Category: Sermons

Receive not the grace of God in vain

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

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

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

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God bestoweth abundant grace

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

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

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

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

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If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities

Courage and prudence are transformed into humility on this Sexagesima Sunday. We are turned not to the vineyard of creation but to something more basic and more humbling. We are turned to the dust and ground of creation with the parable of the sower and the seed. For courage can be at once unwise and destructive, brave but foolish, if it is not tempered by prudence, by practical wisdom; in short, if it is not aware of human limitations, of our own weakness and infirmity.  And prudence can be too cautious and timid unless tempered by courage. Both need justice and charity, love.

We are turned to the ground. “Remember, O man, that dust thou art.” God formed man from the dust of the ground breathing his spirit into us and so we become living beings. In being turned to the ground we are in effect being turned to God and to our connection with the created order. Only so can we begin to reclaim the dignified dust of our humanity. Only so can we be the good ground instead of the waste-ground of the wayside, the rocky ground, or the thorny ground, all of which signal something of the nature of our  falleness and our incompleteness, of folly and sin.

The parable is more than an image, more than an illustration. In Luke’s account, Jesus tells the parable but then provides the interpretation. This shows something of the radical meaning of the Gesima Sundays. They are about an awakening to the inner qualities of grace in us. That awakening means teaching and learning. Thus Paul provides a lesson about the correctives to courage and Luke about the deeper meaning of prudence. In both there is a kind of humility that recalls us to God in the very circumstances in which we find ourselves, a kind of awakening to ourselves in relation to God and creation.

Courage, in the sense of being bold and in calling attention to how well we have persevered in the face of animosities and persecution, can lead to an insidious pride which elevates us above others. We claim a particular identity which we then extol over others. It can easily become the kind of ‘look at me, look at me’ narcissism of our contemporary culture. This is the danger of incurvatus in se, our being turned in upon ourselves but not to the grace of God in us. Instead of self-awareness there is an ignorance of self in our shallow thoughtlessness, in our inconstancies and inconsistencies, and in our worldly preoccupations and distractions as presented in the images of the ground of the way-side, the rocky ground, and the thorny ground.

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Go ye also into the vineyard

In the bleak mid-winter, it must seem strange to be talking about vineyards. Yet, our province increasingly abounds with more and more vineyards, not to mention hops and craft beer! And while this seems to be a new phenomenon, we should remember that over a thousand years ago, the Maritime provinces, as we call them, were known by the Norse explorers as Vinland – Wine Land. The Medieval Labours of the Months tagged to the signs of the Zodiac sculpted on many a medieval cathedral portal or depicted in stained glass windows or painted in Books of Hours recall us to a profound connection to the land, a connection to the seasons and the human labours that attend them. February is often depicted as a time to sit by the fire while March is the time to tend the vines. Yet that labour too will vary across Europe in accord with climatic zones and climate changes. So perhaps the idea of going into the vineyard even in February is not so strange after all.

It is here an image for the spiritual life and for our reading in the vineyard of the text, the Scriptures. Reading nature in the Book of Nature, and reading the Scriptures means learning about God revealed and made known through both. It is not by accident that the Sunday and Daily Office readings begin today with our reading through Genesis. The point is the connection between land and God. In thinking about creation and about the land we are recalled to the Lord of the vineyard who is the Lord of our souls. Isaiah speaks about Israel as the Lord’s vineyard – something of God’s planting from which God seeks the fruit of righteousness and holiness. It is an image of the greatest intimacy; indeed, a love song. “My beloved had a vineyard … He looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes … he looked for righteousness, but behold, a cry!” Isaiah explains the image. “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel … he looked for justice, but, behold, bloodshed.”

It is in that context that perhaps we can begin to appreciate the radical meaning of the Gospel for Septuagesima Sunday which inaugurates the season of pre-Lent. In so many ways, it marks the beginning of the struggle to internalize what we have been given to see about Christ in the fullness of his divinity and in the revelation of God’s will for our humanity. The Gospel of the labourers in the vineyard belongs to that task and challenge. It makes the point that the justice of God is far more and far greater than the justice of man and yet belongs to the divine good for our humanity, a greater form of goodness than what belongs to the limits of human justice.

Last Sunday marked the interesting conjunction between Candlemas and the end of the Epiphany season, thus pointing us towards Lent and Easter. Apart from that providential coincidence of considerations, it was also the day that one of the great men of letters, the Franco-American scholar, literary critic, writer and philosopher, George Steiner died. In 1974, he gave the Massey Lectures entitled “Nostalgia for the Absolute.”

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When Jesus heard it, he marvelled

From the “beginning of signs” which we heard last week, we come not to one but to two miracles and to what is, perhaps, an even greater wonder. Jesus marvels at what the Centurion says. Why? Because his words are such a profound illustration of divine grace at work in human hearts.

From that “beginning of signs” to the double healing of the leper and the servant of the Roman centurion, we come to the penultimate Sunday of the Epiphany season this year, a season which varies in length along with the Trinity season according to the movable date of Easter. At the very least there can be two Sundays after Epiphany or at the very most, six Sundays. This year we split the difference with four, though next Sunday will be somewhat eclipsed with Candlemas. The double healings in today’s Gospel are epiphanies, to be sure, and emphasize, yet again, the sense of the universality of Christ in his divinity, the sense that what is made manifest is for all people. It is for Jew and Gentile, for young and old, for Europeans, Asians, Africans, and the peoples of the Americas; in short, there is a global reach to the Epiphany idea that the “infinite power, wisdom and goodness” of God is known, glimpsed and participated in universally through the distinctives of culture and language. In a way, Jesus himself seems to marvel at that realization.

The exchange between Jesus and the Centurion is undoubtedly a critique of Jewish chauvinism – the idea of the superiority of one culture over another – but that doesn’t justify in the least the kinds of Christian chauvinism that have bedevilled our world as well. To be sure, Jesus here contrasts the faith of the centurion with that of Israel. Is his remark a criticism of the leper who from within Israel, it seems, said, “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean”? Such a statement, surely, is just as wonderful as the centurion’s “speak the word only”. In a profound sense, these two miracles complement one another. Each are a kind of Epiphany marvel, an opportunity to delight in the insight of each about “the infinite power, wisdom and goodness” of God for our humanity. They both sense this. I find it hard to choose one over the other.

Jesus marvels at the centurion’s insight because it so refreshingly captures what also properly belongs to the Jewish relation to God’s will for our humanity (and not just for Israel). His remark is not directed, I think, against the leper whom he has cleansed but against the people of Israel in their complacency and spiritual chauvinism. He is making an important but general observation that challenges us about God’s will for our humanity.

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There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee

This story, like the story of the boy Christ being found in the Temple teaching and learning, is essential to the meaning of the Epiphany, itself the season par excellence of teaching and learning. But teaching and learning what? About God and man but with a new and distinctive emphasis upon the divinity of Christ as revealed through the humanity of Christ.

This story, like the story of the boy Christ at the age of twelve, is an epiphany, a making known of the essential divinity of Christ. “Did ye know not,” he says in the Temple, rather challengingly, and we might think even rather abruptly to his mother, “that I must be about my Father’s business?” meaning, of course, the will of God. In relation to that exchange we are told that “his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.” It is a wonderful phrase that complements and builds upon the Shepherd’s Christmas where Mary is said to have “kept all these things and pondered them in heart.” What things? All the things that were said about the infant, the unspeaking child Jesus. But in the story of the boy Christ, “his mother,” Luke tells us, “kept all these sayings in her heart.” What sayings? All the things Jesus himself is saying. Wonderful. Mary keeps in her heart both what is said about Jesus and what Jesus says to us.

We are called to be Marian in the sense of attending to what is said about Jesus and what is said by Jesus and to let that define and dignify us in spite of our sins and follies. In so doing, we open ourselves to the miracle of God’s grace at work in our lives, not only perfecting and restoring our wounded humanity, but in signalling the joy of redemption, our joy in the things of God without which we are radically incomplete.

This brings us to the Gospel reading for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, to one of the quintessential stories of the Epiphany, to the idea of miracles that teach as distinct from things that amuse and entertain. It is about attending to what Jesus does.

Miracles are an important aspect of the Christian Faith despite the long, long legacy of skepticism about miracles. They aren’t an article of faith so much as an aspect of our thinking about God in relation to us and our world, to what we might call the mystery of life itself; the miracle par excellence, we might say. We live in a world which desperately wants miracles and yet despairingly rejects the very idea of miracles. The great miracle is creation itself, our life as grounded in the Creator’s gift of life. Today’s Gospel helps us to appreciate the miracle of the gift of life, a miracle which challenges the destructive narcissisms of our culture and age.

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They found him in the temple

“They found him in the temple,” Luke tells us. The only question for us and for our world is “will we?” Nothing highlights better the symbolic significance of Epiphany than the story of Christ as a boy of twelve being found in the Temple. Doing what? You might ask. Asking and answering questions, teaching and learning, we might say. Nothing counters more completely the anti-intellectualism of our contemporary age. If anything we are in flight from thought and its demands. Epiphany suggests otherwise.

The Magoi of Anatolia, “wise men from the East”, as Matthew tells us, show us something of the universal desire for truth. They reveal the eros to know as Plato and Aristotle suggest about the desire to know truth in accord with each of our capacities to know. At issue is whether those capacities are alive in us or not.

Luke’s account is the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in the canonical Gospels. There are various stories invented much later that seek to fill in the gaps between the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke and the stories of the ministry of Christ as an adult, stories which, in my view, diminish and distort both the humanity and the divinity of Christ presented in the Gospels. Only Luke gives us this rich and powerful story of Christ as a boy of twelve. It is, we might say, his bar mitzvah. It marks the transition from boyhood to manhood, to the responsibilities of adulthood and conveys to us the idea of maturing in faith.

But even more, it highlights the important Epiphany theme of teaching, of the idea of things being made known to us about the nature of God through the humanity of Jesus. Here Jesus is found in the company of the learned doctors of the Jewish Law, the Law or Torah of our humanity, we might say, at least in terms of its concentrated form in the Ten Commandments, something given and yet given for thought, known and grasped as belonging to universal reason. Christ is placed with the doctors of the Law in the temple of Jerusalem, a place dedicated to the honour, the glory, and the truth of God. There is a rich significance to these allusions. That Christ is found in the temple amidst the doctors of the Law is not accidental.

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