Category: Sermons

“All are yours; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s”

It is one of those statements which concentrate in the most wonderful way the whole of the Christian faith. It comes from one of the lessons provided in the Octave of the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul (BCP, p. 285). Paul’s statement in 1st Corinthians 3 captures the basis of the faith, like Peter as that rock upon which the Church stands, herself a mystery of the faith. And what is that faith? It is about our being with God through God’s being with us in Jesus Christ.

We forget at our peril that the Church is herself an article of faith. “Where the gospel is preached and the sacraments are administered, there is the church,” as Luther wonderfully and profoundly puts it. That leads to questions about the relation between Word and Sacrament, to be sure, but, in profound ways, his comment counters the more sectarian and institutional views of the Church; all instrumental and calculative, all dead and deadly. The Anglican Church is not the Church Universal, to be sure; its proper and only claim is to be “an integral portion” of the Church Catholic, something spelled out more fully in the Solemn Declaration of 1893 of the Anglican Church of Canada. Nothing proclaims so clearly the real and true vocation and Anglican understanding of catholic Christianity. It is found on page viii of the Prayer Book.  You might want to make it part of your summer reading and meditation.

The conjunction of St. Peter and St. Paul brings these thoughts front and present and wonderfully so in relation to the readings for the Second Sunday after Trinity. We are reminded that “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” Here we have an interesting feature of the liturgy of the Church, namely, the ways in which we are gathered into and participate in the substance of things holy and strong, things which are proclaimed and known, and yet which we can only grow into more and more, if only we will. “For all things are yours,” Paul says. Yet, we see but “in a glass darkly,” as he also reminds us. This is the necessary check to our arrogance and to the greater arrogance of our ignorance. The counter lies in John’s wonderful phrase about our hearts which condemn us in contrast to the heart of God which redeems us. All is yours in Christ; not in ourselves. To be alive to the one requires dying to the other, dying to ourselves.

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“How can these things be?”

Nicodemus’s question highlights the mystery and the wonder of this day. It is complemented by Mary’s question. “How can this be seeing I know not a man?” she asks the Angel Gabriel. We are in the midst of great mysteries, the mystery of God and the mystery of our humanity. The mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of the Incarnation are just so intimately and inescapably connected.

Trinity Sunday is the speculative Sunday of all Sundays, a day when we, quite literally, it seems, are walking on our heads. The Athanasian Creed wonderfully captures the mystical wonder of this day in the dialectical dance of affirmation and negation. To put it in other words, “This is Thou and neither is this Thou.” God is more unlike than like anything created. Think the Trinity in this way, the Creed advises. We cannot take God captive to our minds but our minds can be taken captive by God, by what we are given to see and hear; in short, to think, and in which we are privileged to participate.

“Behold a door was opened in heaven,” John the Divine tells us. Revelation is not  a window out of which or into which we might peek and peer, but a door through which we enter into the mystery of the understanding. To think God as Trinity is to praise him.

The Trinity is the central and great teaching of the Christian faith. “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible,” as the 1st article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Article begins, articulating in a concise and clear way the classical understanding of the idea of God common to ancient philosophy and to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike. Today’s readings are about the making known of the mystery of God in himself and for us, a mystery which we can only think. To think it is to be born again, literally to be born upwards into what is revealed and belongs to thought. God in thinking  and loving himself thinks and loves all else; everything is gathered into the mystery of God, the mystery here revealed to us. The 1st Article goes on to express the specific Christian understanding of the mystery of God, gathering up the triplets of everlasting unity, life and truth, and of infinitepower, wisdom and goodness, into the Trinity. “And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”.

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He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance

“The old world,” Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) famously claimed, “made spirit parent of matter. The new makes matter parent of spirit,” thus capturing and anticipating the materialistic spirit of Darwin and Marx that still haunts our thinking. Pentecost provides the strongest counter to such determinisms. It does so not simply through the many, many examples of the “confluences of mind and matter, and indeed, of mind precedingmatter,” as John Lukacs observes about contemporary science (At the End of An Age) but by way of a sacramental understanding whereby the things of the world are made the instruments and vehicles of spiritual grace.

It is all about the Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God. Pentecost celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit to give birth to the Church as the spiritual community of our humanity. As such, and as we have seen throughout Eastertide and the Ascension, it is about the redemption of our humanity. It is neither reductive nor gnostic. It is not about the collapse of God into the material world (reductive) any more than it is about a flight from nature and matter as if they were somehow evil, as if spirit and matter were to be understood in some sort of fatal opposition (gnostic). Precisely through the wonderful yet elusive images of wind and fire we are opened out to the mystery of God at once with us and beyond us. Precisely through the differences of languages that so often divide and separate us we are recalled to the truth of God, to a unity of the understanding that grounds the diversities of human language and culture in what is universal, in God.

The simple point is that the human community has no unity in itself, only in God, and only in our being gathered and guided by God’s Holy Spirit given to us, as Pentecost teaches, through these signs and wonders, through these sacramental realities, we might say, which envision our unity and our understanding. For all of the ecstatic and experiential features of the Pentecost story, what stands out are the qualities of things intellectual and spiritual that redeem and sanctify every other aspect of our lives individually and corporately. As the Gospel makes clear, Pentecost shows the indwelling power of God in himself and with us. “I am in my Father,” Jesus says, “and ye in me, and I in you,” and all through the truth of God as Spirit, transcendent and beyond, yet immanent and near. It is all through the Comforter “abid[ing] with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth.” “Ye know him,” Jesus says, “for he dwelleth with you and shall be in you.” Pentecost is about the indwelling love of God in us. This happens only through teaching, only through the opening of our minds to the spiritual realities of God and of ourselves. “He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”

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Sing ye praises with understanding

“The end of all things is at hand,” Peter tells us. What does he mean? The Ascension and the Session of Christ, his sitting at the right hand of the Father, are a kind of ending. But what kind of ending? Is it like Great Big Sea’s “It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine”? Only I don’t think we feel quite so fine.

“It is finished.” Jesus’ penultimate word on the Cross is about an ending, an ending which carries over into the Resurrection and the Ascension. What is finished, ended, is all that belongs to the reconciliation between humanity and God. The overcoming of sin and death inaugurates the radical new life of the Resurrection. We only live when we live for God and for one another. The Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection and belongs to its essential logic. The Ascension and the Session of Christ are two of the great creedal doctrines of the Christian Faith and yet are often overlooked and ignored. We forget their radical meaning and connection to Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection.

They are altogether about our life with God, our life as lived to and for God and one another. They are about our life as embraced in God’s will and purpose for our humanity; in short, they are about humanity’s end with God. End here signifies purpose. The Ascension is Christ’s homecoming to the Father having gone forth into the world and having returned to the Father, not empty but having accomplished God’s will for our humanity through his sacrifice. Christ’s sacrifice gathers us to God.

In the tradition of the Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross, “it is finished” is the penultimate word. What, then, is the ultimate word, the last of the last words? It is exactly what the Ascension and the Session signify. “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit,” Jesus says. The first and last words of Christ are the words of the Son to the Father, words of prayer that in turn shape our prayer. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” – what we do. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” What then do the Ascension and the Session mean? Quite literally, that “he’s got the whole world in his hands.” Everything is gathered back to God. “God,” as Thomas Aquinas notes in a kind of summary phrase, “is the beginning and ending of all things, especially of rational creatures.” In other words, the radical truth of the world and of human life is found in God. The Ascension and the Session celebrate the gathering of all things to God. They teach us that the world and our humanity are embraced in the knowing love of God. We live in that sense of ending, an ending that is about the purpose  and truth of our lives. We live for God and in God.

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“In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world.”

Rogation Sunday reminds us that the Resurrection is cosmic in scope. It recalls us to the land in which we are placed and to our vocation where we are. That is altogether about prayer and praise. “Prayer,” as Richard Hooker so clearly states, “signals all the service that we ever do unto God” and so it is praise too. That Godward orientation of our lives belongs to a sacramental understanding whereby the things of the world become the instruments of grace and salvation. It is about seeing the world in God and God in the world. This challenges completely many of our contemporary assumptions.

Rogation is about prayer in this wider sense that connects us immediately and concretely to the land and to our cultivation of the land. This is not simply like, say, Sir Francis Bacon’s endeavour to interrogate nature and to force nature to disclose her secrets in order to make the natural world serve human interests. Though Bacon’s interest in nature was with respect to the betterment of the human condition, that impulse to interrogate nature forcefully and experimentally only too easily slides into the tendency to dominate. We know only too well how that leads to destruction, to a disregard and a disrespect of the created order. Canada shipping garbage to the Philippines? The mind boggles, the heart weeps.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 1879 poem, Binsey Poplars, reflects on this larger problem by way of an instance of a kind of clear-cutting along the banks of a country stream. “All felled, felled,” … “not one spared” …  “O if we but knew what we do/ When we delve or hew – hack or rack the growing green” … “where we mean/ To mend her we end her,/ When we hew or delve” … “Strokes of havoc unselve / The sweet especial scene,/ Rural scene, a rural scene, / Sweet especial rural scene.” There is more to that ending than just a kind of nostalgia for a romanticised rural idyll. His point is that we unselve ourselves in such acts of destruction.

Rogation recalls us to a kind of thoughtfulness about our engagement with the land where we are placed. We cannot not leave a mark; the question is what kind of mark? The cliches of our contemporary world in this respect are often misleading and dangerous. The mantra ‘think globally and act locally’ seems more and more only to serve the corporate interests of the global elites. To think and act locally might actually lead to a deeper appreciation and understanding of the world and of ourselves in it. Even better, just think!

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“Because I go to the Father”

There is a great fearfulness in our own age and culture. It is not just about the ceaseless spectacle of a world of wars constantly before us in such things as “international terrorism”, the Jihadis culture, or the continuing conflicts in Syria, or the humanitarian catastrophe that is the famine in Yemen, not to mention North Korea, let alone the mounting tensions between America and Iran, let alone the disturbing realities of the surveillance state of China which is Orwell’s 1984 at the same time as the so-called West largely reflects Huxley’s Brave New World. In the one, “Big Brother” is literally watching, measuring and controlling you. In the other, the problem of “making people love their servitude” under the illusion of happiness and distraction has been only too successful. Pick your dystopia. Pick your nightmare.

Our fearfulness is more about the emptiness within the soul of a culture when we can no longer identify the principles and the ideals that dignify our humanity. When we can no longer say what makes life worth living for, and mean something more than merely the pragmatic hedonism of a materialistic culture, then there is certainly nothing worth dying for either. There is nothing to live for. There is only the emptiness within, a darkness inside. Out of that emptiness can come such frightening and senseless acts of violence, death and self-destruction that have become a regular feature of our world. Such is the world of “cultural nihilism” in both its active and passive forms.

The essence of such acts is their meaninglessness. The philosopher Peter Kreeft notes that the fear for our culture is not the fear of death as it was for the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, nor is it the fear of Hell as it was for the mediaeval cultures whether Christian, Jewish, or Islamic. No. It is the fear of meaninglessness itself. There is no truth to which we should endeavour to conform ourselves and hold ourselves accountable. Our fearfulness is our emptiness, our nihilism, which we confront.

In the Gospels. Jesus confronts our fearfulness. The Gospel of the Resurrection is especially about his overcoming of our fearfulness. The message of the angel to the women, coming early to the tomb and finding it empty, was “be not afraid”. Jesus comes into the midst of the disciples whether they are huddled behind closed doors in fear or on the road to Emmaus in fearful flight from Jerusalem. His presence is peace and joy.

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“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”

Jesus’ words capture the meaning of the Resurrection. It is what we see in the mystery and the wonder of the Resurrection at Easter and throughout the Octave when we are suspended, as it were, in that wonder and mystery. Mary Magdalene comes in sorrow expecting a body; she encounters the Risen Christ. Sorrow is turned into joy. The disciples huddle in fear and anxiety behind closed doors; Christ appears in their midst. Sorrow is turned into joy.

Two disciples flee Jerusalem in fear and sorrow because of the traumatic events of Christ’s crucifixion; on the road to Emmaus, Christ comes alongside them and enters into conversation with them, drawing out their expectations and desires, all of which have been shattered and destroyed, and drawing out of them the confusing and perplexing things that belong to the accounts of the Resurrection: the women finding the tomb empty, the testimony of the angel, and the confirmation of the other disciples of the women’s words. He then opens their minds to the understanding of the Scriptures about his Death and Resurrection but is really only made known to them in the breaking of the bread. Only then do they get it and sorrow is turned into joy. “Did not our heart burn within us?”, they say. They return to Jerusalem, the very place from which they had been fleeing in fear and sorrow.  Sorrow is turned into joy.

But this Gospel reading is different. It is, as it were, before the fact and yet already explains the fact. It reveals the deeper and more difficult meaning of the Resurrection. It is not just sorrow turned into joy; it is joy found in the midst of sorrow (and paradoxically, sorrow in the midst of joy). It signals a deeper kind of turning that challenges our more linear way of approaching things and one which the Gospel seems to acknowledge. It does so by way of a metaphor: the metaphor of childbirth, appropriate enough, I suppose, on this day when in our secular culture we celebrate and remember motherhood. No motherhood without childbirth.

The Christian faith is wonderfully grounded in the everyday realities of human lives but without being reduced to them and ultimately provides an important critique of our assumptions about religion and human life. This is the challenge. To see the joy in the sorrow and the sorrow in the joy. That is to be radically changed in our whole outlook which in a narrow and linear way moves from one moment to another. Such a way of thinking is quite inadequate and false to what it means to be human. The Gospel readings of the these three last Sundays after Easter counter such simple determinisms.

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