Category: Sermons

Commemoration of Benedict & Cranmer: King’s College, Halifax, March 21st, 2019

Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table.

Little dogs. “Dogs bear  the burden of revelation”, Colin Dayan notes (With Dogs on the Edge of Life). They are the bridge between man and nature, between man and God yet dogs are not much mentioned in the Scriptures and hardly ever in a positive light. We hear of sinners being like dogs returning to their vomit and that dogs licked the blood of Jezebel. Hardly attractive images. To call someone a dog in the Jewish Scriptures is to say they are worthless; in short, an insult. And in the New Testament, such as in Revelation and Philippians we are told to “beware of the dogs… the evil doers”. Dogs, it seems, are evil.

Isaiah speaks of “dumb dogs [that] cannot bark” (Is. 56.10) to criticize the watchmen of Israel, the leaders who do not protect and care for their people. A thousand years later, Gregory the Great would turn that phrase completely on its head to speak of dogs that bark against “the foxes and the wolves”, the heretics, in order to protect “the sheep”, the faithful. Preaching as barking! Now there’s a thought!

Several centuries later after him, it became an image for the Ordo Praedicatorum, St. Dominic’s Order of Preachers, later known as Dominicans. And no, the term Dominicans cannot be punned or played with as the Domini Canes, the dogs of the Lord; that is just bad Latin and not historical, just another one of those latter day myths.

There is, however, nothing mythical about the dog with the flaming torch as the symbol for the Order of St. Dominic. And scripturally, at least in terms of one of “the other Books (as Hierome saith) [which] the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners” but not “to establish any doctrine”, as Cranmer put it in the sixth of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles, there is the Old Testament Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical Book of Tobias or Tobit, which mentions in a kindly fashion, Tobias’ dog. This provides the sole biblical instance of the long-standing view of dogs as faithful and loyal companions much like Odysseus’s dog, Argos, in the Odyssey. He alone recognises his master, though disguised as a beggar in his return to reclaim Ithaca, and then dies but without betraying him. Seeing Argos brings tears to Odysseus’ eyes. As Homer beautifully puts it,“Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years”.

In the New Testament, there are the dogs that are the companions of Lazarus who lies at the gate of Dives, the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table”. It is the dogs who “came and licked his sores”. That, too, is a touching image of compassion and care, of fidelity and fellowship, and as such something which belongs to the formative nature of Benedictine monasticism which shaped Europe and beyond. And then there is this gospel story, a most powerful and yet disturbing story in which rejection, and silence, and even insult give place, finally and heartbreakingly, to mercy and grace. The breakthrough moment is this remarkable women’s last statement to Jesus: “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”. Little dogs.

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Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table.

Little dogs. Dogs are not much mentioned in the Scriptures and rarely in a positive light. We hear of sinners being like dogs returning to their vomit and of dogs licking the blood of Jezebel, hardly attractive images. To call someone a dog in the Old Testament was to suggest that they were worthless; in short, an insult. In the New Testament such as in Revelation or as in Philippians we are told: “Look out for the dogs … for the evil-workers.” Dogs, it seems, are evil. Don’t ask about cats, let alone ‘snakes, shamrocks and shillelaghs’, not to mention green beer. St. Patrick? Well that is another matter, yet one which has to do with perseverance, attention, and insight as in this Gospel. And so with dogs, too, perhaps.

Isaiah speaks of “dumb dogs [that] cannot bark” (Is. 56.10), criticizing the watchmen, the leaders of Israel. Yet more than a thousand years later that phrase was turned about to become an image for dogs as preachers, meaning dogs that dobark and, indeed, bark incessantly against “foxes and wolves”, the heretics that threaten “the sheep”, the faithful, as Gregory the Great imagines. Preaching as barking! Just saying.

Several centuries later after him, it became an image for the Ordo Praedicatorum, St. Dominic’s Order of Preachers, later known as Dominicans. And no, the term Dominicans cannot be punned or played with as the Domini Canes, the dogs of the Lord; that is just bad Latin and not historical, just another one of those latter day myths. There is, however, nothing mythical about the dog with the flaming torch as the symbol of the Order of St. Dominic. And scripturally, at least in terms of one of “the other Books (as Hierome saith) [which] the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine”, as the sixth of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles puts it, there is the Old Testament Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical Book of Tobias or Tobit, which mentions in a kindly fashion, Tobias’ dog. This provides the sole biblical instance of the long-standing view of dogs as faithful and loyal companions much like Odysseus’s dog, Argos, in the Odyssey. He alone recognises his master, though disguised as a beggar in his return to reclaim Ithaca, and then dies but without betraying him. Seeing Argos brings tears to Odysseus’ eyes. It is a touching scene. As Homer beautifully puts it, “Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years”.

In the New Testament, there are the dogs that are the companions of Lazarus who lies at the gate of Dives, the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table”. It is the dogs who “came and licked his sores”. That, too, is a touching image of compassion and care. No doubt, they, too, desired to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. And then there is this story, a most powerful and yet disturbing story in which rejection, and silence, and even insult give place, finally and heartbreakingly, to mercy and grace. The breakthrough moment is this remarkable women’s last statement to Jesus: “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”. Little dogs.

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“All men are seeking for thee”

Lent is the season of our striving to strive for the things of God that belong to the good of our humanity. The conjunction of this Ember Wednesday with the commemoration of St. Gregory the Great, one of the founding giants of the medieval Church and of western Europe, is perhaps instructive and at least intriguing. The Ember seasons belong really to the development of western Christianity to which Gregory was a major contributing figure; one has only to think of the formative power of what came to be known as Gregorian Chant in the liturgy of the western Church. The Ember seasons belong as well to a recognition of the order and life of the Church as the body of Christ and to a certain sensibility about the natural world in relation to our spiritual lives; in short, to a sacramental understanding. The Ember seasons not only recall us to Pentecost as the birth of the Christian Church; they also recall us to our lives as embodied within the patterns of nature’s year.

Our Lenten programme this year seeks to explore the sacramental imagery that the Christian Church found in the Scriptures, particularly the Jewish Scriptures or what Christians have commonly called the Old Testament. A sacramental understanding has very much to do with the relation between Word and Sacrament and with the way in which the things of the world belong and contribute to our life of faith and to the forms of our participation in the life of God in Christ. The sacraments are, after all, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”, as the Catechism teaches. In a way, they are a critical feature of all religions. Something invisible and spiritual is made known through what is external and visible.

It is a feature of Judaism that the world reveals the glory of the Lord. A sacramental understanding necessarily connects us to creation. To speak of creation is to speak about a relation to a Creator who by  definition is not created. That connection between God and the world and between God and our humanity as created beings is essential to our thinking sacramentally. The sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion recall us to creation as the means of our participation in the life of God. The things of the world become the vehicles and vessels of our spiritual life. As Paul wonderfully puts it in Romans, the invisible things of God are made known through the visible things of creation. At once, the scriptural ground for what will be known as natural law, it also belongs to a sacramental understanding. The sacraments are not an add-on, a holy extra, as it were, but rather essential to the nature of the Christian religion and to its doctrine and patterns of thinking.

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Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, with the ashes of repentance and the idea of turning back to God. “Return to the Lord your God”, the prophet Joel exhorts us. But there can be no turning back to God without an awareness of our having turned away from God. That is the reason for today’s readings from Matthew and Paul, the one about the temptations of Christ, the other about our striving with God. Against the idea of the wilderness as a pristine place empty of human presence, Paul seems to suggest that the wilderness is inus. That is where the struggles of the soul for the good take place. And that is the true meaning of the story of Christ’s temptations. It illustrates the forms of our temptations.

The story of the temptations of Christ reveals to us a very basic and fundamental principle. All temptations have to do with our relation to the essential goodness of creation and to the will of the Creator. The very nature of God and the goodness of God is a challenge to us about what we think truly matters and what is truly good. This is what is set before us in the story of Christ’s temptations. The whole aspect of temptation turns on the idea of the good. That is what is primary and what the sequence of temptations in Matthew’s account shows us.

The temptations are about being put to the test. Temptation in that sense is about the relation of our knowing and our willing. Temptation tests us about our relation to what is good and true. They all involve a question about power in relation to truth. The devil here is the tempter as in The Book of Job and, as in The Book of Job, the matter of temptation is explicitly allowed by God; in other words it belongs to our good. Here Jesus is “led up by the Spirit”. The point is not about mere play-acting; the point is that the devil himself is good as a created being. His evil and the nature of all evil lies in his denial of his creatureliness and in his pride and presumption to be God himself. That is to will a lie. It is to turn your back on the truth of your own being. It involves a perversion of the good, a refusal to will the good order of creation and the will of God.

Temptation itself is not sin; sin is the yielding to temptation. The story of the temptations of Christ teaches us two things: first, the nature of all our temptations; and secondly, the way of the overcoming of all our temptations. In other words, we are shown the temptation and we are given the true response.

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“I will show you a still more excellent way.”

A journey. “A still more excellent way.” Lent is upon us. Lent, not lint. What does it mean? The word refers to the lengthening of the days. We are, believe it or not, looking towards spring after the bleak mid-winter, the brutal cold of February and now the messiness of March. The real spring is the spring of our souls in Christ’s resurrection. Yet that makes no sense apart from the readings and meaning of this day and without the lessons of Lent.

“We go up to Jerusalem” Jesus says. Not I. Not you. We go up. It is a powerful statement. Lent is nothing more than the concentration of our lives in Christ which is about our going to God, a going up, as it were. It is all about the radical meaning of Christ as “the way, the  truth and life”. We are being recalled to the journey of the soul to God but with Christ. That makes all the difference. And what is that difference? It is love. God is love.

This is not the sentimental, emotional and romantic love which distorts and conceals more than it reveals and heals. No. It is about the divine love moving in us. Nowhere is that signalled more profoundly, perhaps, than in Paul’s wonderful hymn to love.

In his First Letter to the Corinthians, he lays out a consideration of what belongs to the good of the body,  to the good of our lives together socially and corporately for we have no life apart from our lives with and for one another. In chapter twelve, he lays out the rather traditional view that the human community finds its unity in justice with each part honouring what belongs to each part to do within the whole. Such a view is the constant counter to all of the forms of the autonomous individual which infect, destroy and betray our contemporary culture. The counter is our recognition and respect for each other, for the good of the individual within the good of the community, the body, particularly, the body of Christ, the Church. That is true and marvellous but at the end of chapter twelve he says, “I will show you a still more excellent way”. What is that way? It is the way of love.

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“If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities”

How weird (or at least how strange)! Don’t we all want to call attention to our accomplishments and talents, to our abilities and qualities of character and action? Or even better to have others celebrate such things so that we can bask in the glow of their affirmation and attention? Look at  me! Look at me! How great am I! So what can it mean to glory in the things which concern our weaknesses? Yet, Paul, once again, is on to something of fundamental significance with respect to the journey of our souls to God. It is not about us but about God in us and that makes all the difference. The ‘Gesima’ Sundays recall us to some basic features of our life with God understood cosmically and not just narcissistically. It is about being grounded in God. It is not simply about you, impossible as that may seem. You may recall the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where the father says to Calvin ‘it’s not all about you’ to which he says, ‘How is that even remotely possible?’

He is not alone. We do tend, I am sorry to say, to want to reduce everything to ourselves and reduce others to ourselves. Such is a kind of incurvatus in se, a turning in upon ourselves. To think that we are the centre of the universe is utterly delusional. Yet our culture caters to that concept constantly and completely. We manage even  to turn good works or its pretence into self-serving promotional selfies.

So Paul’s words are saving grace, a necessary corrective but also an instructional gold-mine. He is hinting at a profound religious understanding that belongs to our Christian faith. To glory in the things which concern our infirmities is nothing less than to glory in the grace of God who alone can make something good out of our follies and failures, even out of our sins and wickedness. That is pretty powerful and speaks to a whole other understanding of human activity and human character. It is profoundly freeing and life transforming. Our highest activity is found in our working with the grace of God alive in us and knowing that his grace is the moving principle which redeems and perfects our humanity. Wow!

As we have seen, the virtues of the soul become forms of love, forms of our participation in God’s love. The ‘Gesima’ Sundays remind us of the love of God manifest in Jesus and indicate how that love is to live in us.

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Every one that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things

There is something exotic about these three Sundays, known sometimes as the ‘Gesima’ Sundays. They have been largely lost from view in the more prosaic and rather unimaginative re-ordering of the church calendar in the contemporary liturgies with such things as Sundays in Ordinary Time, for instance, or the mere prolongation of Sundays after Epiphany. But more important than the names is what they signify.

They are in one sense pre-Lenten Sundays that prepare us for the journey of Lent but that journey is really the journey of the soul to God concentrated into the span of forty days. The ‘Gesima’ Sundays reflect some of the different patterns about the development of the quadragesima, the forty days of Lent in terms of what days were excluded from the numbering. Septuagesima is the week of the seventieth day before Easter at one time marking the quadragesima by excluding certain days like Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, for instance, from the Scriptural idea of forty days of fasting and prayer that lies at the heart of Lent in the penitential progress towards Easter. In short, these Sundays have a special spiritual significance in relation to Lent and to the Lent of our lives in faith; hence the purple hangings this year.

They are all about the virtues of the soul as transformed by grace. They speak to a quality of inwardness and excellence of character that is all about activity. We are not simply passive in relation to the grace of God imputed and infused into us through Word and Sacrament. These Sundays remind us of the activities of the soul informed by the grace of Christ. In terms of today’s Gospel, for instance, we are not to “stand here idle” all the day long but to “go into the vineyard” of creation and work, “and whatsoever is right that shall ye receive.” This speaks both to the dignity of human labour in itself and to justice as the operative principle that governs our labour, a justice that cannot be measured in our terms as the Gospel rather sternly shows. Divine justice provides what is right absolutely speaking and in principle. God’s justice is never reducible to the scales of human justice, again by definition. Yet justice is the last and the greatest of the classical or cardinal virtues in the human soul and for the human community.

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“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”

Epiphany season ends this year on a note of reflective judgment. Epiphany season is about the making known of God and of what God wants for us. That alone is an astounding matter. It centers on the idea of revelation, that there are things God wants us to know and which are revealed to us; such is redemption. It says so much about the truth and the dignity of our humanity, on the one hand, and says so much, too, about the truth and the mystery of God, the God who makes himself known to us so that his life can live and move in us, on the other hand. This is an astounding wonder.

The idea of God’s revelation of himself and his will for us also means that something about ourselves is revealed to us. We are in these stories individually and institutionally, as it were. Something about the dynamic and nature of human institutions and human personality is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures. We are made aware of something beyond ourselves, a principle of absolute goodness and truth to which we are held accountable and without which we have no freedom and no real dignity. That we close our ears to this is our folly and our wickedness; such is judgment itself.

Judgment. We are uncomfortable about the idea of judgment and well we should be. In our day, judgment is about being arbitrarily judged by others without any recourse to the question, “upon what basis”? What are the principles that inform our moral, social and political discourse?

We live in a world of wheat and tares. Tares is a Middle English word for weeds used by Wycliffe and then Tyndale in their English translations of the Bible. It is not always easy to know which is which or even which are we. That is why we are given sage advice by Paul in the Epistle for today about “forbearing one another, and “forgiving one another” and above all, to “put on charity which is,” he says, “the bond of perfectness,” and by Jesus in the Gospel parable to let both wheat and tares grow together until the harvest. It is about leaving the judgement to God. It requires of us a certain toleration.

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Why are ye so fearful?

It is a question for us. Ours is the culture of Humbaba. Humbaba? Who or what is Humbaba? He is a figure from the great Sumerian epic poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Humbaba is said to be the guardian of the forest which might make him the prototype of Smokey the Bear, protecting the forest from fire, or an appropriate mascot for environmentalists opposed to the ravaging of the forest by clear-cutting. But he is also said to be “the evil in the land,”a terrifying force of nature, we might say, and, intriguingly “a battering ram.” He is in many ways indescribable. A seemingly odd collection of images, to be sure, but ones which are largely summed up in the idea of Humbaba as belonging to “the fearful uncertainty in things.”

For the Sumerian world, the world of Mesopotamia, some 5,000 or more years ago, is perhaps more like our world than what we would care to imagine. For despite our naive over-confidence in technology, a fearful uncertainty lies at the heart of our culture. Apart from the technophiles who persist in thinking that technology is the future and will solve all our problems, we are really no longer quite so “assured of certain certainties,” as T.S. Eliot puts it, no longer quite so “impatient to assume the world.” We are,  as he suggests in the Journey of the Magi, “no longer at ease.” That is, I think, a good thing.

The image of Humbaba as “a battering ram” is most suggestive. Humbaba is one of the images of chaos for the Sumerian culture, a culture which like ours produced an amazing array of practical and technological accomplishments, unrivaled in scope until the modern world of industrial and digital progress, with all of its attendant problems. They were the first, historically speaking, though they had their counterparts in the cultures of ancient China, India, and Egypt – all river cultures – to invent things like irrigation, therefore not being defined by the givenness of the land but figuring out how to bring water from the river to arid ground making it fertile; the first to invent sailing, no longer limited to the directional flow of rivers; the first to develop agriculture and the tools associated with it which allowed for settling on the land; the first to build cities with walls and buildings out of bricks, requiring the use of fire to harden clay, and so on and so on. But, perhaps, most importantly and as belonging to these marvels of human ingenuity; they were the first to invent writing.

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