Category: Sermons

“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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When Jesus heard it, he marvelled

Epiphany is the season of marvells, of wonders, the season of signs which teach us something about God and about what God seeks for our humanity. “Be not wise in your own conceits,” Paul advises us because what is wanted is to be wise about God and about the will of God for our humanity. That is always a check on human presumption, being wise in our own conceits, and a check on that equally dangerous and destructive aspect of our fallen humanity, our anger and our desire for revenge. All such things arise from our pride and conceit which deny the wisdom of God wherein alone we find grace and healing and peace. We are to act out of what we learn about divine wisdom and divine power.

This challenges human wisdom and human arrogance and conceit. The lessons of the Epiphany show us what God seeks for our humanity. Not just the healing of our bodily infirmities but the healing of our souls, not rendering “evil for evil” but “overcom[ing] evil with good”. That means acting out of the grace of God’s goodness made manifest in Christ Jesus. In that way there is even the possibility of our becoming a wonder and a marvel not to ourselves but to God.

Today’s Gospel reading presents us with two healings: the healing of the leper from within Israel and the healing of the Centurion’s servant, a healing of someone from outside Israel. Such healings show us the universal aspects of the Epiphany. The things of God are made known for all. God cannot be the possession of simply a few; God is God and so for all. And so he must be made known to all. Such is the necessary missionary impulse of the Christian Faith. We cannot keep God to ourselves and our relationship with God shapes the quality of our relationships with one another. The word gets out as the second miracle clearly shows.

The Epiphany Gospels teach us something about the nature of God through the humanity of Jesus. The healing miracles are just that, things which have to do with divine wisdom and divine power made manifest in Jesus. God who is the author of all life is the God of the healing of all life, sometimes indirectly through human arts and skills, and sometimes directly as in the Gospel miracles. These miracles show us that God seeks our good as found in him. Both the Jewish leper and the Roman Centurion understand that power and goodness in Christ. They both come to him with a desire, the one for himself, the other for his servant.

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I could not see for the glory of that light

He was blinded into sight, we might say. Conversion is the paradox of radical transformation. The Conversion of Paul is a striking example of that kind of paradox. He who persecuted “this Way unto death,” meaning the followers of Jesus who are not yet called Christians, becomes himself a follower and even more the outstanding “apostle to the gentiles”. With Paul’s ‘conversion’, Christianity will become Christianity, we might say, and goes global. In that sense, it complements wonderfully the Epiphany season. Something is made known and what is manifest changes us. And sometimes in dramatic ways.

Paul, his name itself is a consequence of his ‘conversion’, tells us his story three times in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, a book which might equally be called the Book of the Acts of Paul. He was Saul of Tarsus, a learned Jew, “born” as he says “in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in this city”, Jerusalem, “at the feet of Gamaliel”, a learned rabbi, “and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers,” a Pharisee of the Pharisees. He is laying out his credentials before the Jews on the very steps of the Temple in Jerusalem. They have sought to kill him because of what he is saying about Jesus as the Messiah. The ensuing riot and commotion has resulted in the Roman legion intervening to keep the peace.

But before being taken away by the Roman soldiers, Paul speaks to the tribune, the commanding officer, Claudius Lysius. We actually learn his name. To the surprise of the tribune, Paul addresses him in Greek. The tribune, who is apparently Latin speaking but knows Greek, is surprised because he had thought that Paul was an Egyptian and indeed one of the Sicari, a group of Jewish zealots opposed to the Roman occupation and dominance of the Jewish people. Sicari refers to the daggers which they would use to assassinate both Roman soldiers and Jewish collaborators with the Roman authorities. It is the only time the word is used in the New Testament, an hapax legomenon.

Paul asks to be allowed to speak to the Jewish people. He speaks to them in Hebrew. The entire scene shows us something of the interplay of cultures and languages that belongs to the emergence of Christianity. What is his story? It is his famous account of his ‘conversion’ on the road to Damascus. It becomes iconic; ‘a road to Damascus experience’ signals the idea of a radical change of direction in thought and character.

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“O woman, what is that to thee and to me? Mine hour has not yet come”

This, too, is an Epiphany, a making known of the essential divinity of Christ. This, too, is a scene of wonder and amazement. This, too, is a matter of disquieting questions put to Mary. Here he says in response to her observation that they have no wine, “O woman, what is that to thee and to me?”A strange and disturbing question, not unlike the one we heard last Sunday. “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” Such questions might seem to border on the impertinent and the rude, perhaps even a tad disrespectful! But no.

In the context of the Epiphany, we are to see these scenes and hear these questions as belonging to the two natures of Christ, to the union of the divine and the human in the person of Christ. Only so can we begin to see that the making known of the things of God makes certain things known to us and our humanity. Last week, it was about the vocation of our humanity as students in matters of things divine. This week it is about the presence of God in our lives sacramentally and spiritually, but only through the awakening to human limitation that opens us out to the abundance of grace in God, the God who seeks the very best for us in our lives which is more than we can desire or deserve. Such is the radical significance of the miracles of the Gospel. They have to do with two things: the miracle of creation itself as the work of the Creator and the miracle of God’s redemption of our humanity. The miracle stories of the Epiphany all show us what God truly seeks for our humanity.

This is “the beginning of signs,” John tells us, the beginning of the miracles that belong to the understanding of human redemption. This beginning is most instructive. Most of the miracles are anything but mere displays of power. Most of the miracles of the Gospel are about human healing and salvation: “the blind see, the deaf hear, the lepers are cleansed, the lame walk, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” To be sure, and yet the beginning of all such signs is this miracle story of the changing of water into wine at the wedding feast of Cana of Galilee, a story which has, I think, an inescapable sacramental quality and significance. What does it mean?

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Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased

“There came a voice from heaven”, Mark tells us, just after Jesus “com[es] up out of the water” “baptized of John” in the river Jordan, and sees “the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him”(Mark 1. 10). The Baptism of Christ is an epiphany, a making known of the essential divinity of Christ, thus an epiphany, too, of the Trinity. As such The Baptism of Christ is an integral feature of the Epiphany; its propers provided for within The Octave of the Epiphany (BCP, p. 119).

Epiphany is the season of teaching, hence the imagery of light. Advent, too, is the season of teaching with an equal emphasis upon the imagery of light. The difference is that Advent focuses on the Light of Godcomingdown to our world of darkness; Epiphany focuses upon the Light of Godnowin the world. The emphasis is on the nature of God revealed in Jesus Christ. The “voice from heaven” is the Father’s voice which proclaims “Thou are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”(Mark 1.11). This is the beloved “servant, whom I uphold, mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth,” God says in Isaiah, the one upon whom “I have put my spirit” (Isaiah 42.1).

On the one hand, the servant here is Israel in her divine vocation as  “a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles” tasked “to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness” (Isaiah 42.6,7). Powerful images that signal human redemption as grounded in God. On the other hand, the servant is the Son in whom the Father is “well pleased” because the vocation of Israel is only fulfilled in Christ.

The Gospel for The First Sunday after the Epiphany, which this year is also The Octave Day of Epiphany, is the unique story of the boy Jesus engaged with the doctors of the Law in the temple at Jerusalem, “sitting in their midst,” “both hearing them and asking them questions”(Luke. 2. 46). It is a scene of wonder. “All they that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers”(Lk. 2. 47). It is unique in one way because it is the only story in the New Testament about the childhood or boyhood of Christ. But it is uniquely important in another way. Here is Jesus as Divine Teacher and human student. It is an epiphany about who Christ really is. His question to Mary and Joseph highlights his mission and divine identity. “Wist ye not” – did you not know? – “that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Lk. 2. 49). Some translations have “in my Father’s house.” Literally, it is “the things of my Father.” In any event, it is a telling phrase which points to the temple, to the church, as a place of teaching. Teaching and learning, and living the teaching that is learned. That is the Epiphany in us.

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“They saw … they came … and worshipped him”

Unlike Caesar who proverbially came, saw and conquered, the Magi-Kings saw, came, and adored. They were conquered by what they saw. They “fell down and worshipped.” They beheld, through the leading of a star, the child-King of Bethlehem. In their adoration, they “opened their treasures and presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh,” ‘sacred gifts of mystic meaning,’ as one of our hymns wonderfully puts it. Such really is the real origin of gift-giving, the giving of gifts in honour of the gift that is given in Christ’s holy Nativity.

Epiphany marks the completion of Christmas. Everything which belongs to sight and sound, to art and music, to prayer and praise is finally gathered together. The imaginary of Bethlehem is now a crowded place of images derived at once from holy scripture and from holy imagination. With “the adoration of the magi”, the pageant of Christmas is now wonderfully complete.

And over. At least, the account of what we have come to call Epiphany marks both the completion of the mystery of Christmas and inaugurates a new and different consideration. The Journey of the Magi impels, in fact, another journey, one that conveys a profound sense of disquiet and unease. “Being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way,” Matthew tells us. “No longer at ease,” T.S. Eliot suggests, because they are profoundly changed by the mystery which they beheld in Bethlehem. Somehow what they worshipped and adored stays with them and has its way within them. Something has changed. There is a questioning wonder about what we have been given to see. As Eliot’s poem, the Journey of the Magi, puts it:

Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

The awareness of our limitations, of which death is the greatest and ultimate limitation, is the birth of philosophy. It is an ancient theme, constantly reworked and replayed in myriad ways. The death of Enkidu gives birth to Gilgamesh’s quest for wisdom in The Epic of Gilgamesh and launches him on a journey through the realms of the deep darkness of death, the home of the sun which in the ancient understanding arises out of the darkness and sets into the darkness. The death of Patroclus occasions a philosophical crisis for Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. And so for Plato, for Augustine, for Dante, for Shakespeare, for Descartes, the list goes on and on, but in one way or another, the awareness of human limitations gives birth to reflection and wisdom.

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