Category: Sermons

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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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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