Category: Sermons

“His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will … gather his wheat into the granary. But the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

“Hell is other people,” it is famously said in Sartre’s play No Exit. The Covid pandemic perhaps brought that idea out into the open in the fear and hatred of others but is Hell really other people? I think not and even in Sartre’s play that is really a form of self-delusion on the part of the characters who find themselves confined together after death. Hell is really themselves and not just after death but in their lives as the characters Garcin, Estelle, and Inez actually acknowledge.

But such recognitions are without any sense of repentance, without any sense of any kind of objective goodness or ethical principle that they have denied, contradicted, or violated. Garcin, the pacifist journalist is a coward who deludes himself as brave. He has died with twelve bullets through his chest, having been caught as a deserter fleeing from the war, but has been unspeakably and unbearably cruel to his wife, treating her abominably, as he admits, despite or because of her complete devotion to him. He is without any sense of remorse, let alone repentance. For that is Hell – the rejection or denial of repentance. And again for the same reason, a denial of any order or sense of an objective and ethical good. The others, too, have been utterly cruel to others in their lives. The only other thing they have in common, it seems, is a disdain for Second Empire style furniture; for Sartre, the epitome of bourgeois comfort and pretension for which he had utter contempt.

Yet somehow they know that they are in Hell but for all of their descriptions of themselves they do not know themselves. In a masterful image, they see one another but not themselves for there is no mirror, no glass in which they might see themselves, not even “in a glass darkly.” They are their darkness. Hell as other people belongs to the characters in their egotistical obsessions about themselves. As such there can be no repentance because that would mean love. Hell is the rejection or the refusal of love.

It is the modern paradox of self-consciousness without any real self-knowledge. And in the Scriptural understanding that is because of a denial or refusal to acknowledge the objective Spirit of God, the Creator and Redeemer of the world and our humanity, a refusal to seek to know even as we are known in the truth and love of God. In the imagery of Advent, they do not “look up and lift up their heads” towards the redemption of God that Advent proclaims is always nigh. They are imprisoned in themselves, oblivious to anyone or anything else. Hell is unending solipsism.

In the play, the characters allude to the traditional images of Hell. “You remember all we were told”, Garcin says, “about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the ‘burning marl’”. All this he dismisses as “Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers! Hell is – other people.” And yet, other people are precisely those from whom they are incapable of learning anything either about themselves or anything else. There is, to be sure, no mention of God whether as Judge or Redeemer. Hell is set up, it seems, by an unnamed “they”. Who is that? other people?, society?, the world as utterly indifferent to humanity?, the existentialist Hell of having been thrown into being? Yet at the same time there is a strong sense of the reality of our choices that come to define us. The play speaks to our questions and confusions about ourselves. Hell belongs to how we think about what it means to be human.

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“Go and show John again those things which ye do see and hear”

There are two outstanding biblical figures in the spiritual landscape of Advent. They are John the Baptist and Mary, Virgin and Mother. They come together on this day and week in the progress of Advent and in wonderful ways complement one another. On the Advent wreath, the rose or pink candle is lit in remembrance of Mary’s role in the coming of Christ.

Monday just passed was the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a commemoration that has always been part of the Prayer Book calendar since 1549. Though not mentioned in the Scripture, it belongs to the theology of the Incarnation and complements the Advent Ember Day Gospel of the story of the Annunciation of Gabriel to Mary. The reading of that Gospel in Advent concentrates simply on the angelic announcement and not on Mary’s verbal response. Yet these two moments – her conception and Annunciation – belong to her role and purpose in Christ’s Incarnation.

Her conception is about her coming to be even as the Annunciation looks back to the first moment of Christ’s Incarnation – his being conceived in her womb. Her Annunciation is his Conception! The Gospel reading at the very least reminds us of her Annunciation through her fiat mihi, her ‘yes’ to God and as such teaches what belongs to the real truth and meaning of our humanity and life in prayer: “Be it unto me according to thy word.”

But that, too, is the point of the ministry of John the Baptist in today’s Gospel. He is in prison owing to the machinations of Herod’s wife, Herodias, who seeks his annihilation. His being in prison is another form of the darkness of Advent and yet points us to the light of Christ. In the marvel of revelation, Jesus speaks to the multitudes concerning John with a barrage of recurring questions. “What went ye out into the wilderness to see?” “What went ye for to see?” And again, “What went ye out for to see?” All this calls attention to the ministry of John the Baptist. Only then does he tell us his real significance: he is at once a prophet and more than a prophet.

Jesus points us to John the Baptist who points out Jesus to us next Sunday as “the Lamb of God”. John the Baptist’s ministry as the Evensong lesson makes clear is a ministry of preaching a baptism of water for repentance. His message is the Advent mantra: “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He bids the Pharisees and Sadducees to “bear fruit that befit repentance.” But more importantly, he points to the coming of one, he says, who is “mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry;” one who “will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire” and in whose hand is the winnowing fork that will separate the wheat from the chaff.

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“Remember then what you received and heard; keep that and repent”

I am tempted to call this sermon, ‘Why we need hell’. The answer is not to have a place to put our enemies and those who trouble us, nor is it meant to scare us into heaven, as it were, in contrast to the usual and depressing parade of human miseries. The reason, paradoxically, has more to do with the reality of hope itself and the redemption of the truth of our desires. As the poet/theologian Dante so clearly teaches, hell is about getting exactly what you want which is not the same thing as what you think it is. Hell is for those who have lost, as he puts it, “the good of intellect”, for those who have not remembered or better yet, have not wanted to remember what we have “received and heard” and so have not “kept the word” and thus, have not repented, as the letter to the Church in Sardis in Revelation puts it. They have, Dante suggests, “abandoned all hope.” The key word is abandoned; it is a matter of our will and our reason.

Our text from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, which we read in the Evening Offices from the week of the Sunday Next Before Advent through the following three weeks of Advent, and which is from this morning’s second lesson at Matins, complements the eucharistic readings and echoes Matthew’s Apocalypse, his wake-call to what abides and ever is. “Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.” We find our hope and joy in that ever-abiding and eternal word of God paradoxically in the experience of the passing away of all things finite considered in themselves. Such finite realities are not nothing: they have their truth and meaning in the abiding and eternal word of God whose “words shall not pass away.”

It is not just about the catastrophes and impending senses of endism whether in the various forms of eco-apocalyptism or global social, economic, political, and psychological distresses – all wonderfully contracted in Matthew’s “distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear.” This is an aspect of our world, a world of fears, of troubles and tribulations rather fully comprehended and catalogued in the Litany. But whether in good times or bad, we are bidden to “look up and lift up our heads for our redemption draweth nigh”. That is of a different nature and order than our immediate and worldly idolatries of the practical and the technological, ourselves in our presumptions and now in our fears. Rather it is about looking to God in the motions of his Word towards us.

That Word is, inescapably, a word of judgment, a word calling us to account, a word that convinces our hearts of the reality of God and his kingdom by which our lives are measured and, inescapably, found wanting. Hope comes into play precisely at this point. In the awareness of an objective measure and standard to which we are accountable, we are brought before the absolute goodness of God. At the point where human desires discover their limitations, something more is opened out to us that is beyond ourselves and our doings.

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“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

Today’s Gospel is unique among the churches of Christendom historically speaking and in two ways. First, it was the English Church alone, early in that long period which we rather ambiguously and perhaps mistakenly call the Middle Ages, that chose this Gospel reading for Advent Sunday, and secondly, it was Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Prayer Book, who in the 16th century extended the reading to include the story of Christ’s cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem. Both features offer a profound insight into the meaning of Advent at once as the season of expectancy and waiting and as the doctrine of the Advent in the constant coming of God towards us in judgement and mercy, in humility and power, in truth and love, through the pageant of Revelation in the ordered life of the Church.

Advent is the motion of God’s Word coming to us now and always. That coming is threefold: the coming of God in carne, in the flesh of Christ’s holy Incarnation, the coming of God in judicio, in judgement and truth, and the coming of God in mente, in heart and mind. Advent is really about our constant waiting upon those motions of God coming towards us that awakens in us a sense of expectancy and preparation. In a way, the whole of our lives is about our waiting upon those motions of God coming towards us which is the real truth and meaning of human redemption. That is found precisely in the motions of God’s love towards us in Word and Sacrament, in judgement, and in humility and mercy, in grace and love, all conveyed through the Scriptures.

Paul in Romans highlights two things: first, that law is love, and secondly, that in the coming of God as light in the darkness of human sin and evil, we are bidden to walk in that light, “put[ting] on the armour of light” which is nothing less than “put[ting] on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Such is the meaning of “cast[ing] off the works of darkness and put[ting] on the armour of light” concentrated in the Collect that is to be prayed not just on this Sunday and week but throughout the Advent Season.

Christ comes “in great humility,” as the Gospel images from Zechariah the prophet make clear. His triumphal entrance into Jerusalem – the pageant of Palm Sunday – is not in pomp and circumstance but in “meek[ness] and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass.” This challenges all our worldly expectations of glory and majesty. We see at once the wonder and joy of the multitude who welcome him with cries of “Hosanna to the Son of David,” cries that convey the sense of majesty even as we know only too well how those cries of rejoicing will be turned to cries of “Crucify. Crucify.” Such is our darkness, to be sure, the darkness of sin and ignorance. Something of both those aspects of fallen humanity is present in the bewilderment of the crowd, for “when he was come into Jerusalem all the city was moved, saying, Who is this?”

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“Then Jesus turned”

In the senescence of the year comes Christ the King, striding across the barren fields of our humanity to gather us into his everlasting love (with apologies to T.S. Eliot). What is that coming? It is his Advent, his coming to us as beginning and end and so this Sunday with its wonderful collocation of prepositions – next and before – marks an ending and a beginning, a time of transition which concentrates for us the deeper theological meaning of Christ’s Advent. It is now and always.

T.S. Eliot captures something of this in his poem East Coker of the Four Quartets. It begins with “in my beginning is my end” and ends with “in my end is my beginning.” Such is a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God in the Advent of Christ.

There is the gathering together of all of the scattered and broken pieces of our lives to their wholeness and end in Christ and there is our beginning again to embark upon the pageant of Christ’s Advent towards us in Word and in flesh, in judgement and mercy, in grace and glory, that accomplishes the redemption of humanity. The challenge for us is to enter once into the radical meaning of God coming and being with us.

For centuries upon centuries, the Gospel for this Sunday, which was always the Sunday Next Before Advent regardless of the number of Sundays that preceded it, was John’s account of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, a reading also used on the Fourth Sunday in Lent. There the emphasis was on the theme of refreshment and of God’s Providence in providing for our humanity in the pilgrimage journey of our lives. “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” What was gathered up were twelve baskets filled with the fragments from the wilderness banquet, a basket for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, on the one hand, and for each of the Apostles of the Apostolic Church, on the other hand. But here, read on this Sunday, it marks the greater theme of the gathering of all things to their unity and truth in God; in short, the end and purpose of our humanity as found in God, “that nothing be lost.”

That theme of the gathering in the wilderness complements the equally ancient reading from Jeremiah which looks back to the Exodus journey where the Lord through Moses brought up the children of Israel out of Egypt and to the Davidic kingship in which the tribes of Israel were united but both moments now seen by Jeremiah in the impending Babylonian captivity as the hope and promise of the return of Israel. Yet in the Christian understanding, “rais[ing] unto David a righteous Branch” echoes Isaiah’s prophecy about the Messiah, an allusion or prophecy about Christ, “the Lord our Righteousness”; in short, a judgement and restoration theme.

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“Shouldest thou not also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant,
even as I had pity on thee?”

The Church year runs out in the themes of judgment and mercy. Next Sunday is The Sunday Next Before Advent, signalling the end of the Trinity Season at the same time as catapulting us into the mystery of Advent, the beginning of a new Christian year. The Trinity and Epiphany Seasons vary in length according to the date of Easter but regardless there is a pattern and movement of thought in the latter Sundays of the Trinity Season whether shorter or longer, whether twenty-three or twenty-seven Sundays. There is a logic, a way of thinking theologically, centered in the eucharistic lectionary that remains in the classical Prayer Books of the Anglican tradition.

What is that pattern and movement of ideas? It is the interplay between judgement and mercy in a kind of dialectical relation: there is judgement in mercy and mercy in judgement. Both are concentrated for us in today’s lessons, especially in the Gospel. The year runs out, it is not too much to say, on a profoundly ethical note about good and evil, about right and wrong, in our hearts and our lives. Sanctification is the overarching theological theme of the Trinity Season – the pageant of Christ in us – but that presupposes and constantly returns us to the theological theme of Justification – the pageant of Christ for us in his redemptive acts. The two are intertwined and are further informed and amplified by the cycle of the Saints in glory; in short, Glorification. These themes reach a crescendo of expression in the parable of the unforgiving servant precisely in his not doing to another what had been done to him, namely showing mercy, the mercy in which we find our good and our blessedness. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy,” the Beatitude which is at the centre of the Beatitudes.

But doesn’t all this confront us with our contemporary dilemma about the very idea of the ethical? In the culture of moral nihilism there is no ethical, no real meaning to good and evil, to right and wrong. There is only the empty relativism of ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth’; in short, solipsism, a kind of gnosticism, where there is no truth that holds us accountable to one another as human persons; and not just bots in the machinery of technocratic culture. What is good for me may not be good at all, let alone good for you. But isn’t it only just what you can get away with? What’s missing? God? Well, yes, but other things too.

In the culture of moral nihilism, the ethical is simply negated: not just relativized, which leaves the door open, perhaps, to a conversation upon what relativism ultimately depends, but denied and quickly reduced to the pragmatism that whatever you can get away with is fine. – for you and who cares about anyone else? There is ‘no ought from an is,’ David Hume argued in the 18th century, the legacy of which, it seems, is that the ethical is seen as arbitrary and unintelligible, and the assumption, common in our age, that natural science, naturalism or scientism, explains everything; a kind of material determinism which negates human freedom and dignity.

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“But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”

The reading from Hebrews appointed for the Octave of All Saints’ (BCP, p. 302) reminds us that “we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.” Such is the Communion of Saints, a multitude beyond number comprising persons past, present, and future who are known and embraced in God’s eternal love. It is pictured as “an heavenly country,” indeed, a city, heavenly Jerusalem. It is an image of the true homeland of our humanity, the patria with God which defines the via to God, the end which orders the way. Hebrews reminds us that the conditions of our journeying belong to our participation in what Christ has accomplished for us and therefore in us.

At this point the readings for this Sunday come into play and help our thinking about what is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day, namely Remembrance Day. We endeavour to remember all those who sacrificed their lives for their country in the great, defining, and utterly devastating wars of the last century and beyond, the legacies of which remain with us in our world of endless wars. Far from a glorification of war and military power and might, it is really a remembrance of the horrors and cost of war, on the one hand, and of the dedication and sacrifice for the sake of others for what they took to be good and true, on the other hand. Timothy Findley’s classic Canadian anti-war novel, The Wars, reflects profoundly on the technology of war which destroys both the natural world and our humanity, turning what is life-giving into what is life-destroying. It is about us but the novel counsels against falling into the tragedy of victimhood which negates our agency and dignity; instead the challenge is “to clarify who you are by your response to when you lived,” a life lesson for all of us in the face of the ugly spectacle of human sin and evil that bedevils us all.

We are asked to remember the many hundreds of thousands who went forth from our communities to fight and die in the World Wars in far away lands for what they thought was worth fighting for; in so doing we place them in the greater struggle for good over evil in our own hearts and lives. In other words, the real causes of the wars and conflicts of our world are ultimately spiritual. Thus Hebrews bids us “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.” This is to transcend the divisions and animosities of countries and cultures but only by looking beyond ourselves to Christ Jesus, the alpha and omega of all creation and of our lives in faith. “These all died in faith,” Hebrews says, referring to the pageant of Old Testament figures, named and unnamed, who are gathered into the greater sacrifice of Christ.

It is all about faith which Hebrews defines as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” (Heb. 11.1). We are more not less than the material and economic circumstances of our lives that become so often the occasion for sin and violence. We go from last Sunday’s images of “putting off mortality” and “putting on immortality”, from being “knit together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Christ”, from the theme of the “wedding-garment”, emblematic of our participation in the marriage feast, to the powerful imagery of the panoply of war. “Put on the whole armour of God,” Paul bids us, “above all, taking the shield of faith.”

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“Blessed are you”

The soft autumnal colours of October give way to the sombre grey of November. There is a meditative and contemplative quality to this time of year “when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” as Shakespeare so memorably puts it.

His whole sonnet (#73) applies the imagery of the dying of nature’s year to human mortality, seeing in ourselves “that time of year,” “the twilight of such day as after sunset fadeth in the west,” and “the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie, as the death-bed whereon it must expire, consum’d with what which it was nourish’d by.” Though beautifully put, such observations are rather commonplace in the poetic, philosophic and biblical traditions. “Lord, what is man,” the Psalmist asks “that thou hast such respect unto him, or the son of man, that thou so regardest him?” and answers that “man is like a thing of nought: his time passeth away as a shadow” (Ps. 144, 3-4). There is no escaping the reality of human mortality.

The sonnet ends on a different note that suggests a deeper sensibility about the perceptions of mortality pointing to something greater. “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long.” These poetic reflections “make [our] love more strong” and challenge us “to love that well which [we] must leave ere long.” That the world, ourselves, and others are to be loved well even in the face of mortality indicates that they are worthy of love. That can only be so, because they are known and loved in God’s eternal knowing and loving of all things. Things mortal are seen in relation to what is immortal.

This belongs to ancient wisdom and truth albeit in a number of registers. “There is no permanence,” the hero Gilgamesh is told on his quest for understanding in one of the oldest literary works of our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, regarded by the German poet Rilke, shortly after its being discovered five thousand years later in the 19th century, as the great Epic of the Fear of Death; mortality, in other words. But there is a wonderful paradox. Gilgamesh is told this by Utnapishtim, a mortal who has been granted immortality (along with his wife) after the great flood by the arbitrary and capricious gods of ancient Sumeria. Utnapishtim is the precursor to Noah and the flood. But what kind of immortality are they granted? Not one in company or communion with others or even the gods but just the two of them in the Land of Dilmun, an imaginary place beyond the imaginary ends of the world. A kind of no place.

Shakespeare’s sonnet connects to the readings that belong to the great Feast of All Saints and its Octave. Yesterday was All Saints’ Day and today is both The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity and The Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, better known as All Souls’ Day (transferred to Monday). In the season of scattered leaves, themselves an apt image of the dying of nature’s year, and in the culture of scattered souls, another apt image of things passing and falling away, there is a gathering into something more. This is shown in the readings that belong to All Saints’.

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“Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee”

It is a remarkable Gospel. What does Jesus want us to know? That he is the forgiveness of sins. “That you may know,” Jesus says to the sceptical scribes whose inner thoughts he knows, it seems. Wow. But what does forgiveness mean and what does it look like?

If you say, “I forgive you, but I can’t forget,” then you haven’t forgiven the sin. You have merely put away the penalty that you might have exacted, your ‘pound of flesh’, as it were. But the original wrong isn’t made right between you. It isn’t forgiven. Forgiveness cannot be mere words.

Or if you despise the one who has offended you so that it is a matter of repugnance or a matter of indifference to have anything further to do with him, then you haven’t forgiven him so much as tried to forget him; in short, to erase him from the horizon of your mind as if he didn’t exist.

If you say, “I will forgive, because if I don’t, God won’t forgive me,” then perhaps you come a little closer to true forgiveness, though standing still a long way off. At least the common basis of our sinful humanity is recognised – a common need, a ground of sympathy, is acknowledged. It points to the radical meaning of what we pray. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” That acknowledges a sense of reciprocity between God and us.

Forgiveness means the removal of sin and the restoration of the good. Forsaking means the actual turning away from sin so as to turn to the active loving of the true and absolute good, God. It means the desire or pursuit of righteousness. The forgiveness of sins enables the forsaking of sins, the following after righteousness only through the restoration of righteousness in us.

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“Well, Master, thou hast said the truth”

There are two ways of turning back to God, the one in thanksgiving, which we saw last Sunday, the other in repentance. Both are an acknowledgment of the truth of God which measures us and not the other way around; both are a kind of redire ad principia, a return to a principle. That measure redeems and sanctifies our loves and our experiences. How? By bringing them to the truth of God without which “most loving [is] mere folly,” as Shakespeare notes in As You Like It (Act 2, sc. 7).

Paul in the Epistle gives thanks to God on behalf of the people of Corinth for the grace of God which has been given them which enriches them “in all utterance – speech – and in all knowledge.” In the Gospel, we see the idea of repentance as the turning of our minds to the truth upon which our thinking and being ultimately depend. In both readings, love and understanding are interrelated and speak to the truth of our humanity as intellectual and spiritual beings; in short, to the interplay between knowing and loving that belongs to “follow[ing] thee the only God, with pure hearts and minds” over and against the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil”, as the Collect puts it, reminding us of the baptismal renunciations.

The Gospel comprises two parts: first, an intriguing dialogue between Jesus and one of the scribes and, secondly, Jesus’ powerful teaching about the Christ, the anointed one, or Messiah as more than just a son of David, that is to say of the royal Davidic lineage and therefore more than a political saviour. Drawing on the Psalms of David, he points to what David himself says about the Lord by the Holy Spirit, calling God his Lord therefore acknowledging God’s transcendent and eternal nature, ultimately just as we say in the Creed that Christ is “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God.”

Two things are intriguing about the first part of the Gospel: first, it is a positive and not a negative encounter between Jesus and one of the scribes, and secondly, here in Mark’s account we have Jesus himself proclaiming the Summary of the Law, unlike what we heard five Sundays ago in the lead-up to the Parable of the Good Samaritan where the cynical lawyer who tried to put Jesus to the test was compelled by the truth itself to pronounce the love of God and the love of neighbour, and through the parable, its meaning. Here it is given by Jesus: Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord. In our liturgy, Matthew’s ending rather than Mark’s is added that “on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Here Jesus himself sums up the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, and at least hints that the commandment of twofold love is summed up in himself. This is what Paul will recognize and proclaim: love as the fulfilling of the Law in Christ. Something of the transcendent truth of God is being made known through conversation and dialogue and debate. It is made known through scriptural interpretation that is itself proto-credal in shape and substance.

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