Category: Sermons

“For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven,
and giveth life unto the world”

Michaelmas is a feast of intellection, we might say, a festival of the gathering of the thoughts of God; such are the angels as the intellectual principles of the universe in its diversity and unity. Similarly, Harvest Thanksgiving celebrates a gathering, the gathering of the visible fruits of creation in an intellectual way to God, the invisible source and principle of all that we see and feel and taste and smell. It is a particularly significant festival for our agricultural communities where there is some sort of real connection to the land and a proper concern for the good of the land.

Gathering the fruits and vegetables from the fields into the Church is an entirely spiritual activity. We aren’t feeding God, offering sacrifices, as if were, to some idol of our imaginations. We are honouring God as the source and truth of all that belongs to our lives physically and spiritually. This point cannot be emphasised enough. It is the counter to our materialism, on the one hand, and our complacency, on the other hand; a counter, too, to the deadly dualisms of our world and day. You cannot take the harvest for granted. While there is a physical aspect to our thanksgivings for food, for healing, and even for our social and political lives, thanksgiving itself is a profoundly spiritual and intellectual activity.

That is why the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel is actually the Gospel appointed for The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, which we heard five weeks ago. Look in your prayer books on page 240. Then look on page 308 and you find it again as appointed for Thanksgiving Day. That refers to the idea of a nationally appointed day of Thanksgiving, a thanksgiving for the rational principles that properly belong to our collective life without which our social and economic lives cannot flourish; itself a point worth pondering in our current confusions.

The Collect on page 307 wonderfully captures that larger sensibility. We “humbly thank” our merciful God and Father, “for all thy gifts so freely bestowed upon us.” Those gifts are clearly specified and are comprehensive in the sense that they pertain to every aspect of our lives. We thank God “for life and health and safety; for power to work and leisure to rest; for all that is beautiful in creation and in the lives of men.” Think and ponder on those words for a moment and see how they counter and challenge all forms of entitlement and complacency and every sense of whining and complaining. Notice how they open our eyes and our minds to whole different approach to life. Such ideas are only possible on the basis of the pageant of creation that Genesis 1 unfolds, that the Benedicite Omnia Opera sings, and that Isaiah proclaims in this morning’s lesson; all affirm the essential goodness of creation because of the goodness of God. But those ideas of thanksgiving, our thanksgiving for all manner of good things, are altogether secondary to our thanksgiving “for our spiritual mercies in Christ Jesus our Lord,” which ties together the themes of creation and redemption.

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“They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb”

We are in the company of angels, no more blessed company to be with in these disturbing times and yet, angels? What are we, pseudo-enlightened moderns such as we are, to make of angels? Cutsy decorations for Christmas trees? Chubby cherubs with rosy cheeks? The more refined and aesthetically pleasing Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque angels? How do we think about angels?

The simple point is that you can only think them. You can’t see them. The visual imaginary, the way in which angels are depicted in art, is only as useful as it contributes to our intellectual and spiritual understanding of the angels. As such The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels yesterday – today is Michaelmas Sunday, we might say – is a strong reminder to us that there is more to reality than the merely physical, a strong reminder that the most important things in our lives are things that you cannot see. At the same time today’s service reminds us ever so strongly that the things you cannot see are made known through the things you can see. Such are the sacraments.

Blythe’s baptism this morning is a wonderful reminder of that spiritual truth. Through the water of death, the water of life, the water of the washing away of original sin and all sin, she is reborn and made “a member of Christ, the child of God, an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven” (BCP, Catechism, p. 544). Such is baptism. It is all grace perfecting nature and as such requires the renunciation of all that stands between us and God; in short, “the world, the flesh and the devil”as the Collect for Trinity XVIII puts it (BCP, p. 247). But only because “the devil and all his works,” what Michaelmas alludes to as “the great dragon”, “that old serpent, called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world,” nicely gathering up a variety of biblical images for all that opposes the absolute truth and goodness of God, has been “overcome by the blood of the Lamb,” by the sacrifice of Christ. How can this be? we might ask, in the manner of Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night in the baptismal Gospel this morning. “How can a person be born again when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” Note the literalism of such questions, as if the empirical and the physical were literally all there is.

Michaelmas is a splendid reminder to us of the nature and the reality of the spiritual without which we have no way to think anything. The greatest and most important things in our lives are the things we cannot see, only think and feel, the things of intellect and spirit. You cannot see love. You cannot literally see a number, only the representations of number; you can only think them for they are mental realities. You cannot see a quark or a neutrino or any of the many other features of quantum physics. You cannot see words which are thoughts before they are spoken or written, only then can you see or hear them physically as it were. Think of the magic and wonder of reading. Black marks on a white background that somehow entrance and engage our minds with the thoughts and ideas they represent. There is a constant dialectic between what is seen and unseen.

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“Friend, go up higher”

Friendship is the antidote to arrogance and presumption. “I have called you friends,” Jesus says to us. And here in today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable in which the crux of the matter is “Friend, go up higher.” It captures the moral of the story and scene. “For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” Such is the power and significance of divine friendship. Friendship seeks the good of each other.

“God is friendship,” Aelred of Rievaulx suggests in his wonderful 12th century treatise, Spiritual Friendship, boldly translating “God is love” into “God is friendship.” The friendship between God and man is the great wonder and mystery of the Christian faith but it connects powerfully and wonderfully with the idea and concept of friendship as it is explored in other religious and philosophical traditions.

At work in today’s Gospel parable is the idea of friendship as the counter and corrective to pride and presumption, to arrogance and domination. In the oldest literary work known to our humanity, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” friendship is an essential element. Described by the German poet Rilke as “das Epos der Todesfurcht,” the epic of the fear of death, the epic poem is equally about the power of friendship. The friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu is central to the dynamic of the story and to the making of Gilgamesh as the hero of the culture as knower and doer, as the one who faces the fears of the culture and in some sense transcends them. He does so only through the coming of Enkidu.

The prologue proclaims Gilgamesh as the hero, as the king of Uruk, and specifically as one who is wise and knew all things, all countries of the world, and who brought us the tale of the time before the flood engraven on stone. These are significant accolades and features of Gilgamesh. But the story of the Epic is really about how Gilgamesh comes to be these things. For, at first, he is a bad king and is seen as such by the city. How is he a bad king? By lording it over everyone. By using the people of the city and its resources for his own interest. He is an arrogant bully, simply put. The description is a kind of foreshadowing of the questions about justice that Plato wrestles with in The Republic more than twenty-five hundred years later. Does might equal right? Is justice the interest of the stronger as Thrasymachus asserts?

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Follow me

The Feast of St. Matthew coincides with the Fall or Autumnal Equinox, that point of nature’s year, at least for us in the Northern Hemisphere, when the length of the day and the night are equal. We know, of course, that it marks the official end of summer and the not so slow march to winter with the lengthening of the night. Yet that moment of a kind of equilibrium between day and night, between light and darkness, has a spiritual significance captured in the St. Matthew’s feast day which coincides more or less with the equinox. With St. Matthew, we mark “the closing down of summer” to use Alistair MacLeod’s felicitous phrase, the end of summer officially and symbolically and beginning of autumn. Light and darkness in a kind equipoise, even if it signals the coming increase of darkness.

The wonder of The Feast of St. Matthew is that it signals a kind of inversion of the patterns of nature. If with the Fall Equinox we mark the beginnings of the turn towards the darkness of nature’s year, with St. Matthew we mark the turn to the greater light of Christ. We celebrate two things: the call of Matthew to apostleship and its result in the first Gospel, The Gospel according to St. Matthew. The connection to light and darkness is wonderfully captured, it seems to me, by two paintings by the renaissance painter, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), a master of the chiaroscuro which is precisely about the interplay of light and darkness, hinted at in the shadowing forth of more profound ideas.

Caravaggio’s painting, ‘The Call of St. Matthew’ (c.1599/1600), represents  the Gospel story for this feast. Another painting, ‘The Inspiration of St. Matthew’ (c. 1602), hangs with it in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. The themes of darkness and light are central to both.

The painting of ‘The Call of St. Matthew’ depicts a dark and interior scene of men at a table counting money with huddled heads, a worldly scene, we might say, of cupidity and cunning (think Wall Street imaginatively). Into the darkness of the scene, following the pointing finger of Christ, light illumines the face of St. Matthew. His face is not only illumined but transparent and open to the face of Christ in a way which the other characters in the scene are not. That openness is the moment of Matthew’s conversion. Out of the darkness of human intrigue, with the accompanying overtones of deceit and dishonesty, comes the contrasting and compelling glance of Christ, a look and a word which challenges and changes everything. “And he arose, and followed him.”

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“To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”

The Epistle reading from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians complements wonderfully the Gospel story from St. Luke; in a way, the Gospel illustrates the teaching of the Epistle. We are shown something of “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.”

But what does that mean? Does it mean that love is unknowable or even irrational? The love that is shown to us here and elsewhere in the Gospels is the love of God which by definition goes beyond human knowing because it is a divine knowing, the knowing love of Christ for our humanity which always exceeds the limitations of all and every form of human knowing. What is known is something which goes beyond what we can produce by our knowing. In short, something is known; it is just not something which we produce as knowledge.

Faith, too, is about something known but known as beyond us, as something divine and as such something which is always beyond our finite comprehension. We are being raised up by God to learn and know what belongs to our life with God. It is the idea of being raised up that is key, our being raised up by God and to God. Such is the power of the Gospel story. It illustrates wonderfully the love of God in Christ.

The poet, Dante, in a wonderful phrase, designates Luke as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ (De Monarchia I, xvi). The Gospel story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain is one of those stories which reminds me of that description. It shows the gentleness of Christ and illustrates the nature of the divine love which seeks our good. We are raised up out of our falleness, out of sin and death, out of grief and sorrow. Here is a kind of resurrection story which shows us something about what God seeks for our humanity. It the love which “passeth knowledge” because it goes beyond what we could imagine or do for ourselves or for one another.

It teaches us about what it might mean to be “rooted and grounded in love.” To be rooted and grounded in love is about being raised up into that divine love by “comprehending”, itself a verb about knowing or understanding, “with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth and height” of that love, the love “which passeth knowledge.” It is not a knowing which comes from us but from God to us. How that is shown is the wonder and the marvel of the Gospel.

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God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ

Sunday’s epistle reading (Trinity 15) from Galatians complements and informs Holy Cross Day. The major feast days are all about important moments in the life of Christ and of the Apostles and other figures that are named and mentioned in the Scriptures. Holy Cross is a minor feast day which reflects on things or people that emerge in the history of the Church and which have theological significance.

The cross is central to Christian thinking, to be sure. We are signed with the sign of the cross in baptism. The cross is often a central feature of the architecture of the Church as cross-shaped and as in the rood screen here at Christ Church. Rood is an old English word for Cross. Then there are other visible things like the processional cross and the altar cross, as well as the cross above the pulpit and at the back of the Church which bear the figure of Christ crucified on them. We are reminded of the Cross as the dominant symbol of Christian identity. In the liturgy, absolution and blessing is pronounced in word and action, the action is the sign of the cross made by the priest and some people make the sign of the cross themselves. Somehow the cross signals our Christian identity.

A symbol of comfort, it also must discomfort us, a “strange and uncouth thing,” as the poet George Herbert puts it. There have been those who find it a disturbing sign because it recalls the ineluctable cruelty of our humanity; in short, a symbol of violence and torture. Yet the symbolic power of the cross has everything to do with Christ’s overcoming of all and every form of evil: past, present, and future. It is that victory of Christ through the cross that is constantly being recalled to us. It has become a “beauteous form”which assures “a piteous mind,” as John Donne puts it,  a mind in need of pity.

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“Be not anxious”

What could be more anxious making than talking about being anxious? Anxiety R’ us! Big time. And therein lies the problem. W.H. Auden in 1947 wrote a long and largely unread prose poem entitled “The Age of Anxiety” which provided a convenient image for our world and day, itself a culture of anxiety. The title more than the work itself has had considerable influence in capturing our uncertainties. To be fair, it is not easy to say what exactly Auden meant by anxiety. Yet it has become the default word for so many features of our contemporary culture. His solution, near as one might be able to discern, seems to be the idea of mutual sympathy or mutual love for one another even towards those who are really strangers. That is, I think, powerfully suggestive along with the ideas in the poem about the forms of modern self-consciousness which add to the anxiety, on the one hand, and to the antidote of sympathy, on the other hand, through a kind of toleration – not wanting to disappoint and as such being willing to go along with others.

While there may be something to this not wanting to disappoint others and simply being willing to go along in a kind of sympathy for one another, even the beginnings of a kind of care for one another, it seems to me to fall far short of the antidote to anxiety which today’s Gospel story presents. I have on occasion called it ‘the Gospel of Anxiety’ even though it is really the antidote to anxiety but in ways which are deeply challenging to our preoccupations and concerns.

The words anxious and anxiety are relatively modern, appearing first in English via the German in the 17th century and really only taking flight in the late 19th century before becoming rooted in our lexical imaginations in the 20th and going viral, as things only can, in the 21st century. Tyndale’s 16th century English translation of today’s Gospel does not use the word anxious or anxiety. He has rendered Jesus’ words as “be not careful”, an idea which is also found in Luke’s story about Martha and Mary where, as Tyndale puts it, Jesus says, “Martha Martha thou carest and arte troubled about many things”. Here  his “be not careful” was changed in the King James Version of 1611 to “take no thought,” while it more or less keeps to Tyndale in the passage from Luke with “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.” It was only in the late 19th and 20th centuries, that the shift in today’s Gospel was made to “be not anxious” as in the Revised Version as well as other translations, only to be changed, yet again in the New Revised Versions to “do not worry.” Interesting shifts, to say the least.

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“And one … turned back … giving him thanks”

There were ten that cried out for mercy. There were ten that were healed. Yet only “one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks.” Luke pointedly adds, “And he was a Samaritan.”“Where,”Jesus asks, rhetorically and ironically, “are the nine?”

Certain Gospel stories stand out and bear repeating even in the course of the year. They have a certain resonance. This is one such Gospel. Read today in the midst of the Trinity Season and in the beginnings of the turn to the Fall, it is also appointed for Thanksgiving Day; not for Harvest Thanksgiving but for our national thanksgiving day. As such it reminds us of the larger spiritual dimensions of giving thanks. And so, more significantly, it recalls us to the mystery of thanksgiving. It is, we might say, the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel which highlights the spiritual necessity of thanksgiving as altogether critical for our understanding of human redemption.

Thanksgiving is our highest freedom and yet it is nothing less than the grace of God active and alive in us. To give thanks requires our recognition of others and of God beyond ourselves. The counter to our selfish tendency to take everything and one another for granted, thanksgiving recognises the profound gift of life which God alone has given us in and through one another. It belongs to our life and walk in the Spirit, to our fulfilling the law of Christ, to our bearing one another’s burdens as well as our own.

You are alive. I know, we ‘all’ got problems. “All God’s children got troubles” as the old spiritual puts it. But we are alive only if we are alive to God, the author of life and of all good things. Thanksgiving is the realization in us of God’s surpassing goodness signalled in our recognition of God as life and the gift of life in each and every one of us. That is a kind of radical mindfulness – of God, of ourselves, of our world, and of one another. And all as gifts given – in short, grace. It is not about what we think we are owed. It is about freely giving thanks for the simple truth that we are, that we exist and that existence is itself an unconditional good. Such is the wonder of the God-given reality of creation and of our lives within it despite all our complaints and concerns. We can only have those, after all, because we exist. I know. There may be times when you think that you want to die – a very different matter from causing death – but wanting to die presupposes that you are alive and know yourself to be alive. From this standpoint, even the devil is good because he exists even if he exists in contradiction with the very principle of his being and truth, God. This highlights even more the significance of thanksgiving.

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Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?

A confusion or a profusion of Mary Magdalenes? Or just Mary Magdalene’s profuse confusion? She “supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.”It is surely one of the great moments of mistaken identity! It leads to one of the greatest moments of witness to the Resurrection in the encounter and exchange between Mary Magdalene and the Risen Christ recalled in this morning’s Gospel. Yet her confusion, like Thomas’ doubting in the same chapter, all contribute to our faith and understanding.

Today, in the Providence of God, The Feast of St. Mary Magdalene coincides with The Eighth Sunday after Trinity. She is the great witness of the Resurrection, apostola apostolorum, an “Apostle to the Apostles,” as some have styled her, the first witness to the Resurrection, as Mark in his Gospel explicitly states, and thus, by extension, more theologically speaking, to the Gospel of Christ itself. The Gospels, after all, can only have been written in the light of the Resurrection. That is a key point with respect to our understanding. All four Gospels name Mary Magdalene as a figure at the death and resurrection of Christ, a witness to the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

And yet, there is, perhaps, no greater perplexity and confusion than with the figure of Mary Magdalene. It begins, I surmise, with a statement made by Mark and Luke about Mary Magdalene as the one “from whom [Christ] had cast seven demons,” as Mark puts it, or, as Luke simply says, “Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out.”This introduces a whole new dynamic and, I think, an intriguing one that has led to much confusion and perplexity and, I fear, no end of fancy and fiction.

The interpretive narrative currently in vogue is that Mary Magdalene became seen more as the figure of repentance and less as the primary witness of the Resurrection. That is really a false dichotomy, a false or at least unhelpful opposition, and one which obscures more than it clarifies. Mark clearly connects both repentance and resurrection in one economical phrase: “on the first day of the week, [Christ] appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.”She is both a figure of repentance and a witness to the Resurrection.

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How can any one satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness?

We are in the wilderness, an empty and solitary place, a desert, to be exact, and yet the desert becomes a paradise where we are fed with more than what we need. Wilderness and paradise are powerful and important scriptural images in the Christian pilgrimage of faith. What do we mean by wilderness? What do we mean by paradise?

The latter is a Persian word used in Genesis about creation as a garden, the proverbial garden of Eden “in the east,” as Genesis 2 explains, in which God plants our humanity. That connection between Paradise and a garden which, as Dante envisions, is “full of every seed,” includes as well the idea of trees and a forest such that Paradise is not only imaged as a garden but as la divina foresta, a divine forest in contrast to the dark and savage wood that is wilderness, too; a particularly apt image for Canada. The image of trees recalls us to “the tree of life in the midst of the garden” and “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” in the Genesis account of the paradisal garden of Eden.

The contrast is between an original harmony of man with the natural world, a harmony with God and with one another, a place of innocence, and the loss of that harmony and innocence; thus paradise becomes the wilderness of our exile. Is our pilgrimage, then, about reclaiming paradise?

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

The refrain of Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” seems to make this claim. And in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rendition of her lyrical ballad, it has become, quite “uncritically,” as Camille Paglia notes, “a rousing anthem for the hippie counterculture” in the forging together of the “Romantic ideals of reverence for nature and the brotherhood of man.” Joni Mitchell’s own rendition, Paglia suggests, offers an altogether different interpretation. “With its slow, jazz-inflected pacing,” she writes, it becomes “a moody and at times heartbreakingly melancholy art song,” indeed a critique of the unbearable shallowness of the sixties’ dreams and aspirations; in short, “an elegy for an entire generation, flamingly altruistic yet hedonistic and self-absorbed, bold yet naive, abundantly gifted yet plagued by self-destruction.” Such things haunt our own culture and disordered world.

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