“In Thy light shall we see light”: Advent Meditations
Fr. David Curry has compiled his two Advent Meditations on Christ the Light of the World in one pdf document, which may be downloaded by clicking here.
Category: Sermons
Advent Meditation: Christ, Light of the World, Part 2
This is the second of two Advent meditations on Christ, the Light of the World. The first is posted here.
“In Thy light shall we see light”
Part Two:
In keeping with the Advent theme of this Sunday and week, we continue to ponder “the things written for our learning,” especially the image of Christ as “the light of the world.” The Christian Faith has this character to it. There comes into the world an idea so real and so totally true that it carries with it its own repudiation and rejection and makes that part of the reality of its own fullness and truth. This is what we have been exploring in terms of the remarkable statement by Christ that he is “the light of the world.”
”He came unto his own and his own received him not.” His own is not simply Israel but all of us in the confusions of our sins, in the darkness of our minds, in the vanity of our lives. “And this is the judgment that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be closely seen that his deeds have been wrought in God” (John 3.19-21).
”I am the light of the world”, Jesus says, “he who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (John 8.12,13). As Hans Urs Von Balthasar puts it, we do not “think by the light of reason into the darkness of mystery”; rather we think “in the light of the mystery of faith by which we illuminate the darkness of the world”.
The Christian faith takes absolutely seriously the freedom of the will. To take seriously the freedom of the will means to acknowledge the capacity in us all for the refusal of the light. It means a negative definition of ourselves; defining ourselves negatively means defining ourselves against the light of God; in short, to will the darkness – “men loved darkness rather than light”. More strongly put, it means, hating the light both for ourselves and for others. The will to nothingness is the blindness of the soul in the presence of the light. It marks the refusal to be turned to the light, the refusal to be drawn into the light. Such negative definitions of ourselves are a form of denial. It is light refused. Yet Christ is the light refused who uses our refusals to bring us into the light of his presence.
We continue our examination of Jesus as the light of the world by looking at the second passage in which Jesus identifies himself explicitly as “the light of the world”, namely, John 9.5. It accompanies and is part of the story of a healing, the healing of the eyes of the man who was born blind. As with the first story of the woman taken in adultery, so here, too, there is debate and argument.
Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent
“My words shall not pass away.”
Here are words “written for our learning” but only through our sitting and listening. Here are words “written for our learning” about hope and comfort in times of darkness, danger, and despair. Here are words audible and written, yes, but also words made visible. “He hath instituted and ordained holy mysteries, as pledges of his love, and for a continual remembrance of his death, to our great and endless comfort,” as the Exhortation so rarely heard so wonderfully puts it (BCP, pp. 88-89). Words written for our learning.
The Exhortation speaks to the character of this Sunday which is sometimes known as Bible Sunday because of the Collect composed by Cranmer. It calls attention to the reason and purpose of the Scriptures. The Sacraments, too, belong to that understanding of the purposes of God for our humanity. If you read the Proper Preface used for Passiontide, for Passion Sunday right through to Maundy Thursday (BCP, p. 80), you will find that the Exhortation draws directly upon it. We give thanks “for the redemption of the world by the death and passion of our Saviour Christ, both God and Man; who did humble himself, even to the death upon the Cross, for us sinners, who lay in darkness and the shadow of death; that he might make us the children of God, and exalt us to everlasting life.” The Exhortation adds only one word, miserable, “miserable sinners.” Sinners in misery because sin is misery.
Yet here is our comfort: “the patience and comfort of thy holy Word,” and the “great and endless comfort” of “the holy mysteries,” the Sacraments which “he hath instituted and ordained as pledges of his love, and for a continual remembrance of his death, to our great and endless comfort.” Word and Sacrament conveying hope and comfort.
The two Exhortations appended to the Communion service underscore an important reformation ideal. Both Cranmer and Calvin sought to increase the frequency of Communion and especially the reception of the Sacrament over and against the practice of Mass in the late Medieval world largely as a spectator event: seeing the host elevated, even through a squint (literally a hole in the wall!), but receiving the Sacrament very infrequently. The insight of the reformers was essentially a Scriptural insight into the purpose of the Sacraments as revealed in the witness of the Scriptures: “Take eat … Drink ye all, of this … in remembrance of me.” Such is “the memorial which he hath commanded,” (BCP, p. 83). It is about taking seriously the things which have been written. It is about words “hear[d], read, mark[ed], learn[ed], and inwardly digest[ed]” as Cranmer so famously and memorably puts it. Such words are the clarion call and challenge to the recovery of deep reading over and against the superficiality of our digital compulsions, the ephemerality of flickering images.
Advent Meditation: Christ, Light of the World, Part 1
This is the first of two Advent meditations on Christ, the Light of the World. The second is posted here.
“In Thy light shall we see light”
(Psalm 36.9)
Part One:
Advent is about the coming of God as light to a dark and despairing world. The imagery of light is an important and classical feature of the religions of the world and so too for Christianity. Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” He doesn’t just say it once either but twice. It is, I think, an extraordinary statement. What can it possibly mean?
To be sure, Jesus is identified as light by others, too, by prophet and priest, by poet and evangelist. “In him was life and the life was the light of men”… “That was the true light, which lighteth every one that cometh into the world”. And as aged Simeon proclaims, echoing Isaiah’s prophecy, Jesus is “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel”.
But when Jesus identifies himself as “the light of the world,” it is something more and something different: It would seem to be something which he wants us to know. It suggests something which he wants us to know about himself and about the world, and, indeed, about ourselves.
There are things which Jesus wants us to know. The Gospels are at pains to bring those things to our attention. But what Jesus wants us to know does not mean collecting a bouquet of holy facts and figures. It is not about compiling bits and pieces of pious information nor about lining up a series of propositional hoops through which to jump “merrily on high”. Instead, what Jesus wants us to know are the things which belong to our being with him. Such things are relational rather than informational, dynamic rather than static, humbling rather than presumptuous. And they are inexhaustible. They are the things which we must be constantly learning, constantly engaged with, constantly “being renewed in the transformation of our minds”.
They are the things which are identified and known so as to be proclaimed and celebrated. They are matters of witness. These are connected. If Christian life is about our witness to Christ, then it is also about our being with him. Both our being with him and our witness to him turn on the substantial matter of who he is and what he means for us and for our world. They turn upon the powerful image of Christ as light.
Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent
“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
Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent
“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.
Sermon for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity
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).
Sermon for Remembrance Day / Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity
“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.
Sermon for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity
“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.
Sermon for All Saints’ Day
“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.