Category: Sermons

Love is the fulfilling of the law.

It is the great ethical insight of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding albeit in different registers of expression. To put it another way, law is love. That is a challenging concept which requires some thought about both terms.

Advent awakens us to the deeper meaning of God’s engagement with our humanity through the coming of God’s Word to us. That idea belongs to revelation and to reason. There is the coming of God’s Word to Moses on Mount Sinai in the thunderous words of the Law encapsulated profoundly in the Ten Commandments. There is the coming of God’s Word in judgement in the powerful Gospel for the First Sunday in Advent with the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem on what Christians will later call Palm Sunday and which is here already associated with the ancient Jewish rites of the Passover. But even more, as Cranmer understood in the sixteenth century, that coming in judgement is seen most tellingly in the cleansing of the Temple, the passage which follows immediately in Matthew’s Gospel upon the entrance into the city. Here is the wrath of Jesus and yet that wrath is really love, God’s love of his own righteousness  and truth without which there is no truth or righteousness.

Thus are we awakened to the dies irae, the day of judgment which is ever-present because truth is ever-present. The judgement is the coming of God’s Word as light and truth into the darknesses of our world and our hearts. But this is actually love. Why and how? Because the coming of God to us is the goodness of God for us. And it is something known at once by revelation and by reason.

The Ten Commandments mark the climax of the ethical and educational journey of the exodus. The Book of Exodus is an ethical treatise that seeks to awaken us to a fundamental truth and principle upon which our thinking and living depend. The idea of God is not and cannot be simply a human construct – the assumption of every  garden variety atheist. The wonder of the exodus is that God makes himself known as “I Am Who I Am” to Moses in the Burning Bush. In the exodus journey in the wilderness God reveals his will for our humanity in the thunderous words of the Ten Commandments. Allah is all but it is the will of Allah, of God, that defines Jew, and Christian, and Muslim alike. But that will, which itself is nothing less than the explicit expression of the goodness of God, is something that is also known through the exercise of reason in its discovery of that upon which our knowing and reason depend, a principle which cannot by definition be defined by anything prior to it but only by everything which depends upon it.

This is wonderful but not new. For centuries upon centuries and in different ways, the Law in its summary form and as the Ten Commandments has been known as the universal moral code for our humanity, something known at once as given authoritatively but also as given for thought. In our liturgy we regularly and perhaps complacently say the Summary of the Law. We rarely hear the Ten Commandments even though in the history of our own Anglican tradition, at least until the dominance of the 19th century Gothic revival, our churches in their seventeenth and eighteenth century architectural form as auditory chapels often had on the walls of the sanctuary “The Belief,” the summary of the Christian principles of the Faith; to wit, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostle’s Creed. What do Christians essentially believe? There it is. We forget and neglect such things at our peril. We also misunderstand those principles when we reduce them to a set of propositions but that is another story about modern and post-modern narratives and their self-contradictions.

(more…)

Print this entry

Then Jesus turned

This Sunday marks the turning of the year, a time of endings and beginnings. “To make an end,” as T.S. Eliot observes, “is to make a beginning” for “the end is where we start from.” He means an end in the sense of a first principle. Metanoia is repentance. It signals our turning back to the One from whom we have turned away. But literally, metanoia is ‘a thinking after,’ our thinking after the things of God. It is an axiom of thought that a first principle cannot be demonstrated by anything prior to it but rather by showing that everything after it is radically dependent upon it. This Sunday reminds us that our turning to God is entirely dependent upon God’s turning to us.

In a way, it is about two kinds of intellectual or spiritual motion: a motion to and from a first principle, God. Both motions depend upon the absolute priority of God in his motion towards us and in him moving us back to himself. Advent marks the beginning of that first motion; the Trinity season signals the project of the second. The one focuses on what is properly referred to as justification; the second upon sanctification; in short, Christ for us and Christ in us. Together they belong to the dynamic of our incorporation into the life of God in Christ.

“From Advent through to Trinity Sunday,” Dean Anthony Sparrow (1655) says, “we run through the Creed,” through the principles that belong to human redemption as distilled and articulated in the classical Creeds of the Christian Faith. The Creeds themselves are the distillation of the essential teachings of the Scriptures about our life in faith. But “from Trinity Sunday through to Advent,” he says, “the Creed runs through us.” Both motions are interrelated: God’s turning to us and our turning to God, his turning to us in revelation and his turning us back to himself; in short, the coming of God as Word to us and our abiding with that Word.

For centuries, this Sunday was called The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity but was also used and known by way of a rubric as The Sunday Next Before Advent. For regardless of the number of Sundays after Trinity, which varies from year to year owing to the date of Easter, the fifth Sunday before Christmas is always The Sunday Next Before Advent. And for centuries upon centuries, the Gospel reading on this day was John’s account of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, a story which is also read on The Fourth Sunday in Lent. In each case it is read with a different purpose. Its theme on this Sunday was about the “gather[ing] up of the fragments that remain that nothing be lost” – a kind of reflection upon the nature of our spiritual progress  throughout the Trinity Season – and about the miracle as sign that Jesus is “that Prophet that should come into the world,” an Advent theme about the coming of Christ.

(more…)

Print this entry

“How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?”

Peter’s question is very much our question, especially in a culture of retaliation and revenge, at a time of polarizing oppositions and the politics of power for power’s sake. Shylock’s great speech in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice calls attention to certain features of our common humanity, including, sadly, revenge. “Hath not a Jew eyes? … hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?… If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Revenge, starkly put, seems to be a certain kind of justice, a getting back at those who have wronged us, tit for tat, as it were. “If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why revenge!”

And yet, as Shakespeare shows us, revenge is not only a limited form of justice but actually a betrayal of justice. “The villainy you teach me,” Shylock says,”I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.” In other words, we don’t just want to get back, we want to dominate and destroy; in short, to “better the instruction.” We cannot overlook the critical irony. Neither Jew nor Christian, nor Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or any of the philosophical religious traditions should seek revenge; for revenge betrays and destroys our humanity. It is an aspect of our fallen humanity; common, sadly enough, to us all. The play turns on the question of the relation of justice and mercy where “mercy seasons justice”, in other words, perfects justice. The highest form of justice is charity and that is something divine moving in us if we are open to exactly what this Gospel story shows. It is nothing less than a lesson about “the mercies of Christ” and the abundance of his love in us, if we will let it rule and move in us. At issue is the conditional “if”. And if not? Such is the picture of the unforgiving servant, himself a study in self-contradiction.

The Gospel illustrates the point that Portia makes in the play, namely, “that in the course of justice none of us should see salvation.” We all stand in need of mercy. The question is about how we come to recognise that common need without which self-interest or the bitter revenge of the self dominates and destroys. The Gospel seeks to awaken us to the significance of mercy. Christ’s parable convicts our conscience with the picture of self-contradiction. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, the servant who was forgiven a great debt refuses to forgive one who owes him a paltry sum. He had sought mercy and received it but when another asked mercy from him he refused it. “We do pray for mercy,” Portia says, “and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy.” This Gospel is a powerful indictment of our humanity in its hard-heartedness and selfish disregard for what belongs to our common life. But it does so only to awaken us to the divine mercy which redeems and perfects our humanity in and through our common life. If we will act out of what is given to us.

(more…)

Print this entry

And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him

Do we? The word of Jesus is the word of life. Apart from that word we are simply dead.

“I had not thought that death had undone so many,” T. S. Eliot says in The Wasteland, channeling Dante the Pilgrim’s observation about the throngs of souls in the Vestibule of Hell in Dante the Poet’s Inferno. They are souls who are neither worthy of Heaven nor Hell, a Dantean invention of great insight. They are those “who against God rebelled not, nor to Him were faithful, but to self alone were true.” Hell is, in Dante’s vision, the place for the miserable race of “those who have lost the good of intellect.” Not to will at all is part of the loss of intellect. It means an aimless life following this and that fad of the moment, what Dorothy L. Sayers calls “the weather-cock mind, the vague tolerance which will neither approve nor condemn, the cautious cowardice for which no decision is ever final.” Even more, as she suggests, they chase aimlessly after the whirling banners “stung and goaded by the thought that, in doing anything definite whatsoever, they are missing doing something else.” It is a contemptible and pitiful picture of an aspect of our humanity in its disorder and disarray, and yet one which in its inability to commit, to will at all, is part of our world and day.

Power, wisdom and love are attributes of the Trinity that speak to the image of God in us. “If there is God, if there is freewill,” Charles Williams notes, “then man is able to choose the opposite of God. Power, Wisdom, Love, gave man freewill; therefore Power, Wisdom, Love, created the gate of hell and the possibility of hell.” And so there is in Dante’s powerful vision a gathering together of those who have chosen the opposite of God and who are ferried by Charon across the river of death to the City of Dis, to Hell. The image is autumnal. “And as, by one and one, leaves drift away/ In autumn, till the bough from which they fall/ Sees the earth strewn with all its brave array,/So from the bank there, one by one, drop all/ Adam’s ill seed.” Yet, the souls in the Vestibule are not even worthy of being gathered into Hell.

Such grey and dark thoughts are hardly pleasing, and yet the whole purpose of Dante’s Divine Comedy is to lead us from misery to felicity. That requires sombre and serious reflection upon the forms of misery that belong to the images of sin in the self and in the human community. And that is part of the challenge of Remembrance Day. Eliot was commenting by way of Dante about ‘the wasteland of modernity’ occasioned by the devastations of the First World War and beyond that make the twentieth century the most destructive period in human history. It is a tale of madness belonging to the global export of technocratic power without parallel. We are only beginning to understand the importance of Remembrance Day. It is not about cheering for King and Empire, for Queen and Commonwealth, but rather about contemplating the complexity and complicity of human evil in the times of “collective madness.” The phrase is from Robertson Davies.

(more…)

Print this entry

These are they which came out of great tribulation

The softness of a maritime October gives way to the grey barrenness of November. Leaves lie scattered on the wind in heaps of burnished gold and glowing amber; their autumnal beauty fading into the darkness of nature’s death. It is “that time of year,” as Shakespeare so wonderfully puts, “when yellow leaves or none or few, do hang/ upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet # 73). Such is the twilight of nature’s year. Yet in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls there is a gathering, a gathering into fullness and glory. Such is the meaning of All Saints.

The lesson from Revelation signals the conclusion of the long journey of our souls as well as the nature of that journey of the mind to God, the itinerarium of the soul. It is a vision of the end of a kind of exodus, a going forth and return to the homeland of the spirit. It is the vision of the heavenly city, the gathering into truth of what otherwise remains scattered and broken, barren and empty. All Saints reminds us of who we are in the truth of God and of what we are called to be. The vision is redemptive of all that is scattered and broken, distracted and destructive in our confused and fearful world. It speaks to the confusions of souls everywhere. The vision is universal; “a great multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues.” Beyond counting.

The gathering is into a communion of spirit united in prayer and praise, a community of angels and men; a community that extends beyond the present and embraces the past. The vision centers on the worship of God. But is this simply a flight from the world? A kind of escape from reality? No. The whole point is that the vision is the reality, the reality of the spirit without which our lives are empty and nothing.

The vision signals the redemption of images in the gathering of all things to the truth of their being. Ours is a culture obsessed with images and profoundly forgetful that images are not reality; they are only images of the real. Their truth is found not simply in themselves but in what they are and mean in truth. In Plato’s famous image of the Cave, we mistake the flickering images before us for truth. Only by being turned around do we embark upon the long process of education that leads us from the images to the things of which they are the images, and then to mathematical entities abstracted from them, and then to the forms or ideas of things visible and invisible, and ultimately to the realization of the Good as the principle upon which the whole structure of thought and being depends. Such is the  journey of the soul to God.

(more…)

Print this entry

That you may know

Know what? Today’s readings make it abundantly clear that there are things which Jesus wants us to know. They are the things that belong to our being known by God, to the being of our life with God and in God. The idea of the ethical, of the Good, informs and shapes our thinking and our doing. This is one of the great insights of the religious and philosophical traditions of the world and something which we do well to reclaim. It is, perhaps, the only real counter to the ways in which we manipulate nature and one another and which are so destructive of human personality, the human community, and our world. And that is where these readings come into play; literally, we might say, they are about death and resurrection in and through forgiveness.

In the reading from Ephesians, Paul speaks directly about what we have learned in Christ that is transformative in terms of our behaviours and actions. “You have not so learned Christ,” he is saying, if you remain “in the vanity of [your] mind,” in “the darkness” of your “understanding,” in “ignorance” of God, in “hardness of heart,” in hedonism, in “all uncleanness with greediness.” Not a bad summary of the compulsions and challenges that all of us confront in ourselves and in our lives. What is wanted is to be “renewed in the spirit of [our] minds.” How? By virtue of “the truth that is in Jesus” and what follows from that, namely, the qualities of Christ alive in us. It means putting off “the old manhood” and putting on “the new manhood” which is nothing less than Christ in us. Paul here provides some very specific situations or conditions of soul that capture us all in the negative,  only to then provide the antidotes to encourage us all in terms of the radical meaning of our life in Christ.

“Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all malice,” he says. Isn’t that only too true? Especially the part about  “all malice,” that dreadful feature of wanting the injury of others? But then, he opens us out to our life in Christ. “Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” These are not empty platitudes of mere moralizing. The Gospel shows us the radical significance of forgiveness.

Forgiveness. This is what Jesus, above all else, it seems, wants us to know. It is what Paul, too, has grasped. Jesus is the forgiveness of sins without whom we cannot forgive one another. Forgiveness is a divine quality realized in our human lives through the grace of Christ. It is transformative. It is touching and powerfully moving as we see in the Gospel. A paralyzed man is brought by his friends to Jesus. It is as if he were dead, unable to move. They seek the healing of their friend sensing something powerful and divine in Jesus. “And Jesus, seeing their faith,” speaks to the man who is paralyzed. His words are astounding. “Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee.” Words of forgiveness. The greatest problems of our humanity are found in our souls.

(more…)

Print this entry

“He had answered them well”

An intriguing and difficult Gospel, it signals the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the one who is the fulfillment of the Law, the one in whom the love of God and the love of neighbour is perfectly realized. But that turns on another important point, namely, the idea of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the anointed one of God. Both are the strong truth claims of the Gospel about Jesus as Lord. It is worth unpacking them a bit in relation to one of the scribes who engages with Jesus respectfully and intelligently, so much so that Jesus will say that “thou art not far from the kingdom of God.”

One of the scribes “having heard them reasoning together” perceives that Jesus “had answered them well.” Who was reasoning together about what and with whom? The “reasoning together” is really a disputation, an examination of matters of contention. Jesus is engaged in a dispute with the Sadducees about marriage and resurrection. The idea of resurrection was a matter of debate within late Judaism. The Sadducees were a group within Israel who, as Mark puts it, “say that there is no resurrection.” They undertake to entrap Jesus about the law regarding “levirate marriage” in the Law of Moses: the idea that the brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his brother’s widow and raise up children for him. The term “levirate” simply means ‘a husband’s brother.’ The concern, I think, is about a way of providing for the care of the widow and for the continuation of the family line. The Sadducees manufacture a complicated ‘what-if’ scenario of a series of seven brothers who one by one take the first brother’s wife after his death only for each of them to die without a child. The question they put to Jesus is “whose wife will she be in the resurrection since the seven had her as wife?”

At issue is an understanding of the Law and a question about the resurrection. Jesus’ response catches the attention of one of the scribes who has overheard the exchange. Jesus says rather bluntly the Sadducees are wrong because they “neither know the scriptures nor the power of God.” He points out that in heaven they “neither marry nor are given in marriage” so the whole scenario is moot. He reminds them about the burning bush where God says to Moses that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, patriarchs whose lives and deaths are noted in Genesis. His point is that the revelation of God to Moses assumes that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are raised up and are alive. “He is not God of the dead but of the living” Jesus says and, once again, adds “you are quite wrong.”

(more…)

Print this entry

“Only Luke is with me.”

It is a poignant phrase. “Only Luke is with me,” Paul says. And yet that seems significant. For Luke, too, has been very much with us during the Trinity season. He is, we might say, the Church’s great and primary spiritual director especially in the Trinity season. There is a certain quality to his writings in his Gospel and in The Book of The Acts of the Apostles, which work is generally attributed to him. Dante has captured best, I think, the special quality of Luke’s approach to the mystery of God in Christ, the mystery of human redemption. Luke, he says in a memorable phrase, is “scriba mansuetudinis Christi,” the scribe of the gentleness of Christ.

I have often been struck by that phrase. It seems to capture the real meaning and truth of our spiritual pilgrimage, the journey of the soul to God with God in Jesus Christ. It highlights a special quality to that pilgrimage – gentleness. Not our gentleness but the gentleness of Christ, which at once provides a profound insight into God’s engagement with our wounded and broken humanity and a strong corrective to the negative views of divine judgment.

The powerful teachings of the Trinity season largely focus on the idea of an ethic of action rooted in compassion. Not surprisingly, Luke has been our principal instructor about such an ethic which speaks so profoundly to the confusions and idiocies of our day where either profit or the self is God which neither can possibly be. In the absence of any kind of principled ethical discourse there is only the tyranny of global corporatism, the ideological vacuum of contemporary politics, or the subjective tyranny of the self. But here, almost as a kind of counter to those totalizing concepts, we are reminded that “only Luke is with [us]”. That seems to make a difference.

The Gospel reading for The Feast of St. Luke speaks directly about the purpose of our prayerful reading of the Scriptures in the ordered liturgy of the Church. What is it all about? “Then opened he their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures.” In the opening of the Scriptures, a phrase that Luke uses about Christ in relation to the disciples and, by extension, to us, we are gathered into the gentleness of Christ, into the compassionate love of God for our wounded and broken humanity. We are being healed and even more than healed. Once again, in Luke’s insightful account of the healing of the ten lepers of whom only one, and he a Samaritan, “returned to give thanks,” we are being made whole. Luke opens us out to the deeper meaning of Christ’s being with us. It is about our being made whole and complete, but not through anything in ourselves.

(more…)

Print this entry

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth:
it shall not return to me empty

The custom in our maritime communities has been to keep Harvest Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving Day weekend. It is a gathering together of different thanksgivings. The idea of thanksgiving for the harvest is ancient and universal, especially in rural and agricultural communities. The idea of national thanksgiving is more recent and focuses on the political and the social. We would do well to recall the inner spirit of both so I want to try to say something about the spiritual significance of Harvest Thanksgiving in the face of our current anxieties and concerns.

I have always been moved by Harvest Thanksgiving as it has traditionally been celebrated in our maritime communities, especially in our rural farmlands. There is something quite wonderful about gathering the fruits of field and orchard into the churches, something at once aesthetically pleasing and spiritually symbolic. At Christ Church for years sheaves of corn-stalks marked the pews. I always had the sense of preaching in a corn-field! Not a bad biblical image and precedent!

Harvest Thanksgiving has always a sensual and aesthetic quality to it; things seen, and touched, smelled and tasted. But therein lies the danger, the danger of reducing Harvest Thanksgiving to self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption, to a sensual feast of the belly at the expense of the mind and the soul More stuffed than the turkey. Who are we thanking and for what if it is simply about the sensual pleasures of appetite? In our rural and agricultural communities, there is always the danger of losing sight of the more profound meaning of Harvest Thanksgiving. It is not about thanking ourselves for what we have been able to achieve and accomplish. It is not about what we think we deserve, or worse, about what we think we are entitled.

This year the annual Pumpkin Regatta in Windsor will be a much diminished affair because the number of giant pumpkins is much so greatly reduced, owing to the cold spring, the dry summer, and the effects of Hurricane Dorian, which also blasted the cornfields. The world knows but ignores the humanitarian disaster of the continuing famine in Yemen. The current discourse on global climate change is increasingly paralyzing and dispiriting but contributes to the way in which events on the global stage, in which we are all implicated, play out locally, what some have called ‘glocalization.’ All these things challenge us to think more deeply about the radical meaning of thanksgiving. At the very least they remind us that the harvest cannot be taken for granted.

(more…)

Print this entry

And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.

Compassion. Such a rich and powerful word, and, however much it has been hi-jacked by the therapy culture and greatly reduced in its meaning and  truth, it still retains a hold on our hearts and minds. Its deeper meaning is here for us to reclaim without which it becomes the kindness that kills.

Today’s Gospel shows us that compassion belongs to the spiritual pattern of death and resurrection. This Gospel story, along with the passage from Ephesians, makes it clear that compassion is nothing less than Christ in us. It is about our being “strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.” It is nothing less than our “being rooted and grounded in love,” knowing nothing less than “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” This is deep love.

The word compassion in Greek refers to the innermost being of a person, to the core of our being as it were, “the inner man,” the inner you. Luke uses the construction of ‘he saw, he had compassion’ three times: first, here in the story of the Widow of Nain; secondly, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan; and, thirdly, in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Both the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Parable of the Prodigal Son in his return to the Father are really about the movement of Christ’s love in us. But here we have an event where the Lord sees and has compassion. Matthew and Mark use it too in relation to Jesus “seeing the crowds and having compassion on them” because “they are like sheep without a shepherd.” The compassion of Christ, too, is used about Jesus seeing the crowd in the wilderness without food. Seeing them and having compassion on them leads to feeding them. The deeper theological sensibility is about our inward relation to God in Christ and through that to our care for one another. Without the first, our relation to God in Christ, I fear the second risks becoming the cover for the agendas of expediency and convenience; the kindness that kills, quite literally in terms of the so-called right to die via the complicity and agency of the medical profession, for example.

We may all want to die someday. There is nothing wrong in wanting to die especially in the Christian understanding of things. But it is quite another thing to cause one’s death or to be the agent of another’s death. These are some of the ethical dilemmas which arise in our technocratic culture where we have the means and power to do many things but lack the ethical wisdom to know when and where not to exercise such power. The larger question is about the good which is rooted and grounded in God and in his goodness.

(more…)

Print this entry