Category: Sermons

“Love is the fulfilling of the law”

Today’s Collect draws explicitly upon the rich imagery of the Epistle reading from Romans, the images of “cast[ing] off the works of darkness” and “put[ting] on the armour of light.” The Gospel reading from Matthew complements and illustrates this teaching. We are awakened to the necessity of an ethical principle and to its presence in our lives. That is the meaning of the Advent of Christ, the coming of Christ.

The Epistle opens with a commentary on the law as fulfilled in the love of neighbour. “Love,” Paul argues, “is the fulfilling of the law.” Law is love? That must seem rather strange yet it goes to the heart of the matter of God as the ethical principle for our lives. The law proclaims God’s will for our humanity and as such illumines the darkness of our lives. Left to ourselves, to “the devices and desires of our own hearts,” we are deadly and destructive, harmful to ourselves and to one another. The biblical story of Cain and Abel, the first murder, inaugurates the long bloody tale of man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man. Thus it serves to highlight the need for an ethical principle which by definition cannot come from us; it is not a human construct, but something divine through which we learn the true worth and dignity of our humanity.

The story of Cain and Abel is followed by the Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, and, then, the Mosaic covenant in an ascending order of completeness and universality, the meaning of which is summarized in Paul’s statement that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” Love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable.

We often misunderstand the Ten Commandments and confuse the ethical teaching they present with our more ordinary assumptions about laws and legislation, about rules and customs as something constraining and limiting. To the contrary, we are presented with something much more radical and much more freeing. We forget that the Ten Commandments are about our freedom, our liberation, and that they are grounded in the revelation of God to Moses as “I am Who I am,” as the universal principle upon which the being and knowing of all reality depends. “I am has sent you,” God says to Moses. The Ten Commandments begin with God as “I am”: “I am the Lord thy God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” The law is the charter of our freedom, our freedom to God. That freedom is love in its truest sense

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“Jesus turned”

It is all about the turning but what kind of turning? Head over heels? Like a rolling stone? Or a November snowball? No. It is about God’s turning to us and our being turned to God. That is the especial wonder of this Sunday. I love the collocation of prepositions: “next” and “before” that signal an ending and a beginning. This Sunday speaks so profoundly to the double movement of the spirit: God coming to us and our coming to God, to the principle of justification in the first and the principle of sanctification in the second, and to the way in which those necessarily intersect.

We have in today’s lesson from Jeremiah a kind of summa of the pageant of sanctification. It is really all about “the Lord our Righteousness” living in us and we in him. In the textus receptus of the New Testament, this is one of the few but important passages that are re-printed in majuscules, in capital letters. It is a kind of shout-out, a way of calling attention to the whole pageant of sanctifying grace as being about the realisation, bit by bit, of justifying grace dwelling in us. It recalls us to a new beginning, a beginning again in the pageant of that justifying grace towards us and its dwelling in us. It is all about the forms of our incorporation into the life of God in Christ. That belongs and marks the apocalyptic nature of Advent and of all that follows right through to Trinity Sunday. Something has to be made known to us even as we recognise our need for an ethical and spiritual principle. Left to ourselves we are dead and deadly. Such is the darkness of Advent into which comes the light of Christ.

To speak this way about the pattern of the church year may seem linear, a step-by-step kind of thinking but really this Sunday shows us that is not so. It is more about a kind of circular reasoning (understood positively and essentially), a way of returning and turning back again upon the very principle of life and thought and being. A way of being of gathered into what is eternal. “Never that which is shall die,” a fragment from the ancient Greek Tragic poet, Euripides, states. What truly is truly remains. What is that? It is about Christ and about Christ in us, about how our lives participate in the life of God.

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He searches out the abyss, and the hearts of men,
and considers their crafty devices.
For the Most High knows all that may be known.

The rubric or direction on the bottom of page 258 (BCP, Cdn.) explains today’s readings. Sometimes the Trinity Season runs beyond twenty-four Sundays, sometimes less, so what happens when it runs over? It is a question about the distribution of the Sundays and about the appointment of the readings. There is a wonderful logic to the way in which the Trinity Season and the Epiphany Season complement one another, the one longer or shorter as the case may be. This year the Trinity Season runs to twenty-five Sundays. In the New Year, Epiphany Season will run to five Sundays. Note that from the rubric, what is read today are the readings appointed for The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany. Thus there will be no duplication just a marvellous liturgical and scriptural sensitivity through which time is continually gathered into eternity.

These provisions are a post-Cranmerian development. They belong to the work of John Cosin, the Bishop of Durham, who in the middle of the 17th century undertook to make provisions for what was missing for certain Sundays in some years in the lectio divina, the divine reading of Scripture at Mass on Sundays. He appointed readings for the 5th and the 6th Sundays after Epiphany, a season which like the Trinity Season is variable in length owing to the movable date of Easter, which would also serve as the readings for the 25th and 26th Sundays after Trinity when needed. In other words, they do double duty. And, taking his cue from Cranmer, he composed the Collects as based on the Scriptural texts chosen for those Sundays. You can see how this morning’s Collect draws explicitly upon the Epistle and the Gospel. All this offers a wonderful theological insight into the reason for our reading the passages appointed for The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany on The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity. They bring us to next Sunday, The Sunday Next Before Advent.

How appropriate because we hear in the Gospel reading that “they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.” That signals an Advent theme captured in the Advent Hymn, “Lo, he comes with clouds descending” (Hymn # 60).

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“I have called you friends”

It is one of the most extraordinary passages in the Scriptures and perhaps in the history of religious philosophy. It belongs especially, it seems to me, to the rich tradition of the literature of consolation. It teaches us something profound and wonderful about the real meaning of the ethical principle upon which our lives radically depend.

Against a utilitarian or consequentialist view of ethics which merely looks at the consequences real or imagined that arise from certain actions, the outcomes, as it were, we have with the words of Jesus the very principle that shapes and informs our actions. This passage is read on The Feast of St. Barnabas (BCP, p.227) who is sometimes called the son of consolation. Here is our real consolation and comfort in the face of the great evils of our world and day. Jesus’s words reveal to us the great ethic of sacrificial love as the real defining principle in our lives. It can only be about that principle in usas this passage makes clear. “Ye are my friends,” Jesus says, an outstanding claim. The very idea of a friendship between God and man is almost unthinkable for ancient philosophy and religion, the distance between God and man far too incommensurate. And yet, Jesus says, “I have called you friends.”

But only if we do whatsoever he commands us. Our friendship with God in Christ depends upon his Word being alive in us. And that means our knowing, each according to our own capacities, what God seeks for us in our lives. Somehow this passage strengthens us in the face of the great evils of the world, particularly the evils of war.

Today we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the ending of the First World War. We are only beginning to begin to understand and to come to terms with the evil of our humanity. Remembrance Day marks the ending of the First World War; yet the significance of this is so great that it is on this day that we also remember the Second World War, itself an extension of the first, as well as remembering a multitude of other wars and their human cost. Somehow we remember them through this remembrance. We contemplate the dark horrors of the twentieth century unleashed by our humanity upon our humanity in unprecedented ways. We confront the deadly and destructive capacities of our technocratic world. That we try to remember, that we can remember at all, is the signal virtue of this day.

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“Whose is this image and superscription?”

No one talks as much about money as Jesus and there is nothing that Jesus talks quite so much about as money. He knows us only too well, our weaknesses and our temptations. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”, he teaches us. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”, he warns us. And in today’s Gospel, “Show me the tribute-money”, Jesus demands of the Pharisees, who sought to “entangle him in his talk”.

“Whose is this image and superscription?”he asks about the coin. It bears the image of Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor, the highest power on earth, humanly speaking, at that time, much as we used to have and still do have currency that bears the image of the Queen here in Canada and elsewhere in the Commonwealth. The point is that money is the concrete symbol of power, of worldly and political power. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” is a true statement, after all, which reflects the political order to which economic matters are subordinate. But can money be the image of who we are in the truth of our being? Can it be the image of us? Are we simply and entirely by definition, homo economicus, economic man?

In my view, money cannot capture who we essentially are. If we think that it can, then we forget and deceive ourselves. We give it a power over ourselves. The question “whose is this image and superscription?” recalls us to ourselves and recalls us and all things to God. More to the point, ‘Whose image and superscription are we?’

The coin may bear the image of Caesar and thus symbolize his worldly power, but as Jesus will say to Caesar’s man in Jerusalem, “thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above”. Even the power of Caesar ultimately derives from and belongs to God, and so too, for every power and every kingdom.

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“These are they which came out of great tribulation”

November is the grey month of remembering. Leaves lie scattered on the wind in piles of burnished gold and red, redolent with the smell of decay. Scattered leaves in a culture of scattered minds. And as if in testimony to the pathetic fallacy in which we attribute human emotions to the natural world, there is no end to doom and gloom in our human world that nature seems to mirror. The spectacle of the shootings at the synagogue in Pittsburgh is still fresh in our minds. And then there is all of the folly and frenzy, the fun and frolic of Halloween in our secular and commercial culture. I don’t know exactly what to make of it. I don’t quite understand why one would want to be frightened or to frighten others and while I get the whole matter of costumes and masks, I am uneasy about ‘trick or treat.’ What does it teach? To be a jihadi or a beggar? Just not sure.

Yet as the counter to these features of the dark of nature’s year and the darkness in the heart of our world, there is the wonderful mystery of All Saints’ which provides a powerful way for us to think more deeply and more spiritually about our humanity as gathered to God in whom we find our real truth and dignity. All Saints’ reminds us of our Christian vocation. It is to a sanctified life which is simply about the qualities of Christ living in us in and through our lives with one another.

All Saints’ recalls us to the Communion of Saints, to the idea of our humanity united through its true forms of diversity in the praise and worship of God. In the culture of scattered leaves and scattered souls, there is a gathering. It is to God and it is God in us. The great lesson from Revelation affords us a vision of heaven. It is not future so much as it is present. It is about the truth of our lives as gathered to God and to the qualities of grace that properly define our humanity. All Hallows’ Eve is not about ghouls and ghosts, of horror and gruesome images of our humanity in disorder and disarray, dismembered and ghastly; it is about the dignity of our humanity as found in God through the truer forms of our humanity. “A multitude that no man could number,” Revelation says, a multitude composed of“nations, kindred, people and tongues.” In other words, a multitude that embraces the legitimate diversities of our humanity in relation to cultures and nations, families and people, different languages and ethnicities. A vision that takes us beyond the tribalisms of our communities and churches and that recalls us to the communion of saints. Our lives are grounded in God and not simply in the accidentalities of time and history, of culture and experience.

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“He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me”

There is something wonderfully providential about the concurrence of The Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude with The Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity. On the one hand, we have the wonderful vision in the lesson from Revelation of the heavenly city that anticipates the great spiritual harvest Festival of All Saints and, in the Gospel, grounds that heavenly vision in the life of the Trinity. The spiritual fellowship belonging to the redeemed human community is grounded in the life of God through his Word and Spirit. On the other hand, in the Gospel for Trinity Twenty-Two, we have the powerful yet instructive parable of the unforgiving servant which illustrates by way of the negative the whole point of having and keeping the commandments of Christ, namely, our abiding in the very love of God and acting out of that love towards one another. That is the very thing that the servant who is forgiven and indeed has been forgiven much doesn’t do towards others. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, he refuses to forgive others what little they owe to him. It is a refusal of love, of mercy and truth. Yet what is wanted, as the epistle reading from Philippians makes clear, is that our “love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement.” That love is found in Christ and Christ in us; in short, it makes us part of a company of love.

Today’s Scripture readings remind us wonderfully of another kingdom, the kingdom of God. It is another city, the heavenly city, the City of God, which stands in such stark contrast to the disorders and confusions of our contemporary world, the city of man, as it were, the “unreal city” as T.S. Eliot suggests in The Waste Land. The Unreal City is the human community as more dead than alive, an image that follows immediately upon the image of the Church as nothing more than “a heap of broken images” because it no longer lives from God’s word. Yet these readings remind us of the apostolic fellowship of the Church which, if it is to be the Church, must stand upon the authority of God’s Word. “Only/ there is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),” as Eliot’s poem argues, signalling the only hope in the modern wasteland, the hope that is grounded upon the rock that is Christ and upon the apostolic foundations of the Church. This is what we celebrate today.

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“And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him”

It is a poignant and touching story that speaks to the fears and the experiences of countless parents down throughout the ages. It is a story about a father’s concern for his son who is said to be “at the point of death.” The father is described as “a certain nobleman.” Clearly status and wealth are of no use in the face of death. “What helpes honour or worlde’s bliss”, a fifteenth century English medieval lyric puts it about the fact of mortality. “Death is to man the final way.”

And yet, as a 14th century tutor at Oxford wonderfully tells his students,“live each day as if you are to die tomorrow; study as if you are to live forever.” To study is to pay attention to words and the power of words, and, most especially, here, to the word of Christ.

We forget that we can be profoundly touched by words. Words can make or break our day, raise us up or put us down. How and what we think and say to one another is important. It is important to our spiritual health especially we might say.

Today’s epistle reading from Ephesians abounds with military imagery but in an entirely spiritual context, the idea of a spiritual struggle, the cosmic struggle between good and evil which is not about “wrestling against flesh and blood” but something much more serious:“against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” This must not be misconstrued as gnostic dualism – dividing the world into them and us in which we demonize the other and pretend that we are the good. Such conflict narratives only contribute to the forms of spiritual wickedness that Paul is highlighting.

There is a struggle, to be sure, but the struggle is always first and foremost in us. It is the struggle to  be defined by the good, by God’s Word and truth and not by “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” More than thirty years ago, the great English doyenne of mystery novels, Dame P.D. James, wrote a wonderful novel with the title “Devices and Desires.” Against the strong recommendation of her editors, she refused to provide an explanation of the title on the grounds that every educated person should know the reference. This was long before our current fascination and obsession with our digital devices which, paradoxically, reveal only too well “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” The phrase comes from the General Confession at Morning and Evening Prayer in the Prayer Book: “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.”

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Then opened he their understanding

The opening of the understanding is a recurring motif in Luke’s Gospel. It serves to highlight an important feature of his commemoration as the author of the third Gospel and the author of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. There is something significant and attractive about the figure of St. Luke and the role which he exercises in the Christian imagination. He is, as the Collect puts it,“an Evangelist and a Physician of the soul” and one “whose praise is in the Gospel.”

Healing is about more than just relief from bodily ailments. More important is the idea of the healing of the soul captured in the Gospel for his feast day. The Scriptures are opened for our understanding and in particular the understanding of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection from which flows the preaching of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. These are powerful ideas which Luke explores in his writings to the glory of God and the good of his church and people, we might say.

The healing of our souls. How we think about things and how we look upon one another are critical concerns. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that we should commemorate Luke, Evangelist and Physician, the day after the legalisation of cannabis in Canada. It is true that from a Christian perspective nothing in the physical and natural order is simply evil. Somehow there is  something good in the being of every creaturely thing, something good by definition about cannabis and its chemical components. But there is also the great and good wisdom about how we use the good things of our world and day.

That is a far greater question. We know that we can abuse all manner of good things. What I must confess to being utterly uncertain about is the recreational use of marijuana, of cannabis. What exactly is that good? We know only  too well about the misuse and abuse of alcohol, namely, drinking to excess, drinking to get drunk, to intentionally lose control and imagine that one is ‘feeling good’ while under the influence. We know only too well what dangers that can lead to and the cost it brings. But abusus non tollit usum. The abuse of something doesn’t take away from its proper use. What is the proper use of cannabis exactly?

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“See then that ye walk circumspectly,
not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time”

These are strong words which complement wonderfully the strong and disturbing words of the Gospel. On the one hand, there is an invitation to a royal wedding – what’s not to like about that? – and yet, on the other hand, after the refusal, the denial even to the point of violence about that invitation, someone who is gathered in from the high-ways is cast out for not having a wedding-garment! The parables of the Gospel are not always easy to understand! They always challenge our assumptions. That is the point. They do so by opening us out to a larger and more comprehensive understanding.

In a way, it is has everything to do with “redeeming the time,” a concept which is about more than just making the best of things. It is, instead, about seeing the good and acting accordingly. We see, as Paul and Aristotle and others have observed, but “in a glass darkly.” It is an important insight about the limits of our knowing, on the one hand, and the realization of a deeper darkness in the heart of our humanity, on the other hand.

Walking circumspectly. What does that mean? Walking carefully, paying attention to where you are and what is happening, walking while looking around you; in short, walking thinkingly or thoughtfully. The word in Greek relates to the term used for Aristotle’s school of philosophy, the Peripatetics, thinking while walking. It gives a whole new and deeper meaning to thinking on one’s feet!

Walking circumspectly is a feature of this very building and its spiritual purpose. Just above the main doorway in the narthex leading into the Church is a curious phrase from Ecclesiastes. “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God.” I have often wondered why no-one has ever asked me about what that means. I can only surmise that perhaps they have been looking down at their feet literally and so are completely unaware of what was over their heads.

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