. What we ask for we ask “Our Father.”

Origen already remarked on this unique and special feature of the Lord’s Prayer. Nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures do we find any prayer addressed to God as Father. Augustine several centuries later also calls attention to this as does Aquinas in the thirteenth century.

The opening words of the “Our Father” carry over into all of the petitions and serve to ground our prayers in a kind of praise and wonder about God himself that acts as a counter to the ways in which we invariably seek to make God subject to ourselves. That, of course, is how we lose ourselves because we lose sight of God. “For many things are said in praise of God,” Augustine notes, “which, being scattered variously and widely over all the Holy Scriptures, everyone will be able to consider when he reads them; yet nowhere is there found a precept for the people of Israel, that they should say ‘Our Father,’ or that they should pray to God as a Father; but as Lord He was made known to them.” It suggests something intimate and important about the “Our Father” as belonging to the essential understanding of the Christian faith.

The seventeenth century Anglican Divine, Lancelot Andrewes, in his Holy Devotions, notes that the Lord’s Prayer begins with “a Father, not a Lord/ One being a name of love./ The other of dignity … One being, a name of Goodness, Comfortable … the other of Power, Terrible … Who then durst be so bold as to call the Father, but that Christ did command it?” The Lord’s Prayer is grounded in the Son’s love of the Father; his Father is “Our Father” at his bidding and command. We are bold to say, “Our Father.”

Jesus provides instruction about prayer and about persevering in prayer in many places such as in Matthew 7.9. “What man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?” Christ’s first temptation, too, was about the manipulation of the world, about turning stones into bread. The image of “Our Father” reminds us of the essential goodness of God and about what he seeks for us, namely, not stones but bread. Why? Out of the love of the Father for the Son and in the power of the Son’s love for the Father; out of the bond of their mutual and indwelling love, we learn the deep love of God for us. Thus this fourth petition, which marks the beginning of the second set of petitions, concerns what we seek from God in terms of our lives here and now but only as grounded in the deep love of God himself and that love as turned towards us; in short, God’s love for us.

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Sermon for the Feast of the Annunciation

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Is this a kind of fatalism? An acquiescence to ‘the way things are’ or are ‘going to be’? That might be how we feel in a time of isolation and virtual lock-down. It might seem that all and every kind of agency that belongs to human dignity is being taken away and we are trapped.

And while there are many, many uncertainties, and no end of fears and worries that are part of our current experience in the face of the Covid-19 outbreak, including how authorities deal or don’t deal with it, Mary’s words are not about a lack of agency or a kind of fatalism. They are more about an active willing of God’s will or Providence and as such belong to human freedom, agency, and accountability. They belong, in other words to what it properly means to be human which is not about manipulation, not about being reduced to machines, to automatons and bots, but about responsibility and agency. Mary’s words define our humanity and remind us that without God we are radically incomplete.

Mary’s Annunciation falls this year within the range of mid-Lent, a complement at once to the week following ‘Mothering Sunday,’ ‘Laetare’ or Rejoicing Sunday, as the Fourth Sunday in Lent is often called, as well as belonging to the essential orientation of the Lenten Journey that brings us to the Passion of Christ. Simply put, her fiat mihi, her “be it unto me according to thy word” anticipates and participates in what will be Christ’s great word of prayer in Gethsemane and his prayers to the Father on the Cross. “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine be  done.” “I have come,” Jesus says, “to do the will of him who sent me.” He is defined by his eternal and essential orientation to the Father. As Mary shows, that orientation also belongs to the essential meaning of the truth of our humanity. In other words, Mary shows us exactly what it means to be truly and purely human. “Thy will be done.”

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Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.”

“He himself knew what he would do,” John tells us about Jesus in a parenthetical remark. It signals a providential sense of purpose. Jesus is in a mountain wilderness with his disciples. But  “lifting up his eyes,” he sees “a great company come unto him.” His first question to Philip is about how to provide for them, how to care for us, we might say. Yet, as John immediately states, “he himself knew what he would do.” It is a profound lesson about what God seeks for us.

In the ancient and biblical understanding, the wilderness is a place of contemplation, a place of prayer, the place of communion between God and man. There is a great good to be found for us in the wilderness where we are removed from all of the busyness and distractions, all of the confusions and fears of our lives. There are, to be sure, many different senses to the word wilderness but here the focus is on what is learned in the wilderness of our lives itself when we take time to think and pray.

In our current distresses about Covid-19, it may seem that we are all in a kind of wilderness. My hope and prayer is that something good may be learned that is the counter to our fears and worries, our fears about ourselves and our fears about one another, especially our fear of others. For in this powerful Gospel story, we learn about what God seeks for us. We learn not only about being fed and provided for; we learn about thanksgiving. That is especially important. Why? Because it gathers us into the very life of God.

The sixth chapter of John’s Gospel is traditionally known as ‘the bread of life discourse.’ It is intentionally sacramental. It shows that the essential life of Jesus is eucharistical; in short, it is thanksgiving. What is enacted visibly goes to the inner reality of the Son’s relation to the Father. He gives thanks. To whom? To the Father. How? Through the breaking of the bread. “Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down.” This all becomes part and parcel of the Church’s sacramental life which is nothing less and nothing more than our participation in the life of God in Christ. It is about “letting Jesus pray in us,” live in us, as Archbishop Rowan Williams observes. “The whole of our life says Our Father,” Origen says. We are gathered to God in prayer by word and sacrament. The mountain wilderness becomes a place of refreshment, a place of comfort and strength. We are fortified spiritually.

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Lenten Programme on The Lord’s Prayer II

Dear Friends of Christ Church,

I regret that we are not able to meet at the present time owing to the precautions belonging to the Covid-19 outbreak. I will continue to post the Lenten reflections and sermons. Please keep safe but be not afraid.

In Christ,

Fr. David Curry

Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.

And so it begins. “God himself taught us this prayer,” Thomas Aquinas observes, making clear the connection between Christ and God for “He who with the Father hears our prayer, did himself teach us how to pray.” It is, he says, the “most perfect” and the “most preeminent” of prayers. It is quite simply the prayer that underlies all prayer and without which our prayers are less than truly prayers. Aquinas makes the point that “if we are praying appropriately and correctly, then whatever words we may be using we are not saying anything other than what is laid down in the Lord’s Prayer.”[1]

All prayer in some sense or another has its ground in the Lord’s Prayer. Simone Weil, a modern writer in her work “Waiting on God,” notes 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.” At issue is the challenge of paying attention to each word. She is, we might say, ‘the philosopher of attention’ whose voice is especially needed in our age of distraction and inattention. To ponder the Lord’s Prayer is to learn to pay attention to God and to his word. “Blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it,” Jesus says to us in our despair and desolation.

Praying the Lord’s prayer attentively is the subject of our Lenten programme. Following in the footsteps of Origen, the great early Patrisic biblical theologian, Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century emphasizes the intimate nature of the Lord’s Prayer. “Many things [in the past[ were said in praise of God, But we do not find that the people of Israel were taught to address God as ‘Our Father’… With regard to Christ’s people, however, the Apostle says, ‘We have received the spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba, Father and that not of our deserving, but of grace.’ This, then, we express in the prayer when we say Father, which name also stirs up love. For what can be dearer than sons and daughters are to a father?” The Lord’s Prayer is grounded in the understanding of God as Trinity.

To begin with “Our Father’ is to begin with praise, Aquinas teaches, but such a beginning also corrects what he calls three errors that are absolutely fatal for the life of prayer. What are these three errors?

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Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent

For I am desolate and in misery

“You were sometimes darkness,” Paul tells us in this morning’s Epistle. That might be the only good news since it leads to the idea that perhaps “now you are light in the Lord.” The Gospel reading, on the other hand, is the very picture of desolation and darkness. “Beware the Ides of March,”indeed. Beware of human evil. Yet the good news of this Gospel, it seems, is actually our evil for unless we face that we cannot begin to grasp the radical nature of God’s goodness.

We live in rather apocalyptic times not religiously so much as in a secular way. There is a great fearfulness in the global world especially now with the Covid-19 outbreak and spread. About that it is quite reasonable to take prudent measures and precautions about hand-washing, it seems, and about large gatherings that involve considerable travel from one place to another. All sensible and good. But such reasonable carefulness seems almost eclipsed by a deep fearfulness. That warrants some reflection because there are some real dangers in this  fearfulness. The greatest danger, it seems, to me is the fear of the other.

There is even a word for it: allophobia, the fear of others. How do we care for one another if we are afraid of one another? This runs counter to the concept of friendship that belongs to our literary and spiritual traditions ranging from the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu to the friendship of Jonathan and David, to the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, and so on, and extending to the divine friendship. “I have called you friends,” Jesus says, in a passage that is all about sacrifice as a form of deep care. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Beyond that, there is the even more radical command by Jesus to “love your enemies.” These things counter our fear of the other which can only lead to desolation and misery.

In our fear of the other we forget two things: first, that we are all made in the image of God; and second, the absolute goodness of God himself. Today’s gospel reading from Luke is very dark and bleak, a gospel of desolation that complements the Matthaean apocalypse in Advent about the signs of desolation and fear. In Advent, the focus is on the meaning of God’s coming which is always a kind of judgement and a wake-up call, not altogether unlike today’s epistle reading. What is the desolation in today’s Gospel? It is the reality of human sin which calls what is good evil and then having shut oneself off from God in splendid isolation, the soul finds itself possessed of “seven other spirits more wicked than himself.” “The last state of that man,” we are told, “is worse than the first.” Such is the picture of ultimate desolation and despair, a despair of the good.

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Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent

Have mercy on me, O Lord

Lent is one long  Kyrie eleison, we might say, one long “Lord, have mercy upon us”. It reminds us that seeking mercy is an essential aspect of prayer, an essential feature of the Christian faith itself, a confessional mode that belongs to something profoundly positive. Nowhere is that more powerfully seen than in this Gospel story about our need for mercy.

A woman from outside of Israel – Matthew says “a Canaanite woman,” Mark, “a Greek, Syro-Phoenician by birth,” in either case the point is clear, she is from outside of Israel – comes to Jesus seeking a healing mercy for her daughter, “grievously vexed with a devil,” disturbed in her mind in some sense, we would say. It is her quest for mercy that undergirds the whole scene, at once troubling and wonderful.

The point is very simple, yet I am quite aware of how disturbing this story is for people. What is all about? It is about an essential aspect of prayer, namely, the drawing out of us what in fact God seeks for us. There is no story more disturbing and yet more wonderful than this story. This woman from outside of Israel is put to the test about what it truly means to be an Israelite and she shows us exactly that.  Jacob striving or wrestling with God becomes Israel, one who strives with God. This Canaanite woman is the embodiment of what it means to strive with God.

She hangs in there in the face of silence, rebuke, and insult. Why? Because she has a hold of the very principle upon which the desire for mercy completely depends. She senses in Christ the only answer to her dilemma about her daughter. What she grasps intuitively, or better intellectually, is the wonder of the story because like the blind man on the roadside begging, she is insistent. She won’t let go of what she has a hold of.

This troubles us because we would like to domesticate divinity, making God subject to human goals and purposes. Just give us what we want, what we may even think we are owed, even entitled. As if God owes us. She comes to Jesus, to be sure, with a very specific request but her insight into the truth of God in Jesus is far greater. Because of her insight,  she holds on in the face of the torrent of testing.  “Truth Lord,” she says, finally and with great prophetic insight, “yet even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ tables.”

Her opening plea for mercy and her closing statement are intimately connected. You can’t have one without the other. That she hangs in and perseveres and does so with directness and courage is the great wonder of the Gospel. It teaches us something about the nature of the Christian Faith. It is about our working with the grace of God. It is something active and alive. Christ is alive in her, we might say, strange as that may seem.

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Lenten Programme on The Lord’s Prayer I

“Now as our Saviour Christ hath commanded and taught us,
we are bold to say, Our Father”

Even in a post-Christian age, the Lord’s Prayer continues to be used and remembered. It is probably the only prayer that many know off by heart. Yet we know it mostly, perhaps entirely, from its liturgical use. Somehow it is well-known and, remarkably, in its older English translation, the King’s James version. Somehow it is memorable.

We know it. We use it. But do we think much about it? Do we appreciate its radical meaning and its essential place in the life of prayer? Or do we simply rattle it off automatically and without much thought? Let’s be honest. And yet, there is something compelling about the Lord’s Prayer, as it has come to be called, that somehow stays with us and is part of us. It is the prayer which shapes all and every prayer in our liturgies and in praying. But what is prayer?

Prayer, Richard Hooker, famously tells, signals all the service we ever do unto God. Prayer is about our fundamental orientation to God and to our being with God. It is not just about seeking his will; it signals the profound idea of being with God in his will for us through prayer. “The whole of our life says Our Father,” the great 2nd/3rd century theologian Origen of Alexandria notes. All prayer, as Archbishop Rowan Williams suggests, is about “letting Jesus pray in us.” Prayer in other words belongs to our incorporation into the life of God in Christ.

It will be our Lenten task this year to explore, however briefly, the Lord’s Prayer to appreciate its teaching and meaning and to look at some of the ways in which its teaching has been considered by the ancient Fathers of the Patristic period, by certain medieval writers, as well as reformed and modern writers. The Lord’s Prayer is the living breath of the Church; the breath of the Holy Spirit in us through the words of the Son to the Father. And it is, as Origen so rightly notes, our whole life.

We call it the Lord’s Prayer. Why? And what does that mean? Simply that this is the prayer which Jesus has taught us. Jesus is Lord. “No  one can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor. 12.3). We learn the Lord’s Prayer from Jesus himself as presented to us in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. “When you pray,” Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, “be not like the Hypocrites… Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask. Pray then like this: Our Father ….” (Matt. 6.5-13).

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Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

Receive not the grace of God in vain

There can be no greater vanity in all senses of the word than the yielding to temptation. It is both empty nothingness and narcissistic self-absorption. It is not by accident that the First Sunday in Lent begins with the story of the temptations of Christ. We ignore it at our peril because it speaks so directly to our hearts and minds and presents a pressing (and depressing) dilemma and challenge. Temptations ‘r us, to be sure, but the point so often missed is that temptation is really about our relation to the good. The story reveals our temptations. Christ is tempted for us and for our learning about the nature of temptation and its overcoming. Thus, temptation has altogether to do with a necessary testing of our wills in order to bring out the truth of our willing and our knowing, namely, that upon which they depend.

The Gospel shows us the making known of the essential forms of temptation and their overcoming. With respect to such forms, we confront a fairly sophisticated understanding of temptation that is far deeper and wiser than what our therapeutic culture offers, only because the latter is so divorced from the moral and ethical traditions to which this story belongs. We have here an order of temptation and a making known of the constitutive elements of our humanity. To put it bluntly, what is revealed negatively through the temptations is the positive form of our relation to the goodness of God. We are tempted in certain ways and they all reveal that to which we so easily succumb. Such is our weakness in contrast to the strength of Christ who is “tempted yet undefiled,” quite unlike us. He is tempted for our sake, for our learning and living, we might say. The Gospel shows us the overcoming of temptation not by us alone but, as the Epistle suggests, by our working with the order of grace.

Nothing could be more counter-culture. Why? Because our culture defines you by your temptations and says that is what you are. It means being defined by a negative. Such is the culture of addiction, of dependence and co-dependence, of this diagnosis and that. There are, of course, certain conditions and diagnoses that are part of human experience. But is that what fundamentally defines what it means to be human? Are you the diagnosis, the condition, the disease? Once you assume the medicalization of society and human behaviour, then there is really no temptation; there is only the collapse and capitulation to a deterministic way of thinking that denies accountability and agency. There is no temptation, only determinism. You are determined and defined but at the expense of personality and agency, at the expense of your humanity.

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Sermon for Ash Wednesday

God bestoweth abundant grace

We begin with ashes for that is where we are or rather the way in which we awaken to ourselves as apart from God. Our self-consciousness in the biblical view begins with our separation, our self-will opposed and in denial of the will of God. “Did God say?” we ask with the serpent in Eden, knowing full well what God said to the Adam, to our humanity.

Ashes symbolize the profound awareness of ourselves as sinners. They are a symbol of repentance, a sign of our acknowledgment of ourselves as sinners, the realization that things are not as they should be or as we would like them to be about ourselves. This is then a kind of metanoia, a way of bringing ourselves to mind, and so to self-awareness. But this belongs to what the Epistle of James rightly calls God’s “abundant grace.” In bringing ourselves to mind, we are being returned to God.

The point is fairly straightforward. We can really only know ourselves as sinners through the prior awareness of the goodness of God. Sin and evil are privatory; they are privations of the prior goodness and grace of God. Thus it is by grace and only by grace that we can know ourselves as sinners. Paradoxically, this is the good news, the gospel itself, if you will. We can only know ourselves as sinners through having contradicted what we know (in some sense or other) as the good. Sin, in other words, presupposes God’s grace and goodness. To confess our sins is to confess the goodness of God which we have negated, denied, and ignored.

Ash Wednesday recalls us to the dust of creation and to the ashes of repentance. It is all about our turning back to God from whom in myriad ways we have turned away in our folly and sinfulness. To know this is the abundant grace of God bestowed upon each of us in our acknowledgement of our sinfulness. It is not just a one off, a penitential moment to get over and done with. It is a regular and recurring feature of our liturgy in the constant pattern of contrition, confession, and satisfaction that belong to the pilgrim ways of the soul through illumination, purgation, and union.

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Sermon for Quinquagesima

“For now we see in a glass darkly”

The most important thing that has happened to you today, and perhaps even the most important thing in your life is that you have heard the remarkable readings for Quinquagesima Sunday. Now and then, nunc et tunc. “Now … in a glass darkly but then face to face.” Now and then. “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” A profound statement, it captures an essential aspect of our humanity. This ‘now and then’ is about the recognition that our knowing is at once limited and partial but, and this is the crucial point, something which belongs to the divine knowing and to our participation in that knowing. “[We] shall know even as [we are] known.” This is an amazing insight which checks and challenges, counters and corrects all our assumptions.

It is ancient wisdom in the sense of the realization that human knowing is by definition finite and incomplete and utterly dependent upon an intellectual principle which is beyond our knowing, and which at once unites the knowing and being of everything. It is the underlying assumption without which there can be no scientia, no knowing whatsoever, including our modern sense of science, for instance, and yet it is, shall we say, by definition beyond the unity of being and knowing as well. God, in other words, cannot be tied to us and to our interests and concerns, to our knowing.

Some will conclude, and many have in the culture of secular atheism, that God is completely irrelevant and unnecessary to our thinking and doing. That is the opposite to the kind of thinking that these readings present to us. What is revealed here for thought is precisely how we cannot think ourselves or the world without an awareness, albeit “in a glass darkly,” of that upon which our thinking and being necessarily depend. We see but “in a glass darkly,” yet we see and our seeing is part and necessarily a part of the greater knowing that belongs to God himself.

Such is the suggestive power of Paul’s most famous and intriguing hymn to love which launches us into Lent, into the programme of illumination, purgation, and perfection or union that is the journey of the soul. It begins on Ash Wednesday and it begins profoundly with our awareness of our darkness and unknowing. Yet, more profoundly, it begins with love, the love of God at work in human hearts and minds. It begins with the awareness of something more than ourselves. It begins with love, the divine love which is light and life in itself and in us. It begins with the desire in us to go up to Jerusalem that we might begin to see what Jesus wants us to see and know. That is the connecting point to the Gospel. Knowing and loving are interconnected. There can be no knowing without the desire to know.

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