Category: Sermons

One thing is necessary and Mary hath chosen the better part

The rich fullness of Christmas is often matched by a frantic busyness like Martha in the story of Mary and Martha, “anxious and troubled by a multitude of things” (Luke 10.41). The anxiety of Martha is literally about being too careful, too full of cares and worries. Not that there aren’t care and worries, to be sure, especially in the confusion and nonsense of the disordered world of the past two decades. But there is a wonderful counter to our fears and anxieties, of busyness and worries in Jesus’ gentle response. One thing is necessary.

What is that unum necessarium, the one thing necessary? What is “the better part” chosen by Mary? It is another Mary who shows us what is the unum necessarium, the one thing necessary, the Mary of the Christmas story, the Virgin Mary through whom God becomes man and dwells among us. This is the Mary of the Gospel reading today on what is the Second Sunday of Christmas and the Eve of the Epiphany. The one thing necessary is our contemplation of the wonder of Christ’s holy birth. We contemplate the wonder of God and of God with us just as the Magi-Kings will fall down and worship offering gifts which teach the wonder they acknowledge. Christ is God, and King, and Sacrifice.

Both stories of the Marys are told to us by Luke. “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” What are all these things? They are “those things which were told them by the shepherds who went “unto Bethlehem” to “see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.” The Mary of the Christmas story shows us what belongs to the true response of our humanity to what is made known to us by God with us. God speaks to us in human vesture even through the unspeaking Word and Son of God in the infant Christ. What is said about him belongs to who he is for us even as the unspeaking babe of Bethlehem. An infant is one who cannot speak. Mary’s attitude is the essential attitude of faith. It is contemplative wonder at all that is said about the child Christ.

This does not deny or diminish the importance of human actions and busyness. It does however challenge us about our busyness and our practical activities by reminding us that ultimately they are grounded and have their real truth and meaning in the activity of contemplation which is the highest activity of our humanity. This redeems our everyday busyness from its frantic mindlessness and frightening emptiness.

(more…)

Print this entry

His name was called JESUS

The descriptive titles for today are a bit of a mouthful: “The Octave Day of Christmas and the Circumcision of Christ being New Year’s Day,” and, as if to underline the titles, we have not one, not two, but three Collects! All this belongs to the rich fullness of the Christmas mystery and yet that rich fullness, so theologically significant and doctrinally suggestive, centers on the name of Jesus, literally highlighted for us in Luke’s account by being printed in capital letters. JESUS. In the digital culture, it is a shout-out.

We learned via St. Matthew’s Gospel on Sunday that his name means ‘saviour’; “for he shall save his people from their sins.” Yeshua – Joshua – Jesus, saviour. It is a compelling and intriguing term, a name with an explicit meaning, a name signifying the divine purpose of Christ’s holy birth, a name named by the angel, named by Joseph, and now named by Mary herself. It is a name worth pondering upon, in the manner of Mary and Joseph, in contemplative wonder.

The rich fullness of images which belong to the crowded cluster of things in the Bethlehem scene all center on Jesus and on who he is for us. Emmanuel means God with us and that, too, is said, of the Son brought forth of a Virgin. But what God with us actually means takes on a much fuller meaning with the actual name, Jesus, saviour. It speaks of redemption and of what God seeks for our humanity which is nothing less, it seems, than our actual incorporation into the life of God through God speaking divine things to us in human ways. Such is the incarnation. The deeper reality of this divine speaking humanly, and resoundingly, we might say, is seen in the particular feature of Christ’s circumcision. At once a required ritual belonging to Jewish religious identity, it also signals the reality of Christ’s humanity. It belongs to the rituals of the Jewish Law and yet speaks universally to the redemption of the whole of our humanity.

That is salvation. It is accomplished in and through the sacrifice of Christ, in and through his taking our sins upon him and saving us from all that diminishes and destroys the real truth of our humanity which is found in Christ. God with us means God giving himself for us.

(more…)

Print this entry

When the fullness of the time was come,
God sent forth his Son, made of a woman

There is a rich fullness to Christmas, a fullness of images seen and heard, in crècheand carol, in sacrament and word. It highlights an important feature of the Christian faith. It is about the fullness of images rather than an emptying of images. But the images of Christmas are not nothing. They are not mere images, empty signs; rather they are signs that signify a fullness of meaning. They have, as it were, a sacramental quality to them. They point to the reality of Emmanuel, “which being interpreted, is,” as Matthew states, “God with us.” All of the images of Christmas dance and swirl around the mystery of God and of God with us; the idea of the sign and the thing signified have very much to do with our incorporation into the life of God through Christ’s incarnation. Such is “the fullness of the time.”

This has a profound significance for how we think about what it means to be human. God’s intimate engagement with our humanity in Christ’s holy nativity signals something profound about our humanity. It signals that our humanity finds its truth and fullness in God. As the reading from Galatians indicates, this means a certain preparation and readiness through God’s will at work in time and, more importantly, in the intersection between time and eternity captured, I think,  in Paul’s rich phrase “the fullness of the time.” It suggests a certain moment of rightness, of the making adequate of our humanity for this realization in time that gives time and our humanity its truth and meaning. The concept of “the fullness of the time” also applies to humankind historically in terms of cultures and individual lives.

“There came,” T.S. Eliot says in ‘Choruses from “The Rock,”’ “at a predetermined moment, a moment in time /and of time,/ A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history:/ transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time,/ A moment in time but time was made through that moment:/ for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment/ of time gave the meaning.” As he explains, “it seem[s] as if men must proceed from light to light, in the/ light of the Word,/ through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being; /Bestial as always before, carnal, self-seeking as always before,/ selfish and purblind as ever before,/ Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their/march on the way that was lit by the light; /Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no other way.”

For there is no other way than the way of God despite our “negative being” and our wandering ways of deceit and confusion, of certainty and uncertainty, of sin and folly. God makes our way to him through the way of his coming to us at “the fulness of the time.” This is the wondrous mystery which we behold in the Christmas scene of the Word made flesh, of the babe of Bethlehem wrapped in the swaddling bands of our humanity, “incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.” Christ is “that pure one,” as Irenaeus so beautifully puts it, “opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.” “Made of a woman,” says Paul, “made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”

(more…)

Print this entry

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

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

Print this entry

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry