Category: Sermons

Sermons

Sermon for Palm Sunday

“He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death,
even the death of the cross.”

Our cries of “Hosanna” quickly turn to “let him be crucified.” And so it begins, and ends, on Palm Sunday. It begins with the exultant note of rejoicing but ends with the grim spectacle of Christ’s death on the Cross. Yet that ending also marks a beginning. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ. For only then can we say that “truly, this was the Son of God” (Mt.27.54). Already something comes to birth, to light, out of the darkness of Christ’s suffering and death.

The global pandemic has made the world a rather fearful place. That is, perhaps, the greatest danger of the Covid-19 crisis; the fearfulness that brings out the worst kinds of despair and anxiety as we contemplate the growing numbers of fatalities globally. Churches are closed and media headlines suggest that preachers wonder, ‘where is God in all of this?’

Where is God? Right where He always is, right in the midst of the struggles and sufferings of our wounded and bent humanity. Never more so than in Holy Week and in the drama of the Passion of Palm Sunday. The question is not, ‘where is God in all of this?’ The question is where are we in our thinking and our caring about the ethical and about one another? The whole point of Holy Week is to confront us with the contradictions that belong to human sin and wickedness without which we cannot be awakened to the truth of our humanity in God. Such are the deep lessons of the Passion. We are to be where he is. As Rowan Williams puts it in his lovely book Being Christian, “Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering” That is where we are.

“There were they in fear where no fear was,” the Psalmist says (Ps. 53.6). In a way, such words speak to our current state of isolation. For as cooped up in our homes we are, it seems, largely insulated from contagion but not from the fears of our minds and hearts about others in our families and communities, fears about those in the front lines of health care, fears about deaths in Nursing Homes, fears about ourselves and a growing fear, suspicion, even hatred of others, precisely because of our isolation. No doubt, too, there are fears about the necessities of life, fears about other kinds of illnesses that belong to the human condition quite apart from the coronavirus. Our fear is very much a fear of the other, a fear of bodies, a fear of nature. At the heart of our fears is uncertainty. Yet the Passion of Christ is all about God’s willingness to subject himself to the bodily realities of human suffering. God wills to suffer. That is the striking paradox and meaning of Holy Week.

Such is the radical truth of the Incarnation, recalled for us in the Annunciation of Mary which fell in Passiontide this year. Her Annunciation marks the beginning in time of God being with us and so with human suffering. Her Annunciation marks his conception in her womb. Only so can God suffer for us and with us. In the body. And why? To bring us to the truth of ourselves in his will for us. To do so through suffering.

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Sermons, Theology

2020 Lenten Programme

Fr. David Curry has collected his four Lenten Programme addresses (with footnotes) into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Lenten Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer”.

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Sermons, Theology

Lenten Programme on The Lord’s Prayer IV

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

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”

Our Lenten study of the Lord’s Prayer brings us to the last three petitions, to the triad of forgiveness, temptation, and evil. They draw us into the deeper meaning of Christ’s Passion. To pray for forgiveness for ourselves and towards one another, to pray not to be led into temptation, and to pray to be delivered from evil is to pray the Passion of Christ.

We pray to our Father in all of the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. To pray “Our Father” achieves, Thomas Aquinas tells us, “five things.” First, the words “Our Father” serve to “instruct us in our faith”; second, they “raise our hopes”; third, “they serve to stimulate charity”; fourth, they lead us “to imitate God”; and fifth, they call us “to humility”.  In other words, the phrase “Our Father”, which is present throughout the Lord’s Prayer, gives us confidence in God. As Aquinas says, “Our Lord, in teaching us how to pray, sets out before us those things which engender confidence in us, such as the loving kindness of a father, implied in the words, Our Father.” Once again, we see how the Lord’s Prayer is an essential of the Christian Faith.

Augustine breaks off his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer in the sixth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel to speak about the Creed. He is speaking during Holy Week in the context of preparing catechumens for baptism. Both the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed are to be learned by heart. “When you have learned [the Creed], that you may never forget it, say it every day when you rise; when you are preparing for sleep, rehearse your Creed, to the Lord rehearse it, remind yourselves of it, and be not weary of repeating it. … Call your faith to mind, look into yourself, let your Creed be as it were a mirror to you. Therein see yourself, whether you do believe all which you profess to believe, and so rejoice day by day in your faith. Let it be your wealth, let it be in a sort the daily clothing of your soul. Do you not always dress yourself when you rise? So by the daily repetition of your Creed dress your soul.” It is a powerful passage complemented by his teaching about the creedal nature of the Lord’s Prayer as being an essential form of our participation in the life of God in Christ.

From these remarks about the Creed, he turns to the “Our Father,” and highlights its essential and radical nature. In saying “Our Father,” he says, “you have begun to belong to a great family. Under this Father the lord and the slave are brethren; under this Father the general and the common soldier are brethren; under this Father the rich man and the poor are brethren. All Christian believers have various fathers in earth, some noble, some obscure; but they all call upon one Father which is in heaven.” Like the Creed, it is to be prayed every day.

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Sermons

Sermon for Passion Sunday

“For this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant”

For what cause? Meaning for what reason or on account of what? The reason or cause is redemption or atonement which can only be accomplished by a Mediator; indeed, as Hebrews insists, “the Mediator.” The Christian understanding of redemption hangs on the idea of Christ as the Mediator between God and Man.

Passion Sunday marks the beginning of deep Lent, a time of great seriousness and contemplation about the human condition of sin, suffering, and death, on the one hand, and about how that condition is addressed and dealt with by God, on the other hand. We are thrown into the deep waters of theology.

The lesson from Hebrews lays out the Scriptural doctrine of human redemption. “Christ is the High Priest of good things to come,” the Epistle reading begins, hinting at something greater and better and more efficacious than the sacrificial “blood of goats and calves,” and yet it is by blood, “by his own blood,” that this is accomplished. That “blood” belongs to the truth of Christ’s humanity as derived from Mary whose Annunciation fell just this week past, marking the conception of Christ in her womb without which this greater sacrifice would not be possible. He is “immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,” by which “salvation to all that will is nigh,” as John Donne’s sonnet, ‘Annunciation’, so beautifully puts it.

“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place.” The references to “High Priest” and “the holy place” speak to the sacrificial rituals of the Temple in Jerusalem that recapitulate the forms of Israel’s deliverance and dedication to God, but the point of Hebrews is about something greater. It is signified by Christ “enter[ing] in once,” and once for all, we might add, “having obtained eternal redemption for us.” The contrast is between the Old or First Covenant and the New or Second Covenant; the turning point is the nature of the Mediator who gathers our humanity into the life of God.

The word redemption is used twice in this passage. Christ “enter[ing] in once into the holy place” obtains “eternal redemption for us.” “He is the Mediator of the new covenant, that by means of death for the redemptionof the transgressions that were under the first covenant,” meaning the Old Covenant of the Torah, the Law, “they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.” The end or purpose of our humanity is to be found in God and not simply in our own projects and designs.

For our own projects and designs are invariably but “the devices and desires of our own hearts,” as the General Confession so clearly puts it (BCP, p. 4), such things, which we admit, “we have followed too much.” For “we have offended against thy holy laws.” ”We have left undone, the things which we ought to have done.” “We have done the things which we ought not to have done.” Would we really want to protest this? Is there any wonder, then, about acknowledging that “there is no health in us”? The phrase in the context of this honest appraisal of the human condition is that “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves” (Collect for Lent II). We are not self-complete nor are we self-sufficient, as the events of our world more than amply suggest.

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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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Sermons

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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