Category: Sermons

“For ye were as sheep going astray”

The accounts of the Resurrection, especially in John’s Gospel, are particularly instructive about a fundamental feature of Christianity which extends to other religions. That is “a sacramental understanding,” which we attempted to explore in our Lenten series this year. A sacramental understanding, we suggested, connects to the idea of creation and to the idea that the things of God are made known through the things of the world and that our participation in the life of God is precisely through the things of the world becoming the instruments of grace and salvation. A sacramental understanding extends necessarily as well to the Resurrection, itself a new creation. In a way, the Resurrection is made known to us sacramentally, as it were.

We see this in Luke’s Gospel too in such things as the wonderful story of Christ and the disciples on the road to Emmaus where Jesus “opens their understanding of the Scriptures” about his death and resurrection but is really only made known to them “in the breaking of the bread;” in short, by recalling them to his words and actions at the Last Supper. In John’s Gospel after Mary Magdalene’s discovery first of the empty tomb and then her encounter with the Risen Christ, and after Jesus appears in the midst of the disciples twice behind closed doors and makes himself known directly to Thomas, there is the wonderful story of a beach barbecue breakfast with Jesus. This is not quite the same thing as the Men’s Club breakfast. “Have you any fish?” Jesus asks, and then invites us, “Come and have breakfast.” That story leads to the end of John’s Gospel where Jesus asks Simon Peter three times “do you love me?” and commands him each time “to feed my lambs,” “tend my sheep,” “feed my sheep.” Peter who had betrayed Christ three times is reconstituted in love three times. It is a wonderful statement about the radical power and nature of the Resurrection. Something new and wonderful is made out of the nothingness of our sins. The past is not denied nor forgotten but becomes the vehicle and vessel of new life. Such is redemption.

This brings us to today’s readings. Sheep and shepherds. We are the sheep who have gone astray; Christ is the Good Shepherd who gathers us and returns us to himself, “the Shepherd and Bishop of [our] souls.” The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is profoundly a resurrection image that belongs to our sacramental understanding. Today’s Collect speaks of Jesus as being “unto us both a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life”. He is the sacrifice for sin. He is the cure, the Good Shepherd who gives his life for the sheep. He stands in the face of the destroyer of the sheep – ultimately our sins are his destroyer. He is the shepherd who wills to be struck, not so that the sheep may be scattered but so that through his being struck and their being scattered he may gather them to himself. He is our care. He cares for us through his cure for us.

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“Be ye not troubled”

Mark’s feast day fell within Easter Week and so is transferred to the first Tuesday after that week. There is something sacrosanct about the special readings and spiritual focus of Easter week that brooks no other considerations even when, as in the case of Mark, they provide a certain commentary upon the mystery of the Resurrection.

Mark is the saint of Eastertide. The Collect for his day of commemoration draws upon both the epistle reading from Ephesians and upon the Gospel reading taken from Mark. Rather than being “carried away by every blast of vain doctrine,” as the Collect colourfully and profoundly puts it, building upon the Paul’s more modest phrase of “every wind of doctrine,” we seek to “be established in the truth of thy holy Gospel.” And that means being not troubled even in the midst of troubling times and circumstances that pertain to the meaning of the coming of Christ’s kingdom. In other words, in difficult times of persecution when there is every reason to be troubled and to be afraid, we are exhorted to “be not afraid” as Mark’s account of the Resurrection at Easter wonderfully puts it. Here, too, we have the recollection of Christ’s words to Peter and James and John and Andrew, a kind of inner circle, it seems, about the times of wars and rumours of wars, of natural disturbances and troubles which are, Jesus says, “the beginnings of sorrows.” It is in that context that we are not to be troubled. Why? Because such things like persecution and suffering are the occasions for witness and testimony, for “speak[ing] the truth in love.”

I like to think that this is the real fruit of Mark’s Gospel and witness. His Gospel ends, at least in terms of what is called the shorter ending, with the words, “they were afraid,” even though the angel told them not to be afraid. Mark, I like to think, confronts himself in his fears and troubles, perhaps as the young man who runs away naked from the scene of Christ’s capture. Mark is aware of his own limitations and shortcomings. Christian faith is not about human heroism, a kind of willpower on our part for that would be to miss the whole point. The real point is that the Resurrection is God’s doing. The real point is about our utter and complete inability to do the good that we would and our utter and complete ability to do the evil that we would not, to use Paul’s words, words which resonate for me about Mark.

He has realized as few have with such perspicacity that what we want we cannot of ourselves achieve. He points us as few do so wonderfully, so clearly, to the grace of the Resurrection. The point is that it is all grace, all the grace of God, and yet all the grace of God at work for us and in us. To begin to grasp this is to begin to be defined by an overwhelming sense of joy and wonder which nothing, absolutely nothing in our worldly vale of tears can possibly counter. It is the peace and the joy that passes understanding. We need not be troubled. We need not be afraid. Let the good news of Christ’s Resurrection establish you upon the truth which Mark in his life and Gospel opens out to us.

“Be ye not troubled”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of St. Mark (transf.), 2019

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“Jesus came and stood in the midst”

It is like one continuous story from the same book, chapter after chapter. The same book is John’s Gospel. In the spirituality of the older eucharistic lectionary tradition found in the Book of Common Prayer, John’s Gospel contributes greatly to the essential theological understanding of the Christian Faith, especially, it seems, in Eastertide. We see, as it were, through the eyes of John.

“The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early,” we heard last Sunday. “The same day at evening, being the first day of the week,” we hear today. As if time were magically stopped and we are mystically present at that day, that day that never, never ends. The Day of Resurrection is just like that. And so, too, for the meaning of every Sunday.

The Resurrection is not something which we celebrate in a moment, for a day or for a season. It runs through the whole of the year and through the whole of our lives in Faith. The Octave Day places us in that endless day, the day of Easter, to show us the Resurrection in motion. It shows us something of the meaning of the Resurrection for us and in us. The symbolism of being “on the same day,” the day of Easter, becomes the meaning of our Sunday worship. It is always a celebration of the Resurrection. We are always in the presence of the Risen Christ and never more so than in the Easter Season when the Resurrection itself is our principal consideration. The only question is whether we are alive to his presence or dead in ourselves.

“Jesus came and stood in the midst.” They were behind closed doors. They were in fear and great anxiety. The world of their hopes and expectations had been shattered, perhaps like ours in contemporary culture. Then “Jesus came and stood in the midst.” Suddenly all that was shattered begins to come together into something new; a new understanding. His presence changes everything. The nature of that change is the Resurrection in us.

What is the significance of the closed doors? The closed doors are the closed doors of our minds. Our minds are like tombs. We are dead to the idea of the Resurrection, to its power and truth, until it presents itself to our understanding. We couldn’t invent it. It breaks through only so as to break out in us. The Risen Lord comes into our midst to break us out into a new and radical understanding of himself and what he is for us. Out of the chaos of fear and confusion comes peace and forgiveness.

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“What mean ye by this service?”

This has been our text throughout the Passion of Christ and one which now carries us into this day and to the proclamation of this day: Christ is risen, Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is risen, indeed, Alleluia! Alleluia! Now that’s a greeting! And one to be shouted out. It says a bit more than “Happy Easter” which might just as well mean, “May the bunny be with you!” Maybe even a chocolate bunny. Just saying. The great and ancient Easter greeting on this day is the proclamation of the Resurrection. Christ is risen. Alleluia! Alleluia!

And yet, the real meaning of this day, paradoxically it might seem, is that we are dead! For if we are not dead, then we shall not be alive. “You have died,” Paul tells us, “and your life is hid with Christ in God.” What this means is sacrifice in its deepest and truest meaning. Holy Week is about the Passion of Christ in all of its intensity but only so as to bring us to this day, the day of Resurrection, itself the fruit of the Passion and thus utterly meaningless without the solemn events of Holy Week and especially Good Friday. There can be no Resurrection without the Passion.

Bronwyn’s baptism is our Easter joy. Her baptism is a reminder of our vocation and calling, a reminder of the realities of death and life, a reminder of the radical new life of the Resurrection precisely through our dying to ourselves in order to live for God and for one another. She died and now she lives. And all because of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. That is the meaning of this service. We are dead so that we may live. Our life is not in ourselves. It is all Christ and all Christ in us. His sacrifice is love, a love made visible on the Cross and in his Resurrection.

The Resurrection is radical new life because it grounds us in the only life there is, the life of God in Christ. The Resurrection is the new and greater creation, the making of life and joy out of the nothingness of human sin and evil and of suffering and death. That is its radical meaning. God and God alone makes out of nothing both in creation and in redemption. The Resurrection is the greater creatio ex nihilo, the greater act of making new. The Crucifixion is not a gothic horror tale, a Stephen King shocker. It is graphic, to be sure, but it is the graphic portrayal of the nature of all sin and evil. We kill God. At least that is what all sin attempts, the attempt to deny the very principle of life upon which our being, our knowing and our loving completely and utterly depend. The Crucifixion makes that reality visible even as the Resurrection makes visible the overcoming of all sin. Both are the graphic lessons of love. Such is a new beginning just as Bronwyn’s baptism marks a new beginning, a new life, one made visible to us in the act of baptism.

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“What mean ye by this service?”

We can only know it retroactively, after the fact, as it were. The Resurrection is the great new creation, God’s redemptive act that restores and renews our humanity and the world. The Passion and the Resurrection are cosmic events, we might say, arguing for a much more intimate and closer relationship between our humanity and the natural world than what we currently experience in our disordered world. Like creation, we can only know the Resurrection after the fact and yet that only leads to a whole new way of thinking that means seeing everything before it in a new light. In a way, the Easter Vigil is about that whole new way of thinking and seeing things. It is about a recapitulation of the past seen now in the light of the Resurrection.

The ceremonies of the Vigil are traditionally long (three hours or more!), intense, symbolic, and fully participatory. Our country vigil, as I like to call it, is a concentrated version of the Great Vigil of Easter but contains most of the same elements except for the blessing of the Font and the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. Like the traditional Vigils of Easter, there is the lighting of the new fire in the darkness; the blessing and lighting of the Paschal (Easter) Candle; the singing of the Exultet or Paschal Praeconium, the great proclamation of the Resurrection parts of which derive from Ambrose; the reading of some (though not all) of the ‘prophecies’ – there are up to twelve!; the renewal of our baptismal vows; and, finally, the lauds of Easter morn. All rather simple but profound.

What does it mean? It means our participation in the fruit of the Passion, the Resurrection. We re-enact sacramentally the meaning of the Resurrection as God’s great re-creative and redemptive act. Life triumphs over death; light over darkness. It cannot be the extinguishing of the past but the past now as seen in a new light, in the light of the Resurrection. The Vigil imaginatively and scripturally celebrates the passover from death to life, from darkness to light, representing the whole history of salvation. The renewal of our baptismal vows – or in the case of Bronwyn, the rehearsal of the vows she will make tomorrow morning – reminds us that the great Vigil of Easter was precisely that time when converts to the Faith, young and old, individually and by family, were baptized and confirmed by the officiating bishop. In other words, we participate and recall our incorporation into the Body of Christ.

It is precisely in the wonder and joy of the Resurrection that we have journeyed with Christ in his Passion. The Resurrection shows us the underlying principle and power at work in the Passion of Christ; it is the compassion of God and the power of the divine life which recreates and renews even out of the nothingness of our sin and evil. Yet the Vigil, too, is about our joyous participation in that work of redemption at once sacramentally through the rituals of remembrance and by sacrificial service in our life and ministry together as priest and people. The Easter Vigil is, as Augustine remarks, “the mother of all vigils” and in a double sense as being the greatest of all vigils and as bringing to birth like a mother our faith. New birth. New life. Such is the Resurrection. It is all joy. All alleluias! “Rise heart! Thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise always.”

“What mean ye by this service?”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil 2019

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“What mean ye by this service?”

We gather at the grave of Christ in silence. It is the quietest of times, the most peaceful day of the year in a way. All is done. “It is finished.” To be sure. All that belongs to the reconciliation between God and man is accomplished on the Cross. Today marks the peace of Paradise, as it were.

And yet the readings for Holy Saturday suggest something more that belongs to the radical nature of Christ’s sacrifice, to the radical nature of God’s desire to be reconciled with our humanity and world. Holy Saturday marks the creedal mystery of the Descent into Hell. What does that mean? It means the fullest possible extent of God’s desire to be reconciled with the whole of our sinful humanity.

Drawing upon imagery from Zechariah, our readings from 1st Peter this morning point to the idea of Christ going and preaching to the spirits in prison, in the darkness of Sheol. The work of human redemption extends far beyond our assurances about ourselves, far beyond the narrow limits of our world-view. The great icons of the Resurrection in Eastern Orthodoxy envision for us something of the great mystery of this day. Christ is depicted as drawing Adam and Eve and a train of others out of the grave, out of the pit of darkness. Such is reconciliation writ large, we might say.

At the very least, our gathering at the grave of Christ allows for the possibilities of something more. Of hope. Ultimately the reconciling grace of Christ for the whole of the world, for the whole of our humanity – such after all is its universal scope without which it is nothing – moves us to watch and wait expectantly.  It will lead us to the vigil of Easter and to the radical outcome of that reconciling love in the Resurrection. Already in John’s Gospel we are made aware of that idea and the plans taken by the Chief Priests and the Pharisees who petition Pilate for a watch and a stone. Such is the fearfulness of our humanity in the limitations of our imagination and our reason. Such too is our folly in thinking that we can ultimately contain and restrict the will and actions of God. Already in the quiet mystery of Holy Saturday, Christ, the Word and Son of the Father, shows us that his reconciling sacrifice on the Cross is always something active and alive, and something, too, which speaks to the whole of our humanity. There is, we might say, the constant doing of what is done.

We watch and wait at the borrowed tomb of Christ, the tomb borrowed from Joseph of Arimathea. We watch and wait upon the Christ who “borrowed a body that he might borrow a death” (Athanasius), our death. That changes everything.

“What mean ye by this service?”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday 2019
Matins & Ante-Communion

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“What mean ye by this service?”

You may be forgiven for wondering, ‘which service?’ For Maundy Thursday is really a great jumble of services, a collection of rituals. There is the rite of the washing of the feet; there is the rite of the royal mandatum, a gift of money to the poor; there is the Judas Cup ceremony at Durham Cathedral; there is the institution of the Holy Eucharist in the Upper Room with his disciples “on the night,” this very night, “in which he was betrayed”; there is the stripping of the altar; there is the watch in remembrance of Christ’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane. “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” “What mean ye by these services?”we have to ask.

And yet the connecting thread of meaning is clear. It has altogether to do with the power of the concept of sacrifice, a concept so much misunderstood that it now belongs less to its profound religious and spiritual sensibilities and more to the pathologies of the therapeutic culture. Sacrifice here is not about calling attention to oneself, about victimhood; it is entirely about the giving of oneself for the sake of others. Such is love. Such is true agency. Such is true love. Love is not love if it is not sacrificial love. It is entirely about putting oneself freely and utterly on the line, not counting the cost. It is love without calculation. It is simply love.

“What mean ye by this service?” This is our text throughout Holy Week. It concentrates for us the purpose of our rather intense and demanding Holy Week observances. Nothing could be more counter-culture. The places are few and far between that undertake such a demanding regime. And yet, it really all begins with Maundy Thursday, the day of the new commandment, novum mandatum. Maundy is simply the englishing of the Latin word, mandatum, which means commandment. A new commandment. That is the unifying theme. The new commandment is “that you love one another as I have loved you.” That is our vocation and challenge: that our loves should be nothing less and nothing more than God’s love moving in us. That new commandment is simply service as sacrifice. And that is what unites the diverse services of this holy day.

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What mean ye by this service?

Tenebrae means darkness or shadows. It underscores an important feature of our Holy Week observances. They are not about a linear sequence of events. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ in all four accounts of the Passion along with the kinds of scriptural commentary that passages from the Old Testament and the New Testament provide. It is really all a kind of circling around the meaning of the Passion in and through the complex of perspectives that are part of its fundamental and doctrinal unity. Thus the ancient Medieval services of Tenebrae are anticipatory of the events of the Triduum Sacrum. The services of Tenebrae anticipate the Mattin services of each following day: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday.

Tenebrae, then, is a kind of shadowing forth of what we already know but know only in the shadows and the darkness of our minds. We know the story of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection but only partially, only ”in a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13..13), as it were. Thus Tenebrae reminds us of what the veiled cross signifies, namely, the limitations and incompleteness of our understanding. And yet, Tenebrae is about the passion of our quest to know and to understand more fully the radical meaning of Christ’s passion as the pageant of divine love.

Tenebrae anticipates. We participate in the intensity of the Passion by anticipation. Tonight we read the Matins and Lauds of Maundy Thursday. Our modern Tenebrae services are usually restricted to the Wednesday of Holy Week. But it all belongs to the meaning of the services of this week. We anticipate the Triduum Sacrum, the three Holy Days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. We do so by our attention to the psalm offices of Matins and Lauds and to the readings which illumine and belong to the deepening of our understanding about Christ’s Passion.

We can only do this in the light of the Resurrection. That is, after all, how all of the accounts of the Passion and by extension the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament have come down to us along with the Creeds that encapsulate the essentials of the Christian faith. We immerse ourselves in the challenge of trying to understand the radical nature of God’s love for us revealed in Christ’s sacrifice.

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