Category: Sermons

These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth

If the reality of the stoning of St. Stephen was more than we can bear, how shall we ever bear the heart-rending story of the Holy Innocents? And how shall we possibly make sense of it in relation to the sentiments of the Christmas season. How is this joy and peace and goodwill? How is this truth and love, mercy and grace? And yet it is.

No feast of Christmas week speaks more profoundly, albeit disturbingly, to the reality of Christ’s holy birth. Here is a story which disturbs or should disturb us and yet belongs to the tragic realities of our world and day, a world which witnesses to the endless sufferings and death of countless little ones. They are, as in Matthew’s account, the innocent ones, those who are unable to harm and yet are harmed themselves. They are the victims of the convenience of others, the victims of the machinations of individuals and nations. They are those whose deaths seem so utterly pointless and meaningless.

There are the sad realities of abortion, of the slaughter of children in the war zones of the world, of the deaths of the little ones through famine and pestilence. These are some of the inescapable realities of our world; complicated and complex, to be sure, but also terrifying and heart-rending. How amazing that during the Christmas season which celebrates the birth of God as a child we are asked to contemplate the deaths of the little ones!

Christ is God’s “great little one.” He takes his humanity from the blessed Virgin Mary. There is a sense of wonder in his birth, a sense of joy and an awakening to hope and peace, good will and harmony. Yet the Christmas story is very much about the dark realities of the human condition, about the stark realities of sin and evil. “He came unto his own and his own received him not,” you might remember from Christmas Eve. “There was no room for them in the inn,” you might recall from Christmas  Day.

Christmas does not hide from view such realities. It gives us a way to face them and to do so in the paradox of God’s grace signalled in the lesson from Revelation. The Holy Innocents are seen as the pure and innocent ones who “follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.” Yet the Holy Innocents are the little children of Bethlehem whom Herod, seeking to remove a potential rival to his throne, has killed. His violent act recalls the ancient policy of infanticide inaugurated by Pharaoh to contain and control the Hebrews. The phrase “out of Egypt have I called my Son” references the story of the Exodus. In every way, these lessons seek to connect the deaths of the little ones to Christ and to the purpose of his coming.

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That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you

The Feast of St. John the Evangelist immediately recalls the wonderful words of Christmas Eve. “That which was from the beginning” is the Word which “was with God and was God” without which “was not anything made that was made.” Christ is the Word of God, the Divine Word and Son. It can only follow that “the world itself could not contain the books that should be written” about all the things which Jesus did. Such is the contemplative meaning of God with us.

Christ’s Incarnation does not exhaust the riches of God; rather it enfolds us in its mystery and truth which is always more and never less than what we can imagine and know. The witness of John the Evangelist in his Gospel and in his epistles contributes greatly to the understanding and development of Christian doctrine. The Christmas message of John emphasizes the divine reality of Christ as Word and the human reality of his embodiment in the flesh of our humanity; in short, the Word made flesh is real.

It is not fake news. The Epistle and the  Gospel make a claim to the truth of the witness not just by assertion but by argument. The argument is the idea of the Incarnation itself as being the Word, and Son, and Light of God come into the world in Christ, a light which is greater than the darkness of sin and evil. “We have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you” John tells us, again and tellingly in parenthesis, “that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us.” There is in this a sense of urgency and a sense of contemplative wonder.

This is the corrective to all our mistaken notions about God which reduce God to our agendas and concerns as if we have taken God captive to our desires. Such is the vanity of our attempt to absolutize the finite and so to deny the infinite. Christ’s Incarnation is about God and our humanity, each in their integrity and fullness, and yet one in Christ. The Christian mystery seen with the eyes of John is about God making us adequate to himself through himself becoming man in Jesus Christ. The Incarnate Son of God is the eternal Son of God. “There was not when he was not” (Athanasius). Incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, as the Creed puts it does not mean that he ceases to be God. Such is the wonder and the mystery of God and of God with us that John the Evangelist so powerfully presents to us. Such is the great wonder of Christmas. It is always more and never less than what we can imagine and know.

These things have been written not only for our learning but as John says “that our joy may be full.” And what is that joy? Fellowship with one another and with God: “that ye also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” This is the great joy of Christmas and the meaning of our fellowship with one another. It is grounded in our fellowship with God. Such is the Christmas message of love-in-contemplation.

That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you

Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. John the Evangelist, Xmas 2019

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Lord, lay not this sin to their charge

“Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot observes in his 1935 drama, Murder in the Cathedral. That play along with the well-known and well-beloved Christmas Carol, Good King Wenceslaus, written by John Mason Neale in 1853 and sung to a 13th century spring dance melody (Tempus Adest Floridum), offer an intriguing commentary on the Christmas mystery. In Eliot’s play, a sermon preached by Archbishop Thomas a Becket Christmas morning serves as prologue to his martyrdom on December 29th, 1170. The sermon focuses on the Feast of Stephen which falls immediately after Christmas Day. The hymn draws upon a 12th account of a 10th century Duke of Bohemia’s generosity and service towards the poor.

St. Stephen is the proto-martyr, the first martyr and prototype of martyrdom in the Christian understanding. He was also one of the first set of deacons in the nascent and emerging Christian community. Thus, sacrifice and service are intimately connected. The hymn makes no direct reference to the Nativity of Christ but narrates a story of service to the poor on “the Feast of Stephen.” The sermon in the play makes explicit the connection between Christ’s birth and Stephen’s martyrdom and in so doing illuminates the deeper meaning of Christmas.

It is no accident that the Feast of St. Stephen follows directly upon the Feast of the Nativity of Christ. It highlights the deeper reality of the meaning of Christ’s holy birth. “Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and in the Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figures, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs.” We celebrate Christ’s birth by remembering his Passion and death; such is the sacrament. “Do this in remembrance of me.” We cannot conceive of Christmas apart from the reality of his Passion and Death for us. “We celebrate at once the Birth of Our Lord and His Passion and Death upon the Cross.” This is all part of the reality from which we shy away but which the special feasts of Christmas remind us, starting with St. Stephen’s day. As Eliot has the Archbishop note, “as the World sees, this is to behave in a strange fashion. For who in the World will both mourn and rejoice at once and for the same reason?” But that is exactly the Christian reality.

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And this shall be a sign unto you

The gentle quiet of Christmas morn is itself a Christmas blessing, a gift to the understanding. In the noise of our world and day we overlook what is wrought in the great silences of God. Creation, Christ’s Incarnation, and Christ’s Resurrection all happen “in the deep silence of God”; we know them only after the fact. Ignatius of Antioch, one of the Apostolic Fathers, second-generation Christians as it were who had first-hand contact with the Apostles, speaks wonderfully about the silences of God.

Mary’s virginity was hidden from the prince of this world; so was her child-bearing, and so was the death of the Lord. All these three trumpet-tongued secrets were brought to pass in the deep silence of God. How then were they made known to the world? Up in the heavens a star gleamed out, more brilliant than all the rest; no words could describe its lustre, and the strangeness of it left men bewildered … The age-old empire of evil was overthrown, for God was now appearing in human form to bring in a new order, even life without end (Ignatius’s Epistle to the Ephesians).

He could be commenting on this morning’s readings. “The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men,” Paul tells us in his letter to Titus. “And she brought forth her first-born son,” Luke tells us. Such are the quiet graces of Christmas morn.

They are there for our understanding, a challenge and a counter to our post-Christian world. How do we think God? Through the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology, the dance of negation and affirmation that distinguishes God as the principle upon which everything depends and so is not to be confused with anything in the created order. Without the dance of “this is thou and neither is this thou” we collapse God into ourselves and into all of the petty nonsense of our world and day. Such is our atheism. It is for that reason that the so-called Athanasian Creed with its sequences of negation and affirmation about the mystery of God as Trinity and the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation might well be our best Christmas contemplation. “Without forsaking what he was,” namely, God, “he became what he was not,” namely, man, as Athanasius himself says, providing the key insight that belongs to the Creed which much later came to be named after him. We cannot not think God and we can only think God in this way.

The mystery of the union of God and man is the heart of Christmas, its wonder and truth. Nothing is but what is in God and apart from God nothing is. The mystery of God with us is the mystery of God himself. All of the wonderful images of the Christmas scene laid out so wonderfully by Luke for us this morning are but signs that point to the wonder of God. Angels and shepherds come to worship and so do we. To worship is to contemplate what is worthy of all our attention. We are enfolded into the mystery which we behold. Through the dance of negation and affirmation we participate in the mystery of Christ, the Word made flesh, “wrapped in swaddling bands and lying in a manger.” The very contrast between such glory and such lowliness is the greater glory, the greater unity of God in whom all things find their truth and being.

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And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father

Christmas is really all about what we behold, about what we look at attentively; in short, to what we think about in a serious way. How strange and counter-culture that must seem in the hustle and bustle, the stürm und drang, the storm and stress of the Christmas season. And yet, perhaps, nothing is more needed.

What we are bidden to behold is the mystery of God, first and foremost, and then the mystery of God with us. This is the necessary corrective to all the frantic pressures and hectic busyness of Christmas and to its opposite in the empty loneliness of so many in the world of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. We look out, I fear, on a world of lonely people, isolated and afraid. “Look at all the lonely people, where do they all come from, where do they all belong,” as the Beatles sang in ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ It may be, too, that I am simply like Father Mackenzie, “writing the words of a sermon no one will hear.”

What does Christmas mean in our post-Christian culture? Apart from the commercial aspects of getting and spending, I suspect it mostly has to do with a certain desire for a kind of coziness and comfort with family and friends, hyggelig, to use a Danish and Scandinavian term. But the pursuit of such material comforts paradoxically seems to create all of the anxieties of Christmas and turns hygge into something more like Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream.” Cozy comfort and hugs become nordic noir! Instead of a more profound sense of the unity of our humanity we retreat into our little cubby-holes of comfort over and against what has become a fearful, uncertain, fractious and disordered world. We are trapped in a culture of divisiveness and fearful animosities.

But why? In part, because we make the mistake of thinking that we can and must make Christmas for ourselves over and against the other whoever that other may be; that we can and must make the world comfortable for ourselves which is always at the expense of others. We forget the radical meaning of Christmas which is about God and God’s love for his creation and for the whole of our humanity. We forget everything that belongs to the wonder and the mystery of the Christmas scene. What is that scene? What do we behold? Simply this: Bethlehem is paradise restored. The images of Bethlehem in our churches and even in our post-Christian culture signal the mystery of God and man, of a mother and a child, of men and women, of shepherds and kings, of angels and sheep and, by extension and beyond the Scriptures, of ox and ass, of camels and peacocks, quite literally the whole menagerie of creation in the Christian imaginary of artists and poets. Bethlehem recalls us to the harmony and peace of the Creator and his creation, to something universal and yet intimate, a hyggelig that embraces rather than excludes.

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“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”

We seem to have come full circle. The Gospel for the Sunday Next Before Advent in our Canadian Prayer Book begins with John the Baptist looking upon Jesus as he walked and saying, “Behold the Lamb of God.” This morning’s Gospel on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, also from John’s Gospel, ends with  John the Baptist “seeing Jesus coming unto him, and saying, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” Such is the witness of John the Baptist to the advent of Christ and to the meaning of human redemption.

In between the two Gospel readings for these Sundays are four verses which open us out to the mystery of Christ in his Advent to us. John the Baptist points us to Christ. That is his ministry. He identifies him as “the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.” But in the intervening verses (John 1.30-34), we have John’s account of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. An Epiphany theme, it nonetheless highlights the fuller meaning of his witness to Christ, “the one who comes after me,” he says, “ranks before me, for he was before.” Why? Because he is divine. “I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.” This is the witness of John.

The form of this witness is instructive to us in our approach to Christ and to Christmas, our approach really to the mysteries of God and his love for us. Quite simply, John the Baptist, like Mary, shows us the attitude of faith. They provide the strong counter to the endless narcissisms of our age. As if it was all about us! But no. The witness of John is very much about notcalling attention to himself, but to the “one who cometh after me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose,” he says. The questions about John the Baptist in this Gospel are all turned by John to Christ. “Who are thou?” he is asked.

There is in this a wonderful sense of wonder about John the Baptist, this strange and arresting figure of ascetic rigour and disturbing intensity. Last Sunday, Jesus pointed to John the Baptist and the significance of his ministry of preparation. Today, John the Baptist insistently points to Christ. “I am not the Christ,” he says. He calls attention not to himself but to Christ.

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Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?

John the Baptist and Mary the Blessed Virgin are essential figures in the spiritual landscape of Advent. They meet together, as it were, on the Third Sunday in Advent and illumine the nature of what it means to be “the ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.” They do so through the conjunction of repentance and rejoicing.

What is the ministry of John the Baptist? It is the ministry of “preaching a gospel of repentance for the  forgiveness of sins,” as Mark and Luke tell us and to which Matthew also alludes. What does that mean? It means a form of self-awareness, an awareness of our faults and failings which is predicated upon the desire for wholeness or righteousness in us; in short, for truth. It complements Mary’s fiat mihi which is about being defined by the Word of God’s truth coming to her and through her to us. Repentance leads to joy, to the note of rejoicing signaled on this Sunday which is also known as “Gaudete” Sunday from the Introit taken from Philippians (and which also is the Epistle for next Sunday) and symbolised with the rose candle on the  Advent wreath. “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, Rejoice.” And why? Because “the Lord is at hand.”

But why is John in prison? Matthew only tells us several chapters later. He dared to speak truth to power. There is a confusion of Herods in the New Testament, all part of the Herodian dynasty, all related to Herod the Great of the Christmas story. Herodias was first the wife of Philip, also a Herod, but divorced him to marry his more powerful brother, Herod Antipas, who in turn divorced his wife to marry her. Herodias’ name is itself a feminine form of Herod. She was a Jewish princess with great ambitions but marrying Herod Antipas, whom Matthew calls, somewhat confusingly, Herod the Tetrarch, caused an outrage since it was a violation of Jewish law for a man to marry his brother’s divorced wife. As Matthew tells us, it was John the Baptist who said to him “It is not lawful for you to have her,” and so he was put in prison.

This leads to the famous story of the beheading of John the Baptist through the connivance of Herodias and her daughter Salome. Salome dances so pleasingly before Herod Antipas that he promised to give her whatever she wanted. Herodias prompts her to say, “the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” The story has captured the imagination of many artists such as Caravaggio, Titian, and Artemisia Gentileschi, to name but a few. The phrase “one’s head on a platter” has become an idiomatic and hyperbolic expression for a very harsh punishment. Indeed. Obviously there is nothing new about our contemporary questions about “constitutional legitimacy” (quoting Habermas) or about ethical corruption in what Maclean’s calls our disordered world.

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Written for our learning

Truth is judgement. A central feature of the Advent season is God’s coming in judicio, in judgement. God’s Word coming to us is truth as judgment. How does that Word come to us? By what is spoken and hear, by what is written and read . What does it mean for that Word to be learned? There is teaching but what about learning? The real meaning of learning is captured most profoundly in Mary’s response to the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation: “be it unto me according to thy word.”

Her word is the resounding and defining mantra of the Christian Faith. God’s Word is “a lantern … and a light” unto our lives as the Psalmist puts it (Ps. 119. 105), but only through its resonance in us. That resonance requires that we be attuned to that Word, as Archbishop Rowan Williams suggests, for in that attunement lies our atonement, our being at one with what is spoken and heard, with what is written and read.

Mary is the outstanding figure of the spiritual landscape of Advent. It is instructive to consider her role in relation to the spiritual emphasis on the parade of Scripture on this day which is sometimes known as ‘Bible Sunday.’ “Whatsoever things were written aforetime” Paul tells us, indicating the purpose of the Scriptures. They “were written for our learning.” This is wonderfully encapsulated in today’s Collect in Cranmer’s rich phrases, “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.” It means paying attention to that word coming in judgement as the Gospel shows: “look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.” Mary is the supreme example of what it means to attend and be attuned to God’s Word, to what it means to learn the Scriptures; in short, to be defined by the Word of God in mente and in carne, in mind and in flesh for both are in judicio, in judgement, too.

All teaching seeks the embodiment of what is taught. It is about ideas living in us, taking flesh in our lives, as it were. Mary hears. Mary questions, Mary commits. Her great ‘yes’ to God is essential to the Incarnation of Christ. The Word takes flesh in her and from her to be the Word made flesh, the incarnate Christ. She embodies the highest expression of what it means to be human. We are called to be good Marians, to be like Mary in her active acquiescence to the power and truth of God; in short, to let God’s Word written and proclaimed resound in us.

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