Category: Sermons

“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind”

I know. You have heard this text already this year, perhaps more than once. Yet it befits, I think, The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul which almost always falls within the Epiphany season as it does today, The 3rd Sunday after Epiphany. Paul’s words from Romans read on The 1st Sunday after Epiphany express an essential feature of Epiphany and of Christian life. This text highlights the radical meaning of Epiphany not just as teaching, not just as education, not just as healing (as signaled in the Gospel for Epiphany 3 – “speak the word only and my servant shall be healed”), but epiphany as conversion.

About the idea of conversion there is no end of difficulties. We have, perhaps, a rather skeptical if not negative view of conversion, particularly as a religious term, as conveying a sense of certainty and self-righteousness: ‘I saw the light’, unlike everyone else, I suppose. Paradoxically, it seems to play into our polarized world of ideologies and advocacy agendas with their competing claims to dominance and power.

We assume that conversion means a radical break from one position to another and thus retains a sense of opposition and conflict of opinions. There is, I think, another and more compelling way to think about conversion that Paul’s story suggests. It involves two moments: first, repudiation, and second, recapitulation. In other words, the apparent dramatic change from one position to another lead to a reappraisal and a recapitulation of the former position, a way of transcending opposed viewpoints but without simply negating them. This is especially the case in the conflict of partial goods each claiming exclusive and total control as if they were absolute.

The story of the Conversion of St. Paul, the so-called ‘Damascus road experience’, is told by Paul three times in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles. In one sense, the story is personal, in another sense, universal. It belongs, I think, to the idea of epiphany as conversion in the sense of the break-through of the understanding. It is about coming to see things in a new and deeper way but that does not happen without a struggle, the struggle of the soul to grasp and understand. In other words, conversion is not a passive event, not something which happens to us arbitrarily, inadvertently, or externally. It happens because of an intense struggle in the soul or mind about how to think what is good and right; an ethical struggle. Hence, conversion is an on-going affair. Conversion in this sense is education, the constant transformation through “the renewing of our minds”, to use Paul’s powerful and insightful phrase.

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“Thou hast kept the good wine until now”

“And the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee,” John tells us. The mother of Jesus was there along with Jesus and his disciples. But “the wine failed”. The mother of Jesus tells Jesus, “They have no wine.” So begins this extraordinary Gospel, one which is loaded with significance and meaning.

The story ends with its very opposite: an abundance of wine and not just your usual plonk, but “the good wine”, and the meaning of the whole event. This is, John tells us, “the beginning of signs” which “Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory”, with the additional result that “his disciples believed on him.”

It is an epiphany, to be sure, but of what? Two things at the very least, namely, who Jesus is and what that means for our humanity. This story concentrates several key theological elements that belong to the radical nature of epiphany. What is manifest is nothing less than the essential divinity of Christ, on the one hand, and what that means for the good of our humanity, on the other hand. “This beginning of signs” happened on “the third day” at a little country wedding in Cana of Galilee, the first miracle or sign that Jesus did: an act or sign that is what it signifies. What is that? Simply the real truth and meaning of all the miracle stories of the Gospel. They signify what God ultimately seeks for our humanity: our good found in and through our social joys. That is not simply of our doing but of God’s doing in the very midst of a humble human setting.

God is our highest good. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics argues that the highest good for our humanity is found in what comes closest to the life of the gods, a life lived in contemplation, a life lived in accord with virtue or reason. But he recognises as well that this highest good – which is in itself too high for us because of the great and impassible gulf between God and man – is rightly attended by other goods, such as pleasure and even usefulness though they rank far below his profound sense that happiness, which he even calls in a few passages, blessedness, is our summum bonum, the highest good, which it behooves us to seek. It is about an ethical orientation towards what is higher and beyond simply ourselves.

The Gospel story manifests for us what this means in the Christian understanding. In the background is the ancient Greek wisdom and teaching of Plato and Aristotle in terms of the ethical: a life lived in accord with wisdom and virtue which requires an understanding of what is good as distinct from what is evil and the idea of acting upon that understanding. But in the background, too, is an ancient Jewish saying, that “without wine there is no joy.” We lack, as both the Jewish saying and the philosophers suggest, the means of our happiness, our blessedness, our joy, our ultimate good.

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“They went up to Jerusalem”

Epiphany marks the transition from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. They are the two centers, as in an ellipse, to use a mathematical and astronomical image, around which the Christian understanding constantly revolves. The mystery of Christmas is thus not simply eclipsed, past and gone with the event of Epiphany. Kepler’s use of the ellipse to explain planetary motion was probably the greater revolution so-called in terms of early modern natural philosophy, far more significant than Copernicus and Galileo. For it broke the dominance of the distinction between terrestrial or rectilinear motion and circular motion, and especially the hold that circular motion had for more than a thousand years. Yet it didn’t mean that the beauty of the idea of circular motion was lost from thought, particularly theological thinking about God and about the journey of our minds to God and with God.

Likewise Bethlehem remains constantly with us in the journey to Jerusalem just as Jerusalem is a constant presence in the Christmas story. The wise men, the Magoi from Anatolia, come to Bethlehem, after all, by way of Jerusalem. With their coming to Bethlehem, Christmas is omni populo, for all people; thus there is the continuation of Christmas, of Bethlehem, with us. The gifts they bring inaugurate the idea of gift-giving at Christmas and inform the essential meaning of Epiphany not just as event but as teaching. The gifts teach and thus belong to the manifestation, the making known of the essential divinity of Jesus Christ; the main theme of the Epiphany season.

The readings on The First Sunday after Epiphany within The Octave of the Epiphany signal this new and different focus that belongs to Epiphany. There is a turn, as Bishop John Cosin (17th c. Durham) puts it, from “His coming in the flesh that was God” to “His being God that was come in the flesh”; a shift in focus and emphasis in our thinking, namely, “to turn ourselves from his humanity below to his divinity above.”

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“Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east,
and are come to worship him”

Epiphany means manifestation; in this case, the making known to us of the high things of God. It is more than just the ending, a kind of afterglow, of Christmas. It inaugurates a new emphasis and highlights the beginnings of a new journey, the journey of the understanding. It begins with a question: “where is he that is born King of the Jews?”

Epiphany reveals the deeper understanding of God made man in Christ Jesus. It catapults us into a kind of theological reasoning, namely, our thinking upon the nature of God made manifest “in substance of our mortal flesh”, as the Proper Preface for Epiphany states about God who is Eternal Light and Truth. This echoes the Proper Preface of Christmas that Christ “was made very man of the substance of the Virgin Mary his mother; and that without spot of sin.” God is made known in the very substance of our humanity.

Epiphany is, above all else, teaching. The teaching is about the essential divinity of Jesus Christ, the sine qua non of Christian understanding. John Cosin, the 17th century Bishop of Durham, captures best the intellectual sensibility of Epiphany. Our thinking, he says, now turns from “His coming in the flesh that was God” to “His being God that was come in the flesh”; in short, “to turn ourselves from his humanity below to his divinity above.” Epiphany marks this shift of perspective in terms of the nature of divinity unfolded before us through what we are taught about God by God.

In Matthew’s account (and it is only from Matthew that we have the journey of the Μαγοι from Anatolia), they come seeking, following a star from the east. They come from outside of Israel, as Gentiles, meaning non-Israelites, yet seeking, as they say, “he that is born King of the Jews”, whose star they have seen. Once again, this signals the theme of universality. With Epiphany, Christmas is omni populo, for all people. As such there are really two journeys that belong to the mystery of the Epiphany: their journey to Bethlehem and, then, their journey from Bethlehem, “departing into their own country another way”, as Matthew puts it.

Epiphany marks the break-out from Bethlehem in the continuing journey of the understanding that belongs to the fullness of the truth and dignity of our humanity. What that journey to and from Bethlehem means is signalled by them. They come, they say, “to worship him”.

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“When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son,
made of a woman, made under the law”

Some can’t wait for Christmas to be over; others want it to last forever. Yet however much Christmas has been co-opted, if not hijacked to every other agenda imaginable, it has an undeniable hold on our imaginations and our lives to one degree or another. It has a global reach and presence in very different cultures in our world and even among non-Christians. Why? Because of its catholicity, dare I say, meaning something universal and in its fullness. The word, fullness, is a repeated feature of the Christmas mystery.

There is a fullness of things in heaven and earth, a double fullness, we might say, but one which is captured in the central mystery. For in “the Word made flesh”, as John puts it “(we beheld the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth”; a fullness contained in a parenthesis. In the readings for The Sunday after Christmas we have “the fullness of the time” which is just as much “the time of fullness”. The twelve days of Christmas are unique, not just an octave such as at Easter, but an octave and a half, ultimately culminating in Epiphany on Tuesday of this week. With Epiphany, Christmas goes global. What is proclaimed as “good tidings of great joy for all people” reaches far, far beyond a tiny corner of the world. With the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem, Christmas is omni populo, literally for all people, itself a kind of fullness.

But what does all this fullness mean? Quite simply, fullness belongs to God and to our being gathered into the life of God. Fullness speaks to the highest truth and dignity of our humanity; it cannot be constrained to ethnic, cultural, political, social, economic, and linguistic communities and cultures. This sense of the fullness of things is theological, not merely sociological. In a radical sense, the Christmas mystery at Bethlehem never goes away but signals the whole purpose of God’s revelation in the gathering of all things into unity in God. Like the Magi-Kings, we may leave Bethlehem and return to our own places, but, perhaps, as T.S. Eliot suggests, “no longer at ease” because the Christmas mystery at Bethlehem always remains with us. The point is that we are changed by what we have been given to see.

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“Take the young child, and his mother, and flee into Egypt”

Fuga in Egyptu, the flight into Egypt, is one of the more intriguing stories of the Christmas mystery and yet belongs to its most disturbing moment, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. Nothing more apocalyptical, it seems, and certainly no story speaks so hauntingly to the hideous spectacles of destruction and violence which belong to the horrors of the 20th and 21st centuries. It brings out something of the deeper meaning of the Incarnation as providing the only real counter to human evil and wickedness.

The fuga in Egyptu is a salvation story within the salvation story of human redemption. It looks back to Exodus and to Pharoah’s attempt to control the population of the Hebrews through a policy of infanticide. Out of that story comes the birth of Moses, God’s instrument for the exodus, the intellectual and spiritual journey of Israel which culminates in the giving of the Law. The flight into Egypt portrays Joseph as the instrument of the deliverance of the Holy Family from Herod’s wrath, envy, and fear about a potential rival to his power through a similar policy of infanticide.

This story is captured rather movingly and paradoxically in one of the loveliest of the carols of the season. It reminds us of how substantial and serious the Christmas story is and not just sentimental. Puer Nobis Nascitur is a 15th century carol, though probably of much earlier origins, which highlights the sense of Christ’s birth as deliverance from evil in the form of the political. “Came he to a world forlorn, the Lord of every nation… “Cradled in a stall was he with sleepy cows and asses”, suggesting that the beasts “could see” what the evil of man sees but rejects, namely “that he of all men surpasses”.

Herod then with fear was filled:
‘A prince’, he said, ‘in Jewry!’
All the little boys he killed
At Bethlem in his fury.

The story accentuates the theological idea of the Word made flesh coming to a world which “knew him not” and “unto his own who received him not”. It is the attempt to annihilate and destroy the one whose very coming and being as truth and goodness challenges all the pretensions of worldly power. It is an old story and one which sadly recurs over and over again in our world. The Holy Innocents are the nameless victims of the power games of the mindless Herods of our times. Their innocence lies simply in their powerlessness, in their inability to harm, the true meaning of innocence. The Feast of Holy Innocents highlights a sad feature of ‘the city of man’ historically and in the global present; a world of many, many victims who are caught up in the machinations of political and economic power and are destroyed. Most of them are unnamed and unknown by us, yet known to God.

The point is that the unnamed victims are known and named in God. The whole theological thrust of the Feast within the Festival of Christmas is to gather us into the embrace of Christ’s grace. The lesson from Revelation places all such holy innocents in the vision of the redeemed, the proverbial “one hundred and forty-four thousand” who have “his Name, and the Name of the Father written on their forehead”. In other words the Holy Innocents participate in the world’s redemption accomplished in Christ. In that sense the Collect suggests, albeit disturbingly, to be sure, that God “madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths”. Yet this is the idea of redemptive suffering from the perspective of those who are the innocent victims of the machinations of worldly powers.

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“The world itself could not contain the books that should be written”

Between the martyrdom of Stephen and the slaughter of the Holy Innocents there is The Feast of St. John the Evangelist. All three feasts comprise the three great Holy Days of Christmas and enlighten our understanding of the mystery of Christmas. With today’s feast we have the divine ground of human lives in all of their complexity illuminated for us. We are returned, as it were, to the wonder of Christmas Eve in the pageant of God’s Word and Son in The Letter to the Hebrews and in the Prologue of John’s Gospel. We contemplate this morning the radical mystery of the Incarnation by way of John’s first letter and the ending of the very last chapter of his Gospel. These endings and beginnings are nothing more than the ways in which we are enfolded in eternity, enfolded and embraced in the love of God toward us.

The life of the Church and the doctrine of the Christian Faith is greatly influenced and shaped by “the doctrine of thy blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint John,” as the collect puts it. The Divine Word signals life and light communicated to us through “that which was from the beginning, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled”; in short, the Word of life, as John’s 1st Epistle says. For in this, “the life was manifested”, the life that is “eternal life, which was with the Father … [which] and was manifested unto us”. To what end? Our fellowship with God and the joy of that heavenly fellowship. For “these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.”

Is the Word of God only or simply what is written? No. Neither the Christmas Gospel from John’s Prologue nor the last words of the last chapter of his Gospel allow us to draw that conclusion. God’s Word and Son is more than words written, though not less. The greater mystery is how the words written lift us to the wonder of the eternal word with us whose thoughts, words, and deeds, we might say, far exceed all that could be written. “The world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” This is not about more information or facts or data that belong to finite reason and experience; it is about the eternal Word itself as exceeding by definition human comprehension. It is not something to which we can add or from which we can subtract. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord” (Isaiah 55. 8). And so too, we might say, ‘My words are not your words’.

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“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”

What most know about St. Stephen, if anything, is probably from the carol, “Good King Wencelaus”, a 19th century English Christmas carol by John Mason Neale set to a 13th century medieval tune collected in a 16th century Finnish collection of carols, Piae Cantiones. Neale’s carol is based upon a 10th century duke in Bohemia, now the Czech Republic, about whom not much is known, other than is being favorably inclined towards Christians. The carol makes no mention whatsoever of the Christmas story and yet, paradoxically, it is one of the most popular Christmas carols! Nonetheless, the carol touches in at least two ways upon some of the most significant features of the Christmas Mystery and the Christian Faith.

The Feast of Stephen, explicitly mentioned in the carol, is one of the three great Holy Days of Christmas. Stephen is the proto-martyr of the Christian Church. Along with The Feast of St. John the Evangelist and The Feast of the Holy Innocents, St. Stephen’s Day contributes to our understanding of Christ’s Incarnation. Lancelot Andrewes notes that Christ’s Good Friday and his Christmas Day are “but the evening and the morning of one and the same day”; a point which John Donne twenty years later also echoed; both of them highlighting the necessary connection between the Nativity and the Passion. They are inseparable. “His whole life was a continual passion”.

T.S. Eliot notes in his play Murder in the Cathedral the central paradox which goes to the heart of the Christian Faith. We celebrate Christ’s Nativity with the Eucharist which recalls and re-presents to us his Passion. As the carol In Dulci Jubilo puts it “Christ was born for this”. Perhaps, it is not really all that strange that on the very day after Christmas we celebrate the first martyr of the Christian Church, St. Stephen, whose story in some sense or other has become associated with the carol and with Christmas.

The two ways in which Stephen is significant in terms of the mystery of Christmas is that he was, first, one of the early deacons of the emerging Christian church, known then simply as ‘The Way’ – the Christian Tao, as it were, and secondly, his sacrifice is explicitly modelled on Christ’s crucifixion and echoes Christ’s first and last words from the Cross. “Father forgive them; for they know not what they do” is Jesus’s first word on the Cross to the Father. Stephen’s last word is “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”, Stephen prays, an echo of Christ’s last word, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”.

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“Now it came to pass in those days … the days [that] were accomplished
that she should be delivered”.

What days? The days in which “there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed”, as Luke tells us, alluding to matters of politics and power, but, even more as he tells us, “and so it was, that while they [meaning Mary and Joseph], were there [in Bethlehem], the days were accomplished that she should be delivered”. Such is the miracle of birth but as the Christmas Gospel makes clear this is the greater miracle of the birth of Christ, the babe who is Christ the Lord.

All this is the miracle of Christmas which reveals to us the miracle of God making himself known to us in the commonplace and contingent realities of human experience. Not so as to be collapsed into our world and the limitations of our thinking and living but to reveal to us the wonder of God’s will for our humanity, here so wonderfully expressed in the angel’s word to the shepherds. “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people”. What is that good tidings of great joy? The birth in Bethlehem, the city of David, of “a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord”.

So much contained in so few words. “All wonders in one sight”, as the poet Richard Crashaw writes, “eternity shut in a span,/ summer in winter; day in night; /heaven in earth, God in man”.

It begins with words which seem like a fable or a fairy tale. “Now it came to pass in those days”. But then, more concretely yet poetically, “the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.” We will learn in the mysteries of Christmastide from Paul in Galatians, that “when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law”. And why? “To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons”. Even more, “because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” So much made, it seems, out of so little, yet it is all the muchness of God, on the one hand, and something more, wondrously more for us, on the other hand.

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“God … hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son”

There is very little that is sentimental about Christmas Eve, contrary perhaps to all our expectations. We hear in the readings from Hebrews and the Prologue from John’s Gospel tremendous things that awaken wonder. But we hear nothing about the baby Jesus, nothing about the stable or manger, nothing about shepherds visited by angels, nothing about a star in the east, nothing even about Jesus or Mary by name, apart from their mention in the Christmas anthems and the hymns. Yet everything about this holy night speaks to our hearts and minds.

Christmas speaks to the meaning of our humanity embraced by God in Christ’s holy birth. Far from being a touching and sentimental story about the birth of a child, a miracle of nature, as it were, our readings speak about the miracle of the Son of God, this day begotten in the flesh but who is from everlasting, the first-born brought into the world whom the angels of God worship and whose throne and kingdom is for ever and ever, as Hebrews puts it. The Son is the Lord who in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth and the heavens. He is eternally God who speaks to us in these last days. For, “the Word made flesh” is the Word, Son, and Light of God who was “in the beginning with God”, and has come unto the world made by him and has come unto his own; in short, to us.

This is a curious kind of speaking, to be sure, speaking here is a metaphor about the nature of God’s revelation to us, thus using aspects of our thinking and being to make known something which is entirely beyond our imagining in any other kind of way. It is quite simply the mystery of God’s eternal love for our humanity made manifest so that we might live through the only-begotten Son of God. Only-begotten eternally in the mystery of the Trinity; only-begotten for us as conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary, made man and born this night of her. It is the divinum mysterium revealed in the fullness and wonder of this holy night, a challenge and a blessing but not one which we can take for granted nor one which we can in any way domesticate and reduce to ourselves. We cannot make Christmas. The mystery of this holy night seeks to gather us into the mystery of God with us. God speaks things into being. God is the maker.

Hebrews exalts the mystery of Christ eternally. John signals both his eternal birth from the God the Father everlasting and his birth in flesh and in time through Mary. Yet John also signals the further wonder: he comes into the world which was made by him and yet knew him not, he comes unto his own, our humanity, yet his own received him not. There is at once the affirmation of the wonder of the Word made flesh dwelling among us and the wonder of his being rejected by the world which knew him not and by his own which received him not; all so gently, so firmly, so poetically stated. A testament to human perfidy in the face of God’s infinite love and faithfulness. Such a wondrous mystery; the wonder of God’s doing in the very being of our humanity. How can our hearts and minds not be moved? All this belongs to the mystery and wonder of Christmas in and through all of the richness of the images that circle around the Bethlehem scene.

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